Book Reviews

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.00575.x
• Published date: 01 May 2000
• Date: 01 May 2000

575

Book Reviews

‘‘Poppa’’ Psychology: The Role of Fathers in

Children’s Mental Well-Being. Vicky Phares.

Westport, CT: Praeger. 1999. 168 pp. ISBN 0-

275-96367-5. $35.00 cloth.

This book’s 109 pages of text fall into the fol-

lowing chapters: 1. Fathers in present-day fami-

lies. 2. When things go right: Fathers and normal

childhood development. 3. When problems devel-

op in children: Why not just blame the mother?

4. When problems develop in children: What are

the characteristics of their fathers? 5. When fa-

thers have problems: What are the characteristics

of their children? 6. What to do when there are

mental health problems in fathers or children. 7.

Encouraging mental health in families of the fu-

ture.

First, and starting on the upside, the penulti-

mate chapter is excellent and ref‌lects the author’s

strength as a clinical psychologist. It will convince

anyone with family problems to seek professional

help, and it provides practical information to help

everyone get started. Second, the Notes section

(31 pages—about double the length of each chap-

ter) provides a f‌ine point of entry into the research

and the clinical and polemical literature on fathers.

Third, the author serves the lay public well by

emphasizing the complexity underlying the etiol-

ogy of psychopathology, the mutually impacting

interactions among family members, and genetic

contributions to family behavior. Fourth, the book

will be of interest to: parents seeking clinically

oriented parenting advice, readers seeking to un-

derstand their impact on their children, and clini-

cians who have neglected to consider fathers in

etiology and treatment.

However, on the downside in this reviewer’s

opinion, the author has not produced a book on

‘‘Poppa’’ Psychology. First, none of the traditional

fatherhood topics, such as involvement, is cov-

ered. Second, although it seems odd to f‌ind a

chapter on mother blaming in a book on ‘‘Poppa’’

Psychology, the eradication of mother blaming ap-

pears to be the book’s agenda. Third, the author

does convincingly document mother blaming in

theory, research, and clinical practice. However,

mother blaming must be placed in at least two

perspectives: historical and legal. Historically,

from the industrial revolution to the feminist rev-

olution, childrearing has been the mother’s pri-

mary ‘‘job description,’’ so it is perhaps not sur-

prising that when things go wrong with children

we look f‌irst to the mother and only rarely to the

father. Legally, when one leaves the clinicand the

lab and enters the family court system, mother

blaming vanishes and is replaced by the tender

years doctrine. Thus, while families walk into

court intact, nine times out of ten, the ‘‘blamed

mother’’ walks out with the children and ‘‘Poppa’’

walks out with f‌inancial obligations and the am-

biguous, discomforting role of childless father.

What, then, does all this portend for the mental

well-being of ‘‘Poppa’’ as well as ‘‘Poppa’s’’ chil-

dren? As a society, how do we eliminate the neg-

ative impacts of mother blaming, the tender years

doctrine, and father blaming?

Fourth, the author argues throughout the text

that there are more similarities than differences

between mothers and fathers in their impact on

their children, in both healthy and pathological de-

velopment. Thus, a better title might have been:

‘‘Mother/Father’’ Psychology: The Similar Role

576 Journal of Marriage and the Family

of Mothers and Fathers in Children’s Mental

Well-Being.

Fifth, Chapters 4 and 5 should have been the

heart of the book but instead testify to the need

for more research on fathers and developmental

psychopathology. Most conclusions were qualif‌ied

by the small number of studies available and by

conf‌licting f‌indings, or they could be reached only

by looking broadly at the overall patterns. Further,

the high heritability loadings for most of the child

problems reviewed also calls for more adoption

paradigm research to avoid confounding genes

and behavior.

Finally, the parenting assumptions and exten-

sive literature reviewed in the opening two chap-

ters occasionally leave the reader with a sense of

having read a glib, jumpy, uneven, and somewhat

glazed-over discussion. One study that could have

been omitted was Weitzman’s (1988) widely pub-

licized and equally widely discredited data on

mother/father post-divorce income inequality.

G

ORDON

E. F

INLEY

Florida International University

Black Men and Divorce. Erma Jean Lawson &

Aaron Thompson. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

1999. 259 pp. ISBN 0-8039-5954-0. $45.00

cloth, $21.95 paper.

Racial and ethnic differences in patterns of

family formation and dissolution have proven to

be persistent puzzles for social scientists, and f‌irm

explanations remain elusive. Accordingly, schol-

arly efforts to illuminate and account for these dif-

ferences have the potential to contribute signif‌i-

cantly to our understanding of the changing

American family. Black Men and Divorce takes a

small step in this direction. Drawing on in-depth

interviews with 50 recently divorced Black men,

Erma Jean Lawson and Aaron Thompson describe

in considerable detail how these men perceived

and reacted to the dissolution of their marriage.

The book is divided into 10 chapters. The In-

troduction states the book’s purpose, brief‌ly re-

views theories of marital disruption among Afri-

can Americans, and describes the sample and

methods. Chapters Two through Nine tackle issues

related to the formation of marital bonds, the cor-

relates of marital separation and divorce, the di-

vorce experience, divorce-related stressors, post-

marital relationships, strategies for coping with

divorce, the frequently strained relationships be-

tween the respondents and their own fathers, and

the impact of divorce on father–child relations.

The concluding chapter summarizes the key f‌ind-

ings, offers several suggestions for social policies

that impact Black family life, and—quite unusu-

ally—describes the personal marital experiences

of the researchers. Each chapter extracts from the

interviews’ recurrent themes and presents exten-

sive and, presumably, representative quotes from

the respondents. The distal sources of Black men’s

family experiences are located in a system of per-

vasive racism that marginalizes them both eco-

nomically and socially.

The f‌indings admit no simple summar y, but the

authors emphasize several themes. Although di-

vorce was an emotionally stressful event for most,

if not all, of these men, their experiences varied

widely. Some regretted the breakup, whereas oth-

ers found it liberating. Financial problems were

frequently cited as a cause of divorce. Postdivorce

adjustment seemed just as diff‌icult for those who

initiated the divorce as for those whose wives

abandoned the marriage. Social relationships be-

tween these ex-husbands and their mothers-in-law

appeared surprisingly resilient in the face of di-

vorce, and the men’s own mothers served as an

important source of social and emotional support.

Many of the men had been married to women who

brought children into the marriage, and none of

the men viewed the nonbiological children of a

potential wife as a barrier to future mate selection.

Following divorce, most of the men reported pro-

viding f‌inancial and other forms of support to both

their biological and nonbiological children. How-

ever, child custody and child support were key

sources of distress for these men.

Notwithstanding the richness of these data, se-

rious practitioners of qualitative (and quantitative)

research will f‌ind much to criticize here. It is high-

ly unlikely that the sample is representative of di-

vorced Black men: By design, all of these men

were employed at the time of the interview and

85% had some college education. No information

was collected from the ex-wives, nor were data

collected on a comparison group of White di-

vorced men. Even systematic comparisons within

the sample are rare and poorly described. Thus,

despite the authors’ claims, it is doubtful that

these data are capable of either supporting or re-

futing popular images of Black male family life,

or of demonstrating the alleged uniqueness of

Black males’ experience of divorce. At the same

time, however, this book may serve as a valuable