Using in-depth interviews with twenty-six teen fathers, I explore how these young men negotiate the absent-father discourse in making sense of their identities as young dads. I find that teen fathers draw on culturally available notions of gender and age in their attempts to construct and maintain good-dad identities. Teen fathers deploy the expectation that “most dad’s aren’t around” to “lower the bar” and elevate their own performance by comparison. Teen fathers also feel the need to defend themselves from the discourse’s assumptions by invoking tropes of adult masculinity—insisting that “fatherhood means stepping up” and “being a man.” Because the fathers are unable to meet all the expectations of adult manhood, they create an escape hatch for themselves by citing their own adolescence and claiming a need for youthful freedom. Ironically, by invoking gendered and aged norms of adulthood, the fathers reify those norms into something harder to escape.
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