New Research on Parenting Programs for Low-Income Fathers

Jay Fagan, Jessica Pearson, Jay Fagan, Jessica Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000371796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents state-of-the-art findings of research on fatherhood programs, funded by the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN), which advance knowledge and practice in the fathering field.

New Research on Parenting Programs for Low-Income Fathers includes research on how to engage mothers to support father–child contact and to successfully employ social media and online technology for practice. It offers findings on how to increase paternal engagement and parenting skills and to include fathers in policies and programs for children and families. It discusses the importance of providing staff training and resources to practitioners who work directly with fathers. Chapters also provide summaries of key implications for evidence-based practice and future directions for research that encourage effective fatherhood practice.

This book is an excellent resource for therapists, social workers, fatherhood educators, fatherhood practitioners, researchers, and policy makers on how to inspire positive father engagement with children and healthy coparenting relationships.

1

Introduction

Jay Fagan and Jessica Pearson

Family life has changed dramatically in the United States and other industrialized nations during the past 50 years. Fewer adults marry; those who do frequently divorce. For every two marriages that took place in 2018, there was one divorce in the same year (Schweizer, 2019a), with remarriage rates for men declining by more than half between 1950 and 2017 (Schweizer, 2019b). Instead of marriage, more and more adults cohabit, with cohabitation accounting for 23% of all unions among women ages 19–44 (Manning, 2012) and 62% of births to never-married women (Lamidi, 2016). Cohabiting relationships frequently do not last long, with children born to cohabiting versus married parents facing over five times the risk of experiencing their parents’ separation (Osborne et al., 2007). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, more and more children are being born to unmarried parents. Recent estimates show that about 40% of all births in the United States occur outside of marriage, up from 28% in 1990, with this being the case for 52% and 69% of all births to Hispanic and Black women, respectively (Wildsmith et al., 2018).

The net result of these trends is that about 21.9 million children had a parent who lived outside of their household in 2018, which represented more than one fourth (26.5%) of all children under 21 years of age (Grall, 2020). Necessarily, children must adapt to these changes. When parents divorce, or when unmarried parents separate, this typically means the children wind up sharing time with parents who reside in separate households. In many instances, children see the nonresident parent infrequently, especially when adults form new romantic unions. When the parent with whom the child resides remarries or forms a new cohabiting relationship, children must adapt to living with step-parents and possibly step-siblings. And although many unmarried fathers are usually involved and living with the family shortly after the child’s birth, many transition to noncohabiting relationships within a few years and become gradually less involved (Amato & Rezac, 1995; Seltzer, 1991).

Another significant change in family life is the trend for women to participate in the labor force rather than stay at home to raise their children. In 1970, one half of all mothers were stay-at-home mothers (Cohn et al., 2014). This number fell to 29% of all mothers in 2012 (Cohn et al., 2014). Husbands and wives were employed in 48.8% of families in the United States in 2018 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). Only the husband was employed in 19.1% of married-couple families, and only the wife was employed in 6.8% of these families (no one was employed in 25.1% of married -couple families). In families maintained by women, 77.7% of women were employed in 2018 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). These trends have placed demands on fathers to become more involved in child care and to assume greater responsibility for raising children. In 2012, all fathers (i.e., co-resident and nonresident) between the ages of 25 and 59 spent an average of 20 minutes per day in physical child care tasks (e.g., putting child to sleep) and 12 minutes per day in developmental child care activities (e.g., reading to child) (Sayer, 2016). This amount of time is two to three times greater than the amount of time fathers spent in these activities in 1985.

Most fathers have managed to adapt to these family changes. In families experiencing divorce, fathers frequently assume joint custody of children. Recent data in one state (Wisconsin) revealed that between 1989 and 2010, shared custody increased from about 11% to 50% of all divorce cases (Meyer et al., 2017). In co-residing families, fathers have adjusted to mothers’ involvement in the labor force by taking on child care responsibilities. Fathers and mothers are most likely to spend equal time with children when parents have comparable earnings. The total amount of time co-residing fathers spent with children was 73% that of mothers when mothers worked and their earnings were comparable to those of fathers (Raley et al., 2012).

This book focuses on a group for whom adaptation has been particularly challenging: low-income, nonresident fathers. Disproportionately comprised of minority men who face racist policies and practices, and long-term structural changes in the economy that penalize lower- and middle-skilled, less-educated male workers, these fathers experience a life shaped by low educational achievement, joblessness, and out-of-wedlock childbearing (Smeedling et al., 2011). Indeed, a portrait of 10,161 low-income, nonresident parents (90% of whom were fathers) who participated in the Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED) project, which sought to improve employment and child support payments among noncustodial parents in the child support caseload in eight states, finds that 67% were Latino or African American, 25.7% did not complete high school or a GED, 43% had a high school diploma or GED and no further education, and 68% had been convicted of a crime. While slightly over half (55%) reported having a job in the past 30 days, those who did work for pay reported average monthly earnings of $769. On average, these men had 2.5 biological children, with an average of 1.8 partners, with whom only 13.6% were married while 52.4% and 25% were never married and divorced, respectively (Noyes et al., 2018).

Low-income, nonresident fathers often struggle to stay involved with their children. Unlike marital family law, which spells out the rights and responsibilities that divorcing parents have following their breakup, unmarried parents have no established guidelines specifying the father’s visitation rights and no clear pathways to the legal proceedings that formalize issues such as custody and parenting time. As a result, unmarried, nonresident fathers routinely get a child support order without any mention of parenting time (Pearson, 2015), and between 2007 and 2015, the proportion of custodial mothers and nonresident fathers who failed to come to a formal or informal agreement specifying visitation rights and a child support order amount grew from 43% to 55% (Zill, 2019). Data from the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth showed that 20% of fathers who live apart from their children visit their children more than once a week, 29% see their children at least once a month, 21% visit children several times a year, and 27% do not visit their children at all (Livingston & Parker, 2011).

Multiple factors contribute to fathers’ lack of involvement with children, including tenuous and conflictual relationships with the child’s mother, mothers and fathers forming new romantic relationships, unemployment and underemployment, inability to fulfill child support obligations, lack of education, history of incarceration, and having children with multiple partners (Edin & Nelson, 2013). Despite these challenges, many of these fathers are able to stay involved with their children, and when they are involved, children have better outcomes, including higher levels of academic achievement, fewer behavior problems, better peer relationships, and increased social-emotional competence (Adamsons & Johnson, 2013; Coates & Phares, 2019).

Children in single-parent households are a focus of public policy concern for several reasons. First, they are four times more likely to live in poverty and demonstrate negative outcomes, including doing poorly in schools, having emotional and behavioral problems, becoming teenage parents, and having poverty-level incomes as adults (McLanahan et al., 2013). They also have a dramatic impact on the public purse. An analysis of the annual expenditures made by the federal government in 13 major programs to help support father-absent homes resulted in the conclusion that they are conservatively at least $99.8 billion (Nock & Einolf, 2008).

U.S. Public Policy Response to Engage Low-Income, Nonresident Fathers

One major response to fathers’ challenges with meeting their parenting responsibilities and the high cost of child poverty was the 1996 welfare reform law (P.L. 104–193). Welfare reform cut cash assistance and replaced it with time-limited, work-based welfare programs (TANF and the Earned Income Tax Credit) for low-income parents. Simultaneously, the law strengthened the formal child support system to underscore fathers’ personal responsibility for their children and to reduce welfare benefit payments by reimbursing the state from child support paid by a nonresident parent (Cancian et al., 2008).

Another feature of P.L. 104–193 was to promote responsible fatherhood and motherhood with the goal of ending welfare dependence through employment and marriage, reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families (Tollestrup, 2018). To that end, the 1996 legislation authorized $10 million per year of child support enforcement funds to States to establish and operate access and visitation programs; one target of these programs is nonresident fathers.

The passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 provided funding for a Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) grants program that involved $50 million per year during 2006–2010 for awards to 90 organizations to operate fatherhood programs. Under the Claims Resolution Act of 2010, funding rose to $75 million per year for awards to 55 organizations. In 2015, a third round of grant funding of approximately $75 million per year was awarded to 39 organizations for five-year grants. And on June 30, 2020, grant applications were due for a fourth round of five-year competitive grants that is expected to provide financial support for 68 Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs.

The U.S. government defines responsible fatherhood as “taking responsibility for a child’s intellectual, emotional, and financial well-being” by choosing to be an actively engaged parent (U.S. White House, 2012, p.1). Whereas the HMRE programs provide classes on maintaining and forming positive partner relationships, RF programs offer classes on parenting and coparenting. Under federal law, RF programs are required to include activities in three key areas: 1) activities to promote marriage such as enhancing relationship skills and coparenting; 2) activities to promote responsible parenting such as teaching good parenting skills and practices; and 3) activities to foster economic stability, such as job training and employment service (Tollestrup, 2018). In 2015, these grants emphasized the importance of activities related to employment, economic stability, and workforce development (Administration for Children & Families, 2015).

Text Box 1.1

Fatherhood program (FP) is the term used throughout this book to refer to services to fathers. Responsible Fatherhood Program (RFP) is used only to refer to programs funded by the Office of Family Assistance, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Despite the substantial increase in programs for low-income fathers in the United States and the expenditure of an estimated $700 million by the Administration for Children and Families from 2006 to 2018 (Holmes et al., 2018), little is known about how these programs affect fathers and families. A relatively small number of rigorous evaluations of programs serving low-income fathers have been conducted. According to a virtually exhaustive catalogue of fatherhood programs (OPRE catalog of research on programs for fathers), there have been 150 studies of fatherhood programs since 1990, 90 of which included low-income fathers in their sample, and only 15 of which used well-designed and executed, rigorous evaluation methods (Avellar, 2011). Rigorous studies are those that include research designs or methods that provide unbiased estimates of the program’s impact on fathers and families.

Since the OPRE catalog was published, there have only been a few additional rigorous evaluations of fatherhood initiatives (e.g., Rutgers University Economic Development Research Group, 2011). One such study was Parents and Children Together (PACT), which was a randomized controlled trial with 5,522 fathers conducted in four U.S. Responsible Fatherhood Programs. This impact evaluation demonstrated positive intervention effects on some outcomes (parenting, economic stability) but not others (relationship health, father well-being) (Avellar et al., 2018). Many more studies are based on less rigorous research designs, such as pretest/post-test studies that do not include control or comparison groups (e.g., Avellar et al., 2018; Robbers, 2011; Scourfield et al., 2012). With a few exceptions, the literature also yielded inconclusive results across all three programmatic activities (i.e., responsible fatherhood/effective parenting, economic security, and coparenting) as well as programs that address more than one of these programmatic activities.

In response to the small number of rigorous studies of fatherhood programs, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families funded Temple University and the Center for Policy Research in Denver, Colorado, to develop a Responsible Fatherhood Network in 2013. The goals of the network were to (1) promote rigorous evaluation of fatherhood programs nationwide; (2) provide training to researchers and practitioners to conduct better quality evaluations; and (3) disseminate information that leads to effective fatherhood practice and research. Immediately after the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN) was launched, the co-directors of this project (who are also the co-editors of this volume) solicited proposals from research-practitioner teams to conduct rigorous research that addresses gaps identified in the responsible research field. Over the course of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Effectiveness of Responsible Fatherhood Programs Targeting Low-Income and Nonresident Fathers: A Qualitative Meta-Synthesis
• 3 Does Curriculum Matter? A Randomized Control Study of the “Developing All Dads for Manhood and Parenting Program (DAD MAP)” Curriculum
• 4 Factors Associated With Fatherhood Program Effectiveness: A Randomized Controlled Trial of TYRO Dads
• 5 Engaging Fathers in Perinatal Home Visiting: Early Lessons From a Randomized Controlled Study of Dads Matter-HV
• 6 A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Key to Kane, a Text-Messaging Intervention for Fathers in Hawaii
• 7 Challenges and Opportunities for Engaging Unmarried Parents in Court-Ordered, Online Parenting Programs
• 8 A Mixed-Methods Study of a Mother-Only Program to Enhance Coparenting Relationships
• 9 Fatherhood and Coparenting: A Study of Engaging Mothers in Paternal Involvement Interventions
• 10 Engaging Mothers in Coparenting Services With the Nonresident Fathers of Their Children via Fatherhood Programs: Insights Into Barriers and Solutions
• “You Gotta Make Them Feel”: A Study of Evidence-Informed Strategies for Addressing Domestic Violence in Fatherhood Programs
• 12 Journey of a Policy Change to Include Fathers in Homeless Shelters
• 13 Estimating the Monetary Value of Fatherhood Programs
• 14 Developing Father Inclusion Policy at the State Level: A Qualitative Assessment of Enablers and Barriers
• 15 What Have We Learned and Where Do We Go From Here?
• Index