Publications - Family-Centered Interventions

President Obama’s 2013 budget proposal requiring child support agencies to establish parenting time in all new child support orders is the most recent development in a nearly 25-year exploration of parenting time issues that the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) has pursued. This has included the OCSE Access and Visitation Demonstration Projects, begun in 1988, which experimented Read More

More and more, the child support program is realizing that one of the best ways to improve payment among low income noncustodial parents is to link them with job programs. But getting some parents to participate and succeed can be challenging. Parents to Work is an employment program for unemployed and underemployed child support obligors in Arapahoe County, CO, begun in March Read More

Parents to Work, a program to secure jobs for unemployed and underemployed noncustodial parents (NCPs) with open child support cases involved the Arapahoe Division of Child Support Enforcement (CSE), Arapahoe/Douglas Workforce Center (A/D Works), and the Arapahoe District Court/18th Judicial District. Conducted from August 2008 to March 2010, Parents to Work involved: specialized, co-located child Read More

The goal of the Tennessee Parenting Project was to assess whether identifying parents with visitation problems in the child support caseload and providing services aimed at resolving them improves parent-child contact and the subsequent payment of child support. The project was conducted in child support offices and juvenile courts in three jurisdictions: Nashville (20th Judicial District – Davidson County); Read More

The Boston Health Marriage Initiative is a five-year demonstration project funded by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (2004-2009). Known as Relationships for Real Life (RRL), the project was conducted by the Father Friendly Initiative (FFI) of the Boston Public Health Commission. RRL consisted of facilitated classes for low-income, single individuals and  couples that aimed to improve the Read More

The Colorado Parenting Time Project was designed to assess whether identifying parents with visitation problems in the child support caseload and providing services aimed at resolving them improves parent-child contact and the subsequent payment of child support. Conducted in child support agencies in El Paso and Jefferson Counties, the project ultimately involved the identification of a total of 716 Read More

The Ensuring Access — Encouraging Support Project aimed to promote the payment of child support by offering noncustodial parents in Harris County a variety of services to resolve their access and visitation problems. It was conducted by the Attorney General of Texas (OAG) in collaboration with the Harris County Domestic Relations Office (DRO) to assist parents with child support Read More

Since 1997, the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) has managed the “Grants to States for Access and Visitation” Program, as administered by 54 states (including the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). Approximately $80 million has been made available over the course of the past eight years ($10 million per year) to “. Read More

This is an evaluation of the Texas Access and Visitation Hotline (“Hotline”) which is operated by the Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas (LANWT) under a grant from the Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The objectives of the evaluation were to provide a general portrait of callers and their problems and to gauge the effectiveness of the Hotline Read More

PARENT (People Achieving Responsibility Through Education, Nurturing and Training) was initiated by the Larimer County Department of Human Services in 1996 to help unemployed and underemployed noncustodial parents (NCPs) better meet their financial and emotional responsibilities as parents through the provision of parenting classes, employment assistance, case management services, and referral to community agencies. In 1999, with the award Read More