Publications - Father Engagement & Healthy Relationships

Many responsible fatherhood programs provide employment and job training to noncustodial parents. Evaluations of effectiveness in achieving employment, income and financial stability for participants are needed. This brief explores some of the ways in which these items have been measured in past research and some of the issues to consider when selecting measures.

For programs that provide financial education, employment, or child support services, measuring financial support and documenting changes in economic stability and financial support over time are critical elements of program evaluation. This brief considers ways to measure the provision of formal and informal child support and the challenges associated with the reliable collection and analysis of information on financial support.

Child support agencies struggle to find ways to reach young men and communicate with them about paternity and child support before they become embroiled in the child support system. The outreach efforts conducted to date at hospitals and birthing centers, prenatal programs, and WIC programs, are typically sparsely attended by men (See companion article, “Outreaching Read More

There are several reasons that programs serving fathers should be concerned with intimate partner violence (IPV). The widespread nature of the problem makes it a logical topic for fatherhood programs to cover when dealing with parental conflict. Evidence suggests that men who have engaged in IPV may have significant parenting difficulties that need to be addressed and fatherhood programs offer a forum Read More

Despite dramatic increases in collections, child support frequently fails to be the linchpin to family self-sufficiency that it could be, and many researchers, advocates and policymakers have concluded that future progress in collections will require making the child support system more fair and responsive to its growing poor, never-married caseload. High on the list of Read More

This editorial discusses the special issue which focuses on parents who were not married at the time of their children’s birth. Because their relationships are not covered by marital family law, they do not have the clearly established rights and responsibilities that divorcing parents have following their breakup. The articles in this issue examine the Read More

The Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN) convened a workgroup of experts in the field of fatherhood and father involvement to develop a research agenda that defines the state of the current research in this area, identifies extant gaps in this research, and generates suggestions for future research. The goal is for the workgroup’s ideas Read More

The difficulties facing young economically disadvantaged unwed parents and their children – who are referred to as “fragile families” for lack of a better phrase – require a coordinated and constructive response from family focused practitioners, researchers and policy makers. Over the past decade, the federal government has been experimenting with educational programs directly intended Read More

This brief, written for the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network, offers a set of recommendations about how to build knowledge on effective programs and policies to improve the economic condition of disadvantaged fathers. After an introductory section, the brief begins with a short summary of findings from key past evaluations of employment-oriented programs for fathers or, in Read More

OCSE has funded some demonstration and evaluation projects and grants in the area of parenting, and some states use funding available through the State Access and Visitation (AV) Program to support parenting time services for unmarried parents in the child support program. However, only a handful of jurisdictions have mechanisms to incorporate parenting time agreements into initial child Read More