Publications - Parenting Time & Co-Parenting

Oregon’s Interactive Parenting Plan (IPP) is the first comprehensive, interactive tool created to generate customized parenting plans. It is the result of a joint effort of many stakeholders, including representatives of the court, the child support program, the private bar, mediators, community organizations serving families with safety issues, and experts in the field of child Read More

This study reports on the development and validation of the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network coparenting perceptions scale for nonresident fathers. Although other measures of coparenting have been developed, this is the first measure developed specifically for low-income, nonresident fathers. Focus groups were conducted to determine various aspects of coparenting. Based on this, a scale Read More

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

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 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

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

With a large and growing share of American families now forming outside of marriage, triangular infant–mother–father relationship systems in “fragile families” have begun to attract the interest of family scholars and clinicians. A relatively novel conceptualization has concerned the feasibility of intervening to support the development of a sustained and positive coparenting alliance between mothers 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