Publications - Parenting Time & Co-Parenting

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

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

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

This report is a compilation of papers prepared as part of a task order to examine the federal Access and Visitation (AV) Grant program as it is being implemented in the states. Previous data collection efforts have given the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) a picture of the scale and scope of the activities funded by the Read More