On May 16, 2002, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4737, the Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2002, which, among other things, amends the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program to encourage states to make more efforts to promote marriage and, to a lesser extent, responsible fatherhood. The bill also earmarks substantial funds -- $1.6 billion -- focused almost exclusively for the promotion and support of marriage. In this paper, we describe and analyze the various family formation provisions in H.R. 4737 and offer recommendations for how the…
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Journal Article In his new book, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, James Q. Wilson argues that "in much of the Western and Caribbean worlds, marriage is in trouble." Wilson reports that the results have been devastating, especially for children. He calls for cultural and institutional changes that would strengthen marriage. Meanwhile, in a recent edition of The American Prospect, Janet C. Gornick argued that feminists are not opposed to marriage, and that feminists and conservatives should be able to find some common ground. For example, both would like to strengthen fathers' ties…
Effective policies to promote responsible fatherhood must rely on more than mere exhortations. Many fathers need significant assistance in becoming financially responsible for or emotionally involved with their children, whether it be job training or other employment services, or intensive case management and counseling. The model programs described in this report are outstanding examples of effective strategies for helping fathers and they deserve replication nationwide. Coupled with work requirements and increasingly tough enforcement of child support, these programs should go a long way…
The purpose of this paper is to summarize the activities of the Developing a Daddy Survey (DADS) Project, which grew out of the federal fatherhood initiative activities of the mid-1990s. The DADS project builds on existing efforts aimed at collecting data on men as they become fathers and as they go about the task of fathering their children. In this paper, we describe the background, origins and purpose of the DADS project and provide an overview of the studies included in the DADS project. While the DADS project includes six studies, the focus of this paper is on those three studies that…
This paper brings together a body of empirical evidence on how marriage affects the economic well-being of families with children. The paper considers the theoretical reasons marriage might enhance economic well-being, clarifies the empirical questions about the potential roles of marriage, and presents descriptive data and the evidence from empirical studies. The review deals with the impact of higher marriage propensities on incomes and wealth, of gains in marriage relative to cohabitation, of the stimulus to male earnings associated with marriage, and of the changes in economic well-being…
The decline in marriage and its serious consequences for poverty and inequality are well documented. This paper concentrates on how marriage, cohabitation, single parenthood and the presence of biological parents affect the incomes and material hardships of children. The study uses data from the National Survey of America's Families to examine: 1) recent changes in the marital and household structure of families with children, 2) how levels of income and material hardship vary by family structure, and 3) whether marriage acts to reduce material hardship, even among families with low incomes…
A simple model of fatherhood and marriage choice implies that stricter child support enforcement will tend to reduce nonmarital childbearing by raising the costs of fatherhood. We investigate this hypothesis by examining nonmarital childbearing during 1980-1993, a period when child support policy and enforcement underwent enormous changes. We use a sample of women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to which we add information on state child support enforcement. We examine childbearing behavior between the ages of 15 and 44, both before marriage and during periods of nonmarriage…
Low-income families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio were interviewed twice during a 16-month period about children's living arrangements. At the time of the first interview, 57 percent of children were living with their mother, who was neither married nor cohabitating. Twenty percent of children lived with two married, biological parents; five percent lived with two cohabitating biological parents; five percent lived with a mother who was married to a nonbiological father; nine percent lived with neither parent; and two percent lived with a mother who was cohabitating with a man who was…
