This program evaluation assessed the effectiveness of the Young Men as Fathers (YMAF) program administered by the California Youth Authority. The program offers parenting education to 15 to 20 wards of the state living in four institutions to help them become more involved in their families, prevent child abuse and neglect, and provide greater emotional and financial support to their children. Data for the evaluation was collected for 822 program participants from July 1993 through December 1995 and for a comparison group of 847 wards in two non-participating institutions. While the…
This issue brief examines the provisions of the Personal Work Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 that apply to fatherhood. The briefing focuses on the initiatives and programs that can be used by states to encourage fathers to be more involved in the lives of their children. The Personal Work Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRA) included goals for increasing child support enforcement, overcoming barriers to employment, decreasing out-of-wedlock births, and developing visitation programs for…
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Journal Article This State Legislative Report examines the special problems associated with establishing paternity and collecting child support from teenage parents. The report reviews public policy options for legislators and is divided into three major sections: establishing paternity, child support enforcement, and state legislative policy and program responses. Paternity establishment and child support enforcement are particularly difficult with the teenage population. Establishing paternity can be a problem because teenage mothers often refuse to cooperate with state child support enforcement personnel…
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Journal Article This article assesses the effectiveness of in-hospital paternity establishment, a federal requirement since 1993. The authors avoid biases in previous studies by using a national sample of nonmarital births ( N= 3,254), by including detailed controls for characteristics of unwed mothers and previously unavailable controls for characteristics of fathers, and by estimating reduced form models of the effects of strong paternity establishment regimes. They find that paternity establishment rates are now quite high?69%?and that 6 of 7 paternities are established in the hospital. Even after…
Research shows that nearly half of all children born in the US today will be eligible for child support before they reach the age of 18. Many low-income, noncustodial fathers--who often struggle to make these payments--will seek services from workforce development organizations. Yet, understanding the child support enforcement system can be challenging--not only for noncustodial fathers but also for the workforce organizations that want to assist them.
Navigating the Child Support System aims to help meet this challenge by providing information, resources and tools to use at the…
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Journal Article To study changes in nonresident father contact since the 1970s, the authors pooled data from 4 national surveys: the National Survey of Children (1976), the National Survey of Families and Households (1987 ? 1988), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1996), and the National Survey of America's Families (2002). On the basis of mothers' reports, levels of contact rose significantly across surveys. Paying child support and having a nonmarital birth were strongly related to contact frequency. The increase in contact may be beneficial in general but problematic if it occurs within the…
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Journal Article Nonresident fathers' financial support and time are both important to children's well-being, although the association between these two types of involvement is mixed in the literature. Using the 1994 - 2004 waves of the Current Population Survey-Child Support Supplement, this article examined the associations between mothers' reports of child support payments and visitation. The results indicated that about 36% of nonresident fathers did not visit their children at all, and the distribution of visitation was highly skewed. Therefore, zero-inflated Poisson regression was used, and the results…
Part of a series of fact sheets that discuss how and why the child support program provides innovative services to families across six interrelated areas to assure that parents have the tools and resources they need to support their children and be positively involved in raising them, this fact sheet focuses on ways in which the child support program can help prevent the need for its services by promoting responsible childbearing and parenting choices and by raising awareness--especially among teenagers--of the financial, legal, and emotional responsibilities of parenthood. Examples of how…
Part of a series of fact sheets that discuss how and why the child support program provides innovative services to families across six interrelated areas to assure that parents have the tools and resources they need to support their children and be positively involved in raising them, this fact sheet explains how the child support program can increase child support payments by positively engaging with fathers early on, encouraging fathers to be more involved in their children's lives, and helping them overcome obstacles to supporting their children--reducing the likelihood that they will…
Part of a series of fact sheets that discuss how and why the child support program provides innovative services to families across six interrelated areas to assure that parents have the tools and resources they need to support their children and be positively involved in raising them, this fact sheet discusses the dependence of reliable child support payments upon noncustodial parents having stable income. The child support program can increase regular child support payments by helping noncustodial parents find and keep work, and connecting custodial and noncustodial parents to resources that…
