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Journal Article Non-resident fathers’ compliance with child support agreements is low. An estimated 50% of fathers never pay any formal support to their co-parents (Stykes, Manning, & Brown, 2013). This study adds to the sparse literature on the evaluation of responsible fatherhood programs by quantitatively examining the role of hope, parenting role salience, and parenting skills in predicting changes in child support compliance attitudes. The sample was drawn from participants in community-based responsible fatherhood programs. Results indicated that as fathers reported greater improvements in…
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Journal Article This study examines the relationships between ethnicity-based variations in nonresident fathers' involvement and children's behavior. Using weighted least squares regression analysis, this study investigates nonresident father involvement and children's behavior based on a nationally representative sample of children in the National Survey of America's Families. After controlling for family context variables, nonresident father involvement through increased frequency of visits was positively associated with better child behavior. The payment of formal or informal child support by nonresident…
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 family-centered innovations to improve child support outcomes. The need for family-centered child support services is explained, child support program accomplishments are shared, and the evolving child support program policy agenda is described. The collaboration of the child support…
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Journal Article We used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2002 and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (CNLSY) from 1986 to 2002 to describe the number, shape, and population frequencies of U.S. nonresident father contact trajectories over a 14-year period using growth mixture models. The resulting four-category classification indicated that nonresident father involvement is not adequately characterized by a single population with a monotonic pattern of declining contact over time. Contrary to expectations, about two-thirds of fathers were…
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Journal Article This study uses early descriptive data from the National Evaluation of Welfare to Work Strategies (NEWWS) Child Outcome Study, a sub-study of the larger random assignment evaluation of the Federal JOBS program, to answer two timely and important questions. First, what factors predict father involvement among nonresident fathers of young children who receive welfare? And second, is nonresident father involvement associated with better outcomes for these children? The three measures of nonresident father involvement examined are father-child visitation, formal child support payments received…
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Journal Article The article presents a study conducted in the United States that examines variation in the effects of nonresident father involvement on child well being. The data for this analysis was taken from the child supplement to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). In addition to annual interviews with the respondents, data on the children of the NLSY women were collected in 1986 and 1988. The study focuses on children who we living in households with their mothers and had a father living elsewhere in 1988. The children who were assessed tend to be born to younger mothers, and this is…
The nation's Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program is a federal/state/tribal/local partnership to promote family self-sufficiency and child well-being. In most states, approximately half of all child support orders are established and enforced by a federal and state financed child support enforcement entity known as the IV-D program (from Title IV-D of the Social Security Act). About one-third of all children in the United States will receive some assistance from CSE and approximately 58 percent of CSE cases involve never-married parents. Services are available to a parent with custody of a…
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Journal Article This study examines the relationships among nonresident fathers' financial support, informal instrumental support, mothers' parenting and parenting stress, and their children's behavioral and cognitive development in single-mother families with low income. Informed by stress-coping and social support models, this study estimates the mediating effects of nonresident fathers' financial support on children's outcomes transmitted through mothers' parenting and parenting stress. The analyses use the longitudinal data from a subsample of 679 single mothers in the Fragile Families and Child…
Spending positive time with both parents promotes child well-being and is associated with better child support outcomes. Unmarried parents do not have systematic access to assistance in establishing parenting time orders, so stateand local child support programs have sought to address this service gap. This fact sheet highlights states and countiesthat coordinate the establishment of child support orders and parenting time agreements. Family violence safeguardsare always a critical component when addressing parenting time. (Author abstract)
OCSE recently launched Parenting Time Opportunities for Children, a pilot program to give child support agencies grants to develop, implement, and evaluate procedures to establish parenting time orders along with new child support orders. The goal is to learn more about how the child support program can safely and effectively give families opportunities to establish parenting time orders, thereby improving child well-being overall and related child support outcomes. This fact sheet introduces OCSE's Parenting Time Opportunities for Children grantees. (Author abstract)
