Unpublished Paper
The purpose of this study was to examine the direct, mediating, and moderating effects of nonresident fathers' involvement on children's development in poor and near-poor African American single-mother families, using a longitudinal dataset from the first three waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Based on Bronfenbrenner's (1988) person-process-context ecological model, this study investigated whether nonresident fathers' involvement with poor and near-poor single mothers and their children would be associated with the mothers' parenting and the children's behavioral and…
This report provides a statistical portrait of progress in the reduction of poverty and economic hardship over the past five decades in the United States. The poverty measures presented in this volume show that the federal safety net has advanced the economic circumstances of low- income children and families since 1964. Three key metrics assess whether families were able to secure resources to meet their basic human needs and avoid severe material deprivation: the official poverty measure developed by Mollie Orshansky in 1963-1964 and designated as the federal government’s official…
This 2014 fact sheet on children living in low-income families in the United States begins by explaining that there are more than 11 million infants and toddlers under the age of 3 in the United States, and 47% live in low-income families and 24% live in poor families. Statistics are provided that indicate the percentage of infants and toddlers living in low-income families has been on the rise, increasing from 44% in 2008 to 47% in 2014, children under age 3 are nearly three times as likely as adults 65 years and older to live in poor families, children under age 3 are more likely to live in…
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Journal Article This article presents data from the qualitative interviews of seven low-income ethnic minority men who participated in an Early Head Start (EHS) program for fathers in an economically depressed urban area in the North East. The two goals of the study were to understand the men's subjective experiences of growing up and becoming fathers and to identify the elements of the fathering program that maintained their participation over many years. The study used a semistructured interview format. The authors used grounded theory methodology to analyze the data. The narrative data suggest the ways…
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Journal Article Self-regulation ability is an important component of school readiness and predictor of academic success, but few studies of self-regulation examine contributions of fathering to the emergence of self-regulation in low-income ethnic minority preschoolers. Associations were examined between parental child-oriented parenting support and preschoolers' emerging self-regulation abilities in 224 low-income African American (n = 86) and Latino (n = 138) children observed at age 30 months in father-child and mother-child interactions to determine unique predictions from fathering qualities. Child-…
Children represent 24 percent of the population, but they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty. Among all children under 18 years of age, 45 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Being a child in a low-income or poor family does not happen by chance. There are a range of factors associated with children's experiences of economic insecurity, including race/ethnicity and parents' education and employment. This fact sheet describes the demographic, socio-economic, and geographic characteristics of children and their…
Children represent 24 percent of the population, but they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty. Among all children under 18 years of age, 45 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Being a child in a low-income or poor family does not happen by chance. There are a range of factors associated with children's experiences of economic insecurity, including race/ethnicity and parents' education and employment. This fact sheet describes the demographic, socio-economic, and geographic characteristics of children and their…
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Journal Article We examined the activities that low-income, ethnically diverse fathers of sons versus daughters engage in with their children in the preschool years. African American, Latino, and White fathers ( N = 426) from research sites across the United States, were interviewed about their caregiving, play, literacy, and visiting activities when their children were 2 years, 3 years, and preschool age. Fathers of boys engaged more frequently in physical play than fathers of girls, whereas fathers of girls engaged more frequently in literacy activities. Moreover, gendered patterns of father engagement…
