The Responsible Fatherhood, Healthy Marriage and Family Strengthening Grants for Incarcerated and Reentering Fathers and Their Partners (MFS-IP) initiative was established in 2006 by the federal Office of Family Assistance (OFA), and required grantees serve fathers who were either incarcerated or recently released, as well as their spouses or committed partners. The grantees were required to deliver services to support healthy marriage and were also permitted to provide activities designed to improve parenting and support economic stability. From 2006 to 2011, the 12 MFS-IP sites delivered a…
This guide addresses the importance of promoting healthy family and marital relationships as an effective strategy to improve interpersonal relationships and productivity in the workplace. This guide focuses on specific steps employers can take to support employees, enhance their interpersonal skills, and reduce family stress by improving coping skills. It also highlights promising practices by leading American companies that recognize the importance of investing in healthy relationships for both hourly workers and full-time staff. (Author abstract)
Until communities offer multiple pathways to connect with ladders of opportunity, many young families headed by out-of-school and out-of-work (OSOW) youth will be unable to achieve financial independence. To break the cycle of poverty, many human service organizations use two-generation approaches with "young families" (that is, families with children in which the parent is an OSOW young person ages 15-24 years). One hallmark of these two-generation approaches is the use of strategies that address the developmental needs of the young parents, their children, and the families as a whole. The…
In our discussion, we review and synthesize research evidence on five identified domains of instability that have been well established in the literature: family income, parental employment, family structure, housing, and the out-of-home contexts of school and child care. In our review of the evidence, we also discuss some of the key pathways through which instability may affect development. Specifically, research points to the underlying role of parenting, parental mental health, and the home environment in providing the stability and support young children need for positive development. We…
This report represents the results of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's effort to learn what tools local service providers need to help their clients increase their financial capabilities. Through the field scan they contacted fourteen organizations that provide financial empowerment training to their case managers and frontline staff. They learned how programs have succeeded -- or struggled -- in providing training, tools, and resources to change case manager and client behavior. They conducted in-depth interviews of five organizations that represented diverse approaches to…
According to this paper, the parenting gap is a big factor in the opportunity gap. The chances of upward social mobility are lower for children with parents struggling to do a good job -- in terms of creating a supportive and stimulating home environment. Children lucky enough to have strong parents are more likely to succeed at all the critical life stages, which means policies to help weaker parents do a better job can be investments in opportunity, and equality. Key findings indicate: 1) The quality of U.S. parenting, as measured on the HOME scale, strongly varies by income, family…
In 2006, New York instituted a noncustodial parent earned income tax credit (NCP EITC) to encourage low-income noncustodial parents to work and pay child support. This study examines the credit's impacts through 2009. We use a regression discontinuity approach exploiting a drop in NCP EITC eligibility when taxpayers' youngest children turn 18, and find the NCP EITC increased the proportion of noncustodial parents paying their child support in full by approximately 1 percentage point. Effects were stronger among parents with low child support orders. Our estimates may represent upper-bound…
Qualitative research suggests that economically disadvantaged fathers experience considerable stress due to difficulty fulfilling the breadwinning ideal and workplace inflexibility that ignores their childcare responsibility. Yet, quantitative research on how employment and work-family conflict are related to fathers' parenting stress, especially in comparison with mothers', is limited. Analyses using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,165) show that current unemployment and greater work-family conflict, but not overwork, odd-jobs, and nonstandard hours, are…
Many parents without custody of their children work and pay their full child support despite their meager incomes. In 2006, the New York State Legislature enacted a new tax credit to help these parents make ends meet as they pay their child support in full. Although the tax credit was successfully implemented in 2006, only 5,280 noncustodial parents received the tax credit that year. This report identifies three reasons for this result. It also describes how the law was implemented and the challenges that were encountered during implementation. It concludes by examining who might be motivated…
The subject of this paper is the association between the transition to fatherhood and men's work effort. We test three hypotheses: 1) that the transition to fatherhood is associated with an increase in work effort; 2) that the positive association (if any) between the transition to fatherhood and work effort is greater for fathers who are married at the time of the transition; and 3) that the association (if any) is greater for men who make the transition at younger ages. The data are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort. We find that the transition to fatherhood is…
