This conference was to educate, inform, and assist stakeholders from across Alabama about ACF's priority initiatives, to aggressively incorporate the initiatives throughout ACF programs and communities to strengthen families. The focus was on the importance of partnering faith- and community based programs with ACF at the State and local levels to bring fatherhood, healthy marriages, and youth development to strengthen families and to improve the quality of life for children, mothers, fathers, and communities. (Author abstract)
This report explains how President Bush's proposed Healthy Marriage Initiative would reduce domestic violence. The initiative would provide $300 million in federal and State Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) money to State-level programs that promote marriage and marriage-skills training, particularly among low-income and fragile families. The report begins by discussing the primary target populations and goals of the program, and then answers erroneous criticisms of the initiative. It stresses that participation in the program is voluntary and will not cause women to stay in…
This brief is based on extensive in-person observational data, as well as survey data, from 55 unmarried low-income African-American mothers and fathers who were part of the Fragile Families study. Given that 70 percent of African-American children (compared with one-third of all children) in the U.S. are born to parents who are not married, this is a particularly important group to study. The present study is one of the first to collect in-depth observational and parent-reported data from unmarried mothers and fathers regarding their couple relationship and the fathers' involvement with…
The Texas Fragile Families Initiative (TFF) is the only statewide, collaborative demonstration project aimed at increasing the capacity of local organizations to serve "fragile families," defined by the Ford foundation as young, low-income never-married parents and their children. Started in 1999 as a partnership between the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and the Center for Public Policy Priorities, TFF brought together more than 30 local, state, and national funders to test promising practices in responsible fatherhood in eleven Texas communities.
In January of 2003, the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services funded the "Family Connections in Alabama" (FCA) project as a 12-month "Special Improvement Project" (SIP) to pilot marriage education for low-resource parents and to promote family and relationship strength. The Alabama Children's Trust Fund (CTF), in partnership with Auburn University's Department of Human Development and Family Studies, and with the support of the Alabama Department of Human Resources and the Alabama Office of Child…
This paper reports findings from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine union formation among unmarried parents who have just had a child together. Multinomial logistic regression was used to estimate the effects of economic, cultural/interpersonal, and other factors on whether parents are romantically involved living apart, cohabitating, married to each other, or not romantically involved one year after the child's birth. Net of other factors, women's education and men's earnings encourage marriage. Cultural and interpersonal factors also have strong effects. Women's trust…
In response to the congressional mandate to promote two-parent families and marriage specified in the 1996 welfare reform legislation, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services embarked on an initiative to encourage healthy marriage in the broad population and especially within low-income groups. To support further progress in this area, ACF is sponsoring a large-scale, comprehensive demonstration and evaluation of programs designed to strengthen relationships and support the marital aspirations of unmarried couples expecting a…
With the enactment of welfare reform in 1996, encouraging and supporting marriage became priorities for the federal government and the states. Research findings that children in married families generally fare better than those in single-parent families on measures of poverty, hardship, and well-being have provided the rationale for marriage promotion policies. In this brief, we examine racial and ethnic differences in children's living arrangements. We give special attention to racial and ethnic variation in the characteristics of single-parent households and the implications for child well-…
We use data from the Fragile Families Study (N = 3317) to document the number of changes in maternal romantic partnerships experienced by children between their birth and age 3, particularly children born to unmarried mothers. We also examine the association between partnership instability and parenting, child health and behavior. We find significantly high levels of partnership instability among children born to unmarried mothers. In addition, partnership instability is negatively associated with parenting, child health, and behavioral problems for children at age 3. Each partnership change…
This paper examines the ways in which families with children have changed over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and the rise of single-parent families. It begins with a discussion of the negative effects of single parenthood and findings from research on the economic and developmental disadvantages of children raised in single parent families. Factors that have influenced the prevalence of single parenthood are explored and include the birth control pill and legalized abortion that have weakened the link between marriage and childbearing, changing sexual mores that…
