Our study investigates whether fatherhood and specifically involvement with nonresident children influence men's entrance into marital and cohabiting unions. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, our findings suggest that neither resident nor nonresident children affect men's chances of entering a new marriage but nonresident children have a positive effect on cohabitation. The positive association between nonresident children and men's union formation is not uniform; instead, we find that it is involvement with nonresident children, specifically visitation, that enhances men'…
This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the frequency of parent-child interaction in several areas across a range of family types. Overall, we find that few individual characteristics of mothers or fathers are consistently associated with how often parents engage in activities with their one-year-old children. The nature of parents' relationship, however, does appear to be important for parenting. Non-resident fathers exhibit significantly lower levels of interaction with their children in activities such as care giving, playing and cognitive…
The ACF West-Central Hub Family Stabilization Workshop, held September 26 and 27, 2001, in Denver, had three primary themes: Responsible Fatherhood, Faith-based and Community Initiatives, and Marriage and Family Stabilization. This report summarizes the key findings of the workshop. (Author abstract)
The purpose of this paper is to identify what we currently do and do not know about the contributions of fathers' involvement in very young children's lives. Specifically, we provide an overview of the relationship between father involvement and behavioral and cognitive outcomes among young children. Second, we identify aspects of father involvement that should be measured in the early years of a child's life that would help us understand and facilitate the beneficial effects of father involvement on school outcomes. Third, we describe variations in father involvement along the continuum…
