Fact Sheet, Brief
Children and youth who have been abused or neglected need safe, stable, and nurturing relationships and environments to recover from the trauma they've experienced. If you are parenting a child or youth with a history of abuse or neglect, you might have questions about the impacts and how you can help your child heal. This factsheet is intended to help parents (birth, foster, and adoptive) and other caregivers better understand the challenges of caring for a child or youth who has experienced maltreatment and learn about available resources for support. (Author abstract)
Brief
This research brief examines two aspects of low-income, nonresidential fathers' commitment to the parenting role: self-reports of the importance of the father role and perceptions of validation from others for being a good parent. The findings of this study show that both types of commitment to the father role are associated with fathers' reports of having a close relationship with his child(ren). Only validation from others is related to fathers' engagement in child-related activities. The implications of these findings for fatherhood programs are discussed in the brief. (Author abstract…
Brief
An essential step in the child support process is delivering legal documents to the person named as a parent. This infographic summarizes results from a Georgia intervention that aimed to get parents to come in and accept documents voluntarily instead of using a sheriff or process server to deliver them. (Author abstract)
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This FRPN research brief reviews some of the ways in which federal, state and local initiatives in the U.S. have attempted to ensure that father involvement is reflected in programs and policies dealing with children and families. It begins with a summary of how father involvement issues emerged at the national level and describes key federal funding mechanisms. The brief provides examples of state and local initiatives, most of which focus on providing direct services to fathers in the child support system to increase their employment, child support payments and parent involvement,…
Brief
The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project is an ambitious effort to apply behavioral science principles to improving services related to child care, child support, and work support. As is the case with most behavioral research, the BIAS project focuses on individual client behavior. This approach provides significant benefits by allowing for low-cost, incremental improvements that can accumulate over time. One extension to this individual-level approach would be to consider the behavior of individual staff members who work with those clients. Another beneficial…
Brief
The Learn, Innovate, Improve (LI2) process is a systematic, evidence-informed approach to program improvement. LI2 involves a series of analytic and replicable activities, supported by collaboration between practitioners and applied researchers, to help human services programs design, implement, and iteratively test programmatic changes. As a continuous improvement process, LI2 is intended to build practitioners’ capacity for better using and producing high-quality evidence; ultimately, this process can be institutionalized within the program environment.Human services programs (such as…
Working with young men in groups can be a valuable way to create space for young men to focus on their identities as fathers. However, group work can be challenging to initiate and sustain. Community groups for young men who are fathers are quite resource intensive, which may pose challenges to the third-sector groups who run them, particularly as state provision is rolled back and the third sector is being required to enter that space. Skilled workers are integral to group work where positive role models need to be carefully facilitated and toxic aspects of masculinity challenged. This…
Brief
The social safety net is widely recognized as having been quite successful in providing major financial support to low-income families during the Great Recession, one of the most severe economic downturns in modern U.S. history. Safety net expenditures grew in aggregate and were widely distributed to all types of needy families. Before the recession, however, while aggregate transfers to the low-income population also exhibited steady growth, the growth was not equally shared across different types of families. Transfers grew much more for the elderly and disabled relative to the nonelderly…
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This brief addresses the problem of low attendance in programs for low-income fathers. We review approaches to measuring attendance, rates of attendance reported by programs, influences on attendance, the effects of attendance on fathers’ outcomes, and future directions for improving attendance and studying it. (Author abstract)
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Committed fathers love spending time with their children, but with today's pressures of work and other priorities, it can be challenging to find ways to make quality and quantity time with the kids. Wayne Parker discusses some important resources for fathers to help make more time, and better time, with the family.
