Community based organizations have played a leading role in the evolution of the field of responsible fatherhood. Some researchers have long taken an interest in this work and recently, this has had an even broader audience. Additionally, funding to support this work was sporadic before the mid 1990s and woefully inadequate in more recent years.

As a result, by comparison with other fields of human service, evidence-based practice is not presently well established. Further, the primary outcome that has been of interest to public and private donors has been child support compliance and its antecedent, employment.

Unfortunately, the history of our field is that major infusions of public and private support for evaluations of responsible fatherhood programs tend to occur just before recessions, so that the results are disappointing for reasons over which service providers and program participants have no control.

Nevertheless, NFLG is committed to fostering the growth and dissemination of evaluation of responsible fatherhood services and to this end, we have developed some recommendations about the types of fathers we believe programs should be targeting under TANF-related funding.

Based on the findings of the Office of the Inspector General reports¹ that surveyed how states are attempting to manage the child support obligations of low-income fathers, we recommend that responsible fatherhood programs be organized to target non-resident fathers in the following categories:

1. Prevention: These are expectant fathers or fathers with personal incomes below 150% of the poverty line, live in families with family incomes below 150% of the poverty line and for whom paternity establishment or a child support order has not been legally established. For these and other reasons, providing employability or child support services to the fathers may be premature. These fathers may also face barriers to employment including criminal records, no post-secondary education, limited prior work experience, and substance abuse problems. These fathers would have difficulty meeting their child support obligations if one were currently in place.
2. Intervention: These are existing obligors who have child support arrears of $1000 or more and personal or family incomes at or below 150% of the poverty line. Fathers in this group represent 60% of those who do not pay their child support. These fathers may also face barriers to employment including criminal records, no post-secondary education, limited prior work experience, and substance abuse problems.
3. Recovery: These are existing obligors have experienced reductions in their earnings or become separated from formal employment one or more times since December 2007 and have missed one or more child support payments since December 2007. These fathers may or may not be receiving unemployment insurance.
4. Volitional: These are existing obligors who with personal or family incomes at or above 150% of the poverty line who are currently employed or self-employed. These fathers exhibit no visible financial barrier to meeting their child support obligations.

Further, we recommend that the outcomes of fatherhood programs be organized under the domains in the attached grid, which include, but are not limited to employment and child support compliance. The grid describes the types of fathers served across four columns at the top and the outcomes of those services down the rows of Column B.

The outcomes are organized into different domains most of which will apply to fathers in all groups. Each domain includes examples of specific measures. We believe that the domains following child support apply to all fathers and all fatherhood programs.

In fact, this has been the shortcoming of many previous evaluations, which were focused primarily on the measures included under the child support and employability domains. However, we believe it is important for practitioners and for the public to understand that all fatherhood programs have the capacity to improve the fathers capacities to co-parent with the mother of his children, to parent effectively, to form successful bond with his child, and ultimately, to improve child well-being.

Personal Responsibility, Employability, Educational Attainment and Child-Support

The measures under the Personal Responsibility, Employability, Educational Attainment, and Child-Support domains will be relevant for some groups of fathers but not others.

For example, a young father for whom paternity has not been established cannot be expected to meet his child support obligation. Similarly, a father who faces no substantial economic barriers does not need employment services to be brought into compliance. We offer examples of specific measures and can provide examples of instruments used to collect data on these measures should you need greater detail.

We also hope the Administration will consider a few additional recommendations that relate to the capacities of programs that receive grants under the Claims Act for responsible fatherhood. These recommendations are based upon our collective experience and we hope that by requiring or encouraging programs to adopt these practices, the Administration would provide an opportunity to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of these practices and, if proven effective, their wide dissemination throughout the field.

First, successful applicants must provide evidence of established relationships with agencies and organizations including but not limited to the following: child support, labor, commerce, social services, criminal justice, health and substance abuse treatment, local Head Starts, community and/or technical colleges, and those organizations specializing in family planning, workforce development, financial literacy, male centered parenting education, Rights of Passage/Manhood Development, and faith based programs.

Second, successful applicants must require participants to complete an Individual Parenting Plan (IPP) indicating how he plans to pursue measurable goals to become a responsible father. These program expectations and individual actions would of course be monitored, and recorded by program staff, which would facilitate the measurement of outcomes.

Third, successful programs must encourage and educate participants to abstain from behavior that would lead to premature or repeated pregnancy.

Finally, we wholeheartedly support the Administration's commitment to evidence-based practice and believe that in the long run this emphasis will improve the efficacy of services available to fathers and their families. It is imperative that this goal is met within the larger context of the current state of the field, where the capacity to evaluate responsible fatherhood programs is quite uneven.

As a result, there is no consensus regarding the appropriate outcomes to measure for different groups of fathers, nor the appropriate method to do so. Without such clarity, there can be no larger consensus made on the effectiveness of responsible fatherhood programs.

Therefore, we strongly encourage the Administration to follow through on recommendation six from the Administration's Taskforce on Fatherhood and Healthy Families² to “Invest in high-quality program evaluation in order to help the fatherhood field define and increase its impact on specific measures and in so doing increase public understanding of and support for this critical work.”

In our view, part of that investment would be a strategy to disseminate information, not just about the results of evaluations of particular programs, but of evaluation methods in this field. It would also include support for partnerships between community based service providers and faculty at local universities, so that the on-going process of building an evidence base for responsible fatherhood can begin in earnest.

Please join us in this dialog be sending us your feedback to these recommendations. Again, submit them to contactus@nflgonline.org. We will make your comments available on our website in the near future.
 

² President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, A New Era of Partnerships: Report of Recommendations to the President, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/partnerships-fatherhood-healthy-families.pdf.