This book looks at the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Initiative whose goals are to strengthen marriages and relationships in low-income families which has emerged as a national strategy for enhancing the well-being of children. With the passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (DRA), Congress appropriated $150 million in discretionary grants each year from 2006 through 2010 to implement the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Initiative. The Initiative represents an unprecedented financial commitment by the federal government to support marriage and fatherhood programs. The focus of the Healthy Marriage program is to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent households through healthy marriage promotion activities, while the focus of the Responsible Fatherhood program is to strengthen the role of the father in a child's life. This is an edited, excerpted and augmented edition.
Strengthening marriages and relationships in low-income families has emerged as a national strategy for enhancing the well-being of children. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 appropriated $150 million in grants each year from 2006 through 2010 to implement the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Initiative. This report provides insight into how these programs are being implemented and monitored, and reports on: (1) how the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded grants and the types of org. that received funding; (2) what activities and services grantees are providing, incl. those for domestic violence victims; (3) how HHS monitors and assesses program implementation and use of funds; and (4) how program impact is measured. Illus.
This aim of this open access book is to launch an international, cross-disciplinary conversation on fatherhood engagement. By integrating perspective from three sectors -- Health, Social Policy, and Work in Organizations -- the book offers a novel perspective on the benefits of engaged fatherhood for men, for families, and for gender equality. The chapters are crafted to engaged broad audiences, including policy makers and organizational leaders, healthcare practitioners and fellow scholars, as well as families and their loved ones.
This book presents state-of-the-art findings of research on fatherhood programs, funded by the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN), which advance knowledge and practice in the fathering field. New Research on Parenting Programs for Low-Income Fathers includes research on how to engage mothers to support father–child contact and to successfully employ social media and online technology for practice. It offers findings on how to increase paternal engagement and parenting skills and to include fathers in policies and programs for children and families. It discusses the importance of providing staff training and resources to practitioners who work directly with fathers. Chapters also provide summaries of key implications for evidence-based practice and future directions for research that encourage effective fatherhood practice. This book is an excellent resource for therapists, social workers, fatherhood educators, fatherhood practitioners, researchers, and policy makers on how to inspire positive father engagement with children and healthy coparenting relationships.
American fathers are a highly diverse group, but the breadwinning, live-in, biological dad prevails as the fatherhood ideal. Consequently, policymakers continue to emphasize marriage and residency over initiatives that might help foster healthy father-child relationships and creative co-parenting regardless of marital or residential status. In Nurturing Dads, William Marsiglio and Kevin Roy explore the ways new initiatives can address the social, cultural, and economic challenges men face in contemporary families and foster more meaningful engagement between many different kinds of fathers and their children. What makes a good father? The firsthand accounts in Nurturing Dads show that the answer to this question varies widely and in ways that counter the mainstream "provide and reside" model of fatherhood. Marsiglio and Roy document the personal experiences of more than 300 men from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and diverse settings, including fathers-to-be, young adult fathers, middle-class dads, stepfathers, men with multiple children in separate families, and fathers in correctional facilities. They find that most dads express the desire to have strong, close relationships with their children and to develop the nurturing skills to maintain these bonds. But they also find that disadvantaged fathers, including young dads and those in constrained financial and personal circumstances, confront myriad structural obstacles, such as poverty, inadequate education, and poor job opportunities. Nurturing Dads asserts that society should help fathers become more committed and attentive caregivers and that federal and state agencies, work sites, grassroots advocacy groups, and the media all have roles to play. Recent efforts to introduce state-initiated paternity leave should be coupled with social programs that encourage fathers to develop unconditional commitments to children, to co-parent with mothers, to establish partnerships with their children's other caregivers, and to develop parenting skills and resources before becoming fathers via activities like volunteering and mentoring kids. Ultimately, Marsiglio and Roy argue, such combined strategies would not only change the policy landscape to promote engaged fathering but also change the cultural landscape to view nurturance as a fundamental aspect of good fathering. Care is a human experience—not just a woman's responsibility—and this core idea behind Nurturing Dads holds important implications for how society supports its families and defines manhood. The book promotes the progressive notion that fathers should provide more than financial support and, in the process, bring about a better start in life for their children. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
Across the political spectrum, unwed fatherhood is denounced as one of the leading social problems of today. Doing the Best I Can is a strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at fatherhood among inner-city men often dismissed as “deadbeat dads.” Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson examine how couples in challenging straits come together and get pregnant so quickly—without planning. The authors chronicle the high hopes for forging lasting family bonds that pregnancy inspires, and pinpoint the fatal flaws that often lead to the relationship’s demise. They offer keen insight into a radical redefinition of family life where the father-child bond is central and parental ties are peripheral. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Doing the Best I Can shows how mammoth economic and cultural changes have transformed the meaning of fatherhood among the urban poor. Intimate interviews with more than 100 fathers make real the significant obstacles faced by low-income men at every step in the familial process: from the difficulties of romantic relationships, to decision-making dilemmas at conception, to the often celebratory moment of birth, and finally to the hardships that accompany the early years of the child's life, and beyond.
In Essential Dads, sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program. Dads’ experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state’s role in shaping men’s parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one that carefully considers the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement.
A guide to the latest tools for teaching effective and positive parenting skills In the last three decades, parent training has established itself as an empirically sound, highly successful, and cost-effective intervention strategy for both pre-venting and treating behavior disorders in children. Handbook of Parent Training, Third Edition offers a unique opportunity to learn about the latest research findings and clinical developments in parent training from leading innovators in the field. Featuring new chapters, this thoroughly revised and updated edition covers issues that have emerged in recent years. Readers will find the latest information on such topics as: * Behavioral family intervention for childhood anxiety * Working with parents of aggressive school-age children * Preventive parent training techniques that support low-income, ethnic minority parents of preschoolers * Treating autism and Asperger's Syndrome * Parenting and learning tools including role playing and modeling positive and effective parenting styles Offering practical advice and guidance for parent training, each chapter author begins by identifying a specific problem and then describes the best approach to identifying, assessing, and treating the problem. In every instance, descriptions of therapeutic techniques are multimodal and integrate theory, research, implementation strategies, and extensive case material. Handbook of Parent Training, Third Edition is a valuable professional resource for child psychologists, school psychologists, and all mental health professionals with an interest in parent skills training.
Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Initiative: Further Progress Is Needed in Developing a Risk-Based Monitoring Approach to Help HHS Improve Program Oversight
