One in three children live apart from their biological fathers, and about 40 percent of these children live in poverty. From Seedco, this brief is part of the Learnings from the Field series, and provides insights from a new wave of programs designed to help low-income, noncustodial fathers and their families. The brief highlights Seedco’s comprehensive approach to serving fathers, which includes case management, employment training, parenting classes, and financial literacy programs.

The National Skills Coalition authored this report as part of the Skills2Compete campaign, which focuses on identifying gaps in the skills of the workforce and the state’s training and education policies. In particular, middle skills jobs account for half of the current jobs in New York, which include jobs that require a high school diploma but not a four-year degree. This paper calls for attention to training people to fill middle skills jobs but also training people who are already in the workforce to fill these roles as well.

From the Institute for Research on Poverty, this Fast Focus is an overview of presentations given at the “Employment Prospects for Lower-Wage Workers: Easing the Implications of a Slow Recovery” conference in March 2011. Presentations focused on how the polarized labor market impacts workers across all levels, including income inequality, the use of work supports, and the well-being of displaced workers and their families.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) recently launched a Fact Sheet Series. The child support program serves a quarter of all children and half of all poor children. Created primarily to recover welfare costs, Congress has steadily embraced a broader mission for the child support program through legislative change, resulting in a gradual shift to a program that promotes child well-being and family self-sufficiency by making child support a reliable source of income.

While working well for most families, the program has faced a greater challenge serving low-income parents. To improve child support outcomes for all, State child support agencies are now using a wide range of family-centered innovations to increase the ability of parents to support their children, in recognition that collection of support depends on the noncustodial parent’s employment, cooperation between parents, and parents’ emotional connection with their children.

Often, the most effective way to make sure that children can count on regular child support payments is to address the underlying reasons parents are not paying their obligations, whether they are unemployment, parental conflict, or disengagement. State child support agencies are partnering with fatherhood, workforce, and reentry programs in outreach, referral, case management and other strategies that are often organized into six areas:

1. Preventing the need for child support enforcement,

2. Engaging fathers from the birth of their first child,

3. Promoting family economic stability,

4. Helping build healthy family relationships,

5. Ensuring that families have meaningful health care coverage, and

6. Preventing and reducing family violence.

To celebrate Father’s Day, OCSE released a series of fact sheets highlighting how child support innovations in each of these areas can improve child support and child well-being. The fact sheets provide examples of promising practices from across the country.

In honor of Father’s Day, the Child Support Report for June 2011 features three personal essays from leaders in the field, along with several perspectives on the child support program from State child support directors and researchers.

This working paper is through the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (CRCW) at Princeton University. With the increased Federal attention toward responsible fatherhood initiatives, this paper uses the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being to predict non-residential fathers' social and emotional involvement with their children. It was hypothesized that child, maternal, paternal, and contextual characteristics would predict father involvement. However, the data show that paternal characteristics and relational factors were the only significant predictors. Significant paternal characteristics include criminal involvement in the past year, number of children in the household and outside of the household, and whether or not he previously lived with the child. Significant relational factors include the mother's report of parental cooperation and relationship quality, the presence of domestic violence, and whether the mother has a new partner.

In an increasingly global economy, Internet-access and computer skills are essential tools for individuals interested in expanding their educational and employment opportunities. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, in partnership with nine Federal agencies, recently announced the launch of www.DigitalLiteracy.gov. The Web site is designed to serve as a centralized location for librarians, teachers, workforce trainers, and others interested in accessing resources related to digital literacy. The site features tools for educators, basic-skills tutorials, job skills, and community success stories. Additionally, interested parties can also use the site to collaborate through online discussions and resource sharing.

The Institute for Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education issued this report, which discusses the prevalence of high-performing teachers in ten districts across seven states. The data show that, on average, low-income students have unequal access the highest-performing teachers at the middle school level but not at the elementary level. There was variation across the ten districts as high-poverty schools in some districts at both the elementary and middle school levels had fewer highest-performing teachers, other districts had an uneven distribution favoring lower-poverty schools only at the middle school level, and one district favored high-poverty elementary schools in its distribution of highest-performing teachers.

This is a presentation given by Child Trends at the Population Association of America meetings, which provides a framework for measuring the whole child in context. The presentation offers suggestions for expansion of federal data collection, methodological issues, and the availability of geographic data. Authors conclude with information on how to coordinate federal data collection efforts.

From MDRC, this report discusses the implementation of an enhanced version of the Early Head Start (EHS) program. Authors provide an overview of challenges to implementation as well as short-term outcomes of the program on children and parents. Understanding that living in poverty can have profound effects on young children’s development and their prospects for the future, the enhanced EHS program was designed to provide formalized parental employment and educational services were implemented within EHS. This evaluation is part of the multi-site Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation Project, sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with additional funding from the U.S. Department of Labor.