The Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant program authorized $75 million in grants for programs to promote responsible fatherhood through three types of activities: healthy marriage, responsible parenting, and economic stability. As such, this resource from the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation offers a systematic review of impact, implementation, and descriptive studies that have examined responsible fatherhood and related family strengthening programs that target low-income fathers.

From Lawrence Mead and Ron Haskins, through the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, this article analyzes why low-skilled men typically work in lower level positions and provide little support for their children. Authors argue for a program to tie child support with work requirements, which is an initiative that has previously been shown to increase employment. In particular, authors highlight the Noncustodial Parents Choices (NCP Choices) program in Texas as an example to build work enforcement into the child support system.

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.

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.

This Spotlight is from the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, and provides valuable information on the importance of men's activities and behaviors prior to and around the time of a child’s birth (i.e., prenatal involvement). Prenatal involvement has been found to have important implications for the quantity and quality of fathers’ involvement with their children and partners following the birth.

The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse authored this Spotlight on fathering children with disabilities. Few studies have been conducted on fathers of children with disabilities; however, existing literature suggests that having a special needs child may have important implications for fathers’ well-being and involvement with their children. Specifically, fathers of children with disabilities have lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression than fathers of children without disabilities.

This Spotlight is from the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, which is sponsored through the Office of Family Assistance, Administration for Children and Families. Authors report on the latest data that finds fathers who report having high levels of social support experience better psychological well-being and demonstrate more positive patterns of father involvement and co-parenting. The benefits of fathers’ social support may also have important implications for child and family well-being.

This study, which was done through the National Fatherhood Initiative, provides an estimate of the taxpayer costs of father absence. Fatherhood absence has increased from 8 percent of children in single-mother households in 1960 to 34 percent in 2008. Researchers estimate the cost of father absence to the federal government to support father-absent homes equated to around $99.8 billion dollars in Fiscal Year 2006. One of the largest fatherhood absence expenses is TANF at around $15 billion.

From the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, this report provides data on the importance of father involvement within the lives of children. Researchers analyze case outcomes for children within the child welfare system in relation to nonresident fatherhood involvement.