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All states have programs that give unmarried parents the opportunity to acknowledge the father’s paternity of the newborn at the hospital. States must also help parents acknowledge paternity up until the child’s eighteenth birthday through vital records offices or other offices designated by the state. Even if the parents plan to marry after their baby is born, establishing paternity helps to protect the relationship between the child and the father.
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This fact sheet gives information on the cause of food-related disagreements in families and provides strategies for effective communication to overcome these disagreements in a healthy way.
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This research brief shares findings from an evaluation of the Responsible Fatherhood, Marriage and Family Strengthening Grants for Incarcerated and Reentering Fathers and Their Partners (MFS-IP), a program that funded services to support families in which one parent was incarcerated or recently released. The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) within the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provided up to $500,000 per year for five years to twelve grantees. OFA's family strengthening initiative required grantees to work with both…
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Little Children, Big Challenges provides resources for families with young children (ages 3-8) as they encounter the difficult changes and transitions that come with a parent's incarceration.
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In 2007, 1.7 million children had a parent in prison on any given day, and even more have experienced parentalincarceration at some point during their childhood. Parental incarceration can be associated with financial instability,unstable housing situations, school behavior and performance problems, and social stigma. Roughly 10% of incarcerated mothers in state prison have a child in a foster home or other state care. Some estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 8 children who are subjects of reports of maltreatment and investigated by child welfare agencies have parents who were recently…
Spending positive time with both parents promotes child well-being and is associated with better child support outcomes. Unmarried parents do not have systematic access to assistance in establishing parenting time orders, so stateand local child support programs have sought to address this service gap. This fact sheet highlights states and countiesthat coordinate the establishment of child support orders and parenting time agreements. Family violence safeguardsare always a critical component when addressing parenting time. (Author abstract)
OCSE recently launched Parenting Time Opportunities for Children, a pilot program to give child support agencies grants to develop, implement, and evaluate procedures to establish parenting time orders along with new child support orders. The goal is to learn more about how the child support program can safely and effectively give families opportunities to establish parenting time orders, thereby improving child well-being overall and related child support outcomes. This fact sheet introduces OCSE's Parenting Time Opportunities for Children grantees. (Author abstract)
Every man has a choice in determining what kind of father he will be. Government statistics report that 1 out of 3 males are reared without their biological father in the home. Reared himself by a single mother, Weathersby was determined to become the loving, caring husband and father he wished he had experienced while growing up. Journey to Fatherhood: Letter to My Unborn Child begins to break the cycle of absentee fatherhood. (Author abstract)
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Deployment and its possible consequences, including a service member's injury, psychological trauma, or death, put considerable strain on military children and families. Most of them are resilient in the face of this adversity. Still, the psychological distress they experience can reverberate through the family, impairing the healthy functioning of parents and children alike. As a nation, we owe these families a system of care that emphasizes not just treatment but also prevention, helping them draw on their own resources for resilience, as well as those of their communities. We propose a…
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This brief highlights programs that are re-thinking services for children and families based on the science of early childhood development and understanding of the consequences of adverse early experiences and toxic stress. Efforts by Acelero Learning in New York City, the Westside Infant-Family Network in Los Angeles, and Catholic Community Services of the Mid-Willamette Valley and Central Cost in Oregon are described.
