The Welfare Peer Technical Assistance Network held a roundtable in November 2003 to discuss best practices for strengthening families separated by parental incarceration. Participants reviewed national trends and examined the components of state initiatives designed to reduce recidivism and alleviate the negative impact of parental incarceration on children. Emphasis was placed on improving parenting skills and nurturing parent-child relationships. This final report summarizes the challenges identified by programs, such as the lack of family stability, limited parenting skills, child support…
One hundred child welfare professionals, family service workers, court officials, and fatherhood program employees participated in group discussions held throughout the United States about the engagement of fathers in services. The National Family Preservation Network sponsored the events to determine the extent of agency attention to the needs of fathers and to identify ways to support father involvement in family life. The questions focused on the skills necessary to engage fathers in programs, types of services provided to fathers, barriers to father-child relationships, the impact of…
This report discusses the outcomes of an evaluation of Healthy Families Arizona, a home visitation program designed to provide supportive services and education to parents of newborns who might benefit from support to strengthen their families. The program is intended to promote positive parent/child interaction and child health, and prevent child abuse and neglect. All services are voluntary and assistance is typically provided for 12 to 18 months but may be provided for up to five years. This report focuses on aggregate data that are summarized across the 23 sites that make up the Healthy…
The Responsible Fatherhood Management Information System was designed by The Lewin Group to provide a mechanism for fatherhood demonstration programs to track participation. The system stores data about the characteristics of participants, services, outcomes, and costs. The elements can be customized to address the specific requirements of each program. This manual provides printed copies of data forms and instructions for using the system. Sample data entry screens and lists of data fields are included.
Exemplary early childhood centers engage men in activities as staff members and participants. The programs actively communicate with fathers and encourage their involvement by sponsoring special events and by addressing the interests of men. The inclusion of men helps to reduce risk for child maltreatment by demonstrating the benefits of flexible gender roles, alleviating social isolation, developing networks of care for children, and improving relationships between adults and between parents and children. This brief includes profiles of four early childhood programs that involve men.
The catalog of research on programs for low-income couples contains summaries of studies that describe and analyze marriage and relationship education or other couple-based programs. Each study description provides details on the research, such as study design and characteristics of those included in the sample, and of the programs, such as structure, staffing and operations, and recruitment and retention. Also included in each study description is a rating based on the likelihood that the estimated effects are the result of the program rather than other factors. (Author abstract)
This summary provides a brief overview of the catalog of research on programs for low-income couples, which compiles information from 54 studies of 39 programs.
In response to dramatic increases in imprisonment, a burgeoning literature considers the consequences of incarceration for family life, almost always documenting negative consequences. But the effects of incarceration may be more complicated and nuanced and, in this paper, we consider the countervailing consequences of paternal incarceration for both fathers' and mothers' parenting. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and a rigorous research design, we find recent paternal incarceration sharply diminishes the parenting behaviors of residential fathers…
The Parents as Teachers Promoting Responsible Fatherhood project was designed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of an adaptation of the Parents as Teachers model with low-income fathers as the primary target population. The project goal is to increase father involvement in Parents as Teachers services. Fathers who live with their children (residential fathers) who meet the income criteria (under 200% federal poverty level) were recruited toparticipate in a 12-week group meeting cycle lasting 3 months. During these 3 months, fathers also participated in home visits by Parents…
Given employment challenges facing our nation's veterans, the "Guide to Leading Policies, Practices & Resources: Supporting the Employment of Veterans and Military Families" is the product of a collaborative effort of the IVMF and more than 30 private sector employers and supporting organizations, plus many more, whose activities are reflected throughout the report, that agreed to share best practices, lessons learned and innovations tied to the recruitment, assimilation, retention and advancement of vets in the workforce. The guide represents a response to calls for a shared resource for…
