Brief
Healthy marriage relationship skills education programs serving unmarried parents aim to help these couples improve their relationships, with the ultimate aim of supporting family stability and promoting child well-being. A central goal of these programs is to promote fathers' sustained, active engagement in their children's lives. Data from Mathematica's evaluation of the Building Strong Families (BSF) program allow us to deter-mine which families that enrolled in a set of healthy marriage programs were at greatest risk of having fathers with very limited involvement with their young…
A review of data from the United States Census and other sources reveals that the trend in father absence is stabilizing. Currently, approximately one-third of all children in the United States do not live with their biological father and 27 percent of children live in single-parent homes. Thirty-three percent of births in the year 2000 were to unwed parents. Almost half of the children who do not live with their father have not seen their father in at least one year. Fatherlessness is related to child poverty, drug use, educational problems, and health and behavioral problems. Children…
The quality of parents' romantic relationship has important implications for a father's involvement with his child. Both the quality of the mother-father relationship and the level and type of father involvement are critical for children's positive development. This fact sheet discusses the implications and importance of relationship quality on the well-being of fathers not only in their role as parents but also in other areas of their lives as well as its impact on fathers' involvement with their children. (Author abstract)
The quality of the relationship between a mother and father is important for understanding their coparenting behavior (i.e., shared decision making about the well-being of a child). Research suggests that better mother-father relationships and higher quality coparenting relationships go hand in hand, and the quality of each of these relationships is important for children's well-being. This fact sheet discusses the importance and implications of couple relationship quality for father' coparenting. (Author abstract)
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Journal Article The purpose of this study was to examine ethnic and marital status differences in family structure, risk behaviors and service requests among African American and Hispanic adolescent fathers participating in a community-based fatherhood program. Demographic factors, risk behaviors, and service requests were gathered at program entry. The results indicated that each group demonstrated distinct patterns associated with family structure, sexual risk behaviors, substance use, and criminal behavior. In comparison to African American fathers, Hispanic fathers were younger and were more likely to be…
