Welfare reform, fertility, and father involvement.

Sara McLanahan · Marcia J. Carlson

75 citations0/0 files storedPubMed

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Family Dynamics and Relationships Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics Social Policies and Family

Abstract

Recognizing that most poor families are single-parent families, the federal welfare reform law of 1996 emphasized the responsibility of both parents to support their children. In addition to strengthening the child support enforcement system, the law included several provisions designed to decrease childbearing outside of marriage and to promote two-parent families. This article focuses on the important role that fathers play in children's lives and how public policies have affected childbearing and father involvement. Key observations are: Compared with children living with both biological parents, children in father-absent families often have fewer economic and socioemotional resources from their parents, and do not fare as well on many outcome measures. Efforts to reduce the rising number of father-absent families by focusing on preventing unwanted pregnancy among unmarried women, especially teen girls, have met with some success; those programs seeking to alter adolescents' life opportunities in addition to providing education or family planning services appear to hold the most promise. Efforts to encourage greater father involvement by focusing almost exclusively on increasing absent parents' child support payments reap only minimal benefits for poor children because their absent parents often have few resources and little incentive to make support payments. To date, efforts to increase the emotional involvement of unmarried fathers with their children have produced disappointing results, but new research suggests that such programs can make a difference when targeting fathers at the time of a child's birth. Many children spend some time living away from their fathers, deprived of the financial and emotional resources they can provide. Because of the importance of fathers to child well-being, the authors conclude that new directions in research and public policies are needed to encourage greater father involvement across the wide diversity of family arrangements in society today.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 75 citations exist upstream.

References

1991A Treatise on the Family 1995Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps.1984Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 2000Trends in cohabitation and implications for children s family contexts in the United States 1999Nonresident Fathers and Children's Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis 1991The Role of Cohabitation in Declining Rates of Marriage 1991Relationships between Fathers and Children Who Live Apart: The Father's Role after Separation 1999Paternal Involvement and Children's Behavior Problems

Cited by

2003Social Policies, Family Types and Child Outcomes in Selected OECD Countries 2006Early Father Involvement Moderates Biobehavioral Susceptibility to Mental Health Problems in Middle Childhood 2012Engaging fathers in child protection services: A review of factors and strategies across ecological systems 2003OECD SOCIAL, EMPLOYMENT AND MIGRATION WORKING PAPERS Social Policies, Family Types and Child Outcomes in Selected OECD Countries 2008Considerations for Studying Father Involvement in Early Childhood Among Latino Families

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.