Recent Policy Documents: August 2004
Policy News and Research - Fathers
| Child Support and Fathers
| Fathers/Mothers in Prison
Children and Families |
Welfare Reform
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The Effect of Child Support and Criminal Justice Systems on
Low-Income Noncustodial Parents: When You Need a Safety Net, but
There is Only a Dragnet, Center for Family Policy and Practice,
Rebecca May, June 2004.
Introduction (excerpt):
Over the course of the past several years, the Center on Fathers,
Families, and Public Policy (the Center) has gathered information
on the relationship between incarceration and child support enforcement,
and the impact of both on low-income noncustodial parents and their
families. We have investigated policy and law, reviewed the relevant
literature, and most important, conducted a series of focus groups
(with participants from Georgia, Florida, the District of Columbia,
Maryland, and Wisconsin) and interviews with noncustodial parents
and caseworkers, in order to understand and convey the experience
of noncustodial fathers whose voices are rarely a part of policy
discussion in this area. Specifically, we were interested in two
circumstances:
- The increasing use of the criminal justice system to enforce
child support, and
- The impact of incarceration, regardless of the reason, on child
support obligations and debt, and on family relationships.
While the noncustodial parents who experience either of these two
types of child support issues would be expected to share many of
the same characteristics and barriers, these are distinct policy
issues. In the first case, a parent who does not make child support
payments for whatever reason, is incarcerated due to his child support
debt. In the second, an incarcerated father may or may not be aware
of a child support debt, but will have to contend with many serious
consequences for failure to maintain regular payments during the
period of incarceration.
Our interest in looking at these issues is focused exclusively
on the noncustodial parent who is poor. Many noncustodial parents
could afford to pay child support, but choose not to. Laws that
can have devastating consequences for parents and families when
noncustodial parents cannot afford to pay are justified and rational
when applied to parents with the means to pay. But the harshest
of enforcement tools, particularly that of incarceration, have a
disproportionate impact on low-income noncustodial parents because
these are the parents who cannot avoid jail either through the payment
of child support arrearages or by retaining a lawyer to modify their
child support obligation so that it reflects what they can afford
to pay.
To obtain a copy of the complete report, please visit the CFFPP
web site.
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Child Support and Father-Child Contact in Fragile Families,
Lenna Nepomnyaschy, Working Paper # 04-12-FF, Center for Research
on Child Wellbeing, July 2004.
CRCW Abstract:
This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing
Study, a longitudinal survey of unwed parents in 20 large U.S. cities,
to examine the relationship between child support payments and father-child
contact approximately one year after a nonmarital birth. Because
of the simultaneity between fathers' payments and fathers' contact
with their nonresident children, the direction of causation between
these two behaviors cannot be observed directly. Therefore, reduced
form models are estimated using newly constructed measures of the
strength of city and state level child support enforcement regimes.
Results suggest (albeit weakly) that living in states and cities
with stronger child support enforcement regimes leads to lower levels
of father-child contact.
To obtain a copy of the complete report, visit the CRCW
web site.
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Side-by-Side Comparison of Key Child Support Provisions in Welfare
Reauthorization Bills Passed by the Senate Finance Committee and the
House of Representatives, Vicki Turetsky, Center for Law and Social
Policy, July 29, 2004.
This document provides an overview, in table format, of the key child
support provisions of The Senate Finance Committee version of H.R. 4,
called the "Personal Responsibility and Individual Development
for Everyone (PRIDE) Act of 2003,"and the House-passed version
of H.R. 4, called the "Personal Responsibility and Family Promotion
Act of 2003."
To obtain a copy of the chart, visit the CLASP
web site.
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Employment Rates for Single Mothers Fell Substantially During Recent Period of Labor Market Weakness, Arloc Sherman, Shawn Fremstad and
Sharon Parrott, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 2004.
Report excerpt:
It is widely known that the proportion of single mothers who were employed
increased substantially in the mid- and late 1990s. It is less
well known, however, that during the last few years of labor market
weakness, the proportion of single mothers who are employed has fallen.
The employment rate among single mothers fell from 73.0 percent in 2000
to 69.8 percent in 2003 — a larger decline than among other parents
or the population overall.
Despite this recent decline, the employment rate among single mothers
remains considerably higher than it was in the mid-1990s. Between
1995 and 2000, single mothers’ employment rates increased for several
reasons, including a booming economy, expanded assistance for working
families, and a variety of welfare-to-work policies. About one-fourth
of these employment gains were lost between 2000 and 2003.
The employment losses have not triggered a nationwide increase in the
number of families receiving TANF cash assistance, raising questions
about whether the safety net has become less responsive to the needs
of parents who lose their jobs. In fact, recent data show that
among families poor enough to qualify for TANF cash assistance —
families typically well below the poverty line — the proportion
who actually receives TANF has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s
and continued to fall in the recession year of 2001.
To obtain a copy of the complete report, visit the CBPP
web site.
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Welfare Series: Child Care Promises Fall Through, Jennifer Friedlin,
Women's eNews, August 13, 2004.
Article excerpt:
Elizabeth Mayes is barely getting by,working 20 hours a week for $5.20
an hour at a local Burger King.
Mayes, 29 and a welfare recipient, says she would like to pick up more
hours, but she is competing with a number of workers for the evening
shifts, the only shifts she can work due to a shortage of child care
for welfare recipients in her hometown of Corinth, Miss. "I don't
have child care right now because have to wait to get my children's
birth certificates and then they said they would put me on a waiting
list," said Mayes, a mother of two sons, ages 5 and 4. "I
can only work nights right now, when I can leave my kids with my brother,
my mom or whoever."
Mayes is not alone. The Children's Defense Fund reports that at least
550,000 children who qualified for federally subsidized child care were
on waiting lists for child care and only 1 out of 7 children are receiving
the subsidized child care they are eligible for under federal guidelines.
To obtain a copy of the complete story, visit the Women's
eNews web site.
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