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David Murphey and P. Mae Cooper provide a report on the impacts of not only parents but our children and our communities (October, 2015). Since 1996, we have either provided direct services to the incarcerated parents, mentoring programs for the reentry, advocated to improve practices of services providers, established relationships to include FFCA Affiliates whose primary focus is service to those inside/outside prison walls. We have wrestled with how to do balance effective criminal justice system and stop the strategic fragmentation of families and destiny of millions of children through failed social policy and practices.   Parents Behind Bars What Happens to Their Children? released by Child Trends, Inc. provides new insights and existing realities to help others reduce the hovering of generational impacts of poverty and incarceration for millions of in-risk individuals in America. Five million U.S. children have had a parent incarcerated. Today, Child Trends released a report, Parents Behind Bars: What Happens to Their Children?, which reveals who these children are and what challenges they face. The report is the result of a study using data from the 2011-12 National Survey of Children’s Health. Read more here  

Increased attention is being given to the practice of engaging fathers in early childhood home visiting programs. What strategies do home visiting programs use to engage fathers, what challenges do they face, and what are the potential benefits of participating? What strategies do home visiting programs use to engage fathers, what challenges do they face, and what are the potential benefits of participating?

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By Anna Solmeyer, Social Science Research Analyst, Office of Planning Research and Evaluation, and Amanda Clincy, Social Science Research Analyst, Business Strategies Consultants

Categories:

Serving Young Fathers in Home Visiting Programs

What are the experiences of early childhood home visiting programs attempting to engage young fathers? Learn about young fathers' motivations for participating, the unique challenges that young fathers present, and the strategies that staff use to serve this population. 

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Maeve E. Gearing
December 21, 2015

“I have a couple where the father is 15 years old and comes on a skateboard to the home visit.”

About 9 percent (900,000) of American men become fathers before their twentieth birthday. Many of these young fathers grew up in disadvantaged homes, often without fathers in their own lives. And the challenges to becoming a dad at such a young age are many.

Teen fathers have less education and lower earnings than men who delay childbearing. Some young dads, particularly low-income dads, respond to these challenges by withdrawing from their new families. But fathers are crucial to the wellbeing of their children. Research has shown that children with engaged fathers have better cognitive development, exhibit fewer behavioral problems, and do better in school. In other words, having an involved dad helps put children on the right track. How can we get and keep teen dads engaged?

 Loyalty Night Opening Presidential Reception

Tuesday, February 16, 2016 

5:00p.m. to 7:30p.m.

2016 Rise up Families! National Families & Fathers 17th Annual Conference 

SHERATON GATEWAY HOTEL LOS ANGELES

6101 W CENTURY BLVD,

LOS ANGELES, CA 90045

Parenting in America

Outlook, worries, aspirations are strongly linked to financial situation

The link between family structure and financial circumstances

Marriage and family structure influence the economic and social well-being of children. As Sara McLanahan and Isabel Sawhill note in the most recent issue of Princeton and Brookings’ Future of Children, “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.” Recent research also suggests marriage and family structure matter not just for individual children, but also for the economic and social well-being of entire communities. When it comes to economic mobility, for instance, we know from the work of Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren that “[low]-income children are most likely to succeed in counties” that have “a larger share of two-parent families.”

 Read Full Policy Brief Here

The Fatherhood Research & Practice Network (FRPN) is seeking proposals from teams of researchers and fatherhood programs to evaluate fatherhood services. The FRPN is a five-year national project that funds the evaluation of fatherhood programs working with low-income populations and offers a wealth of training and technical assistance to improve fatherhood practice and evaluation research. Evaluation studies help strengthen fatherhood programs and boost their potential for future funding.

This grant funding opportunity is designed for:

• Evaluations of fatherhood services designed to promote economic stability, effective parenting or coparenting with fathers and/or improve effective practice.
• Studies of innovative approaches to recruit, engage and retain fathers for services or fathers and mothers for coparenting services.
• Studies that focus on low-income, never-married and nonresident fathers.
• Studies that use rigorous evaluation designs (randomized controlled trials or strong quasi-experimental), replication studies or exploratory studies that systematically examine innovative approaches.

Eligible applicants include:

Read this report on the changes in family formation around the world… here

The World Family Map report monitors the global health of families by tracking 16 indicators in 49 countries, representing all regions of the world. This year’s report includes an essay examining how parents divide labor-force participation, housework, and child care.

IN MEMORIÂ

Charlene Lewis-Meeks

April 25, 1954 – September 18, 2015

Worthy of Double Honor as a Leader & Champion | Charlene Lewis-Meeks

Model Integration and Capacity Building Initiative: A Process for Assimilating Responsible Fatherhood within Children, Youth, and/or Family Systems of Care

By

Dr. Rufus Sylvester Lynch, ACSW, Chair, The Strong Families Commission Incorporated & Senior Advisor to Fathers & Families Coalition of America -  National Chair, Affiliate Development, Philadelphia, PA

  The Integration of Responsible Fatherhood within Foster Care Service Delivery and Other Children and Youth Servicing Systems” is a research, policy change, and practice enhancement project, designed to be a multi-faceted agency initiative, that utilizes evidence based learning, reciprocal knowledge building and exchange, advocacy, collaboration, systems integration, agency self-assessment and evaluation, model development, responsible fatherhood training and curriculum design, technical assistance in the form of individual agency consultation for capacity building, as well as agency and system policy and practice change. The principal objective of the project is to strengthen the capacity of a select group of children, youth, and family service organizations to increase and sustain their involvement of Fathers in the lives of their children, in order to prevent and/or reduce their long term system involvement, through quality Father Engagement philosophies, policies, procedures, and protocols that improve child well-being and permanency case planning, where needed. The blueprint for the project has a total of ten goals, with an equal number of anticipated outcomes associated with those goals, evaluative strategies that accompany the goals, and performance measures to judge the success of the goals. The primary and most immediate goal is to champion the conversation and build an awareness of the value of Responsible Fatherhood within foster care service delivery and other children and youth servicing systems, through the initiation of the much needed dialog, by and among children, youth, and family focused agencies, regarding the value of safe father involvement to enhance the well-being of children in cross-systems of care. The research approach utilized is participatory action research. A Results Based Accountability Framework will be utilized to measure the overall success of the Project. To document organizational effectiveness and capacity growth made by individual agencies the DAPIM (Define, Assess, Plan, Implement, and Monitor) Framework will be utilized. Learn more how to implement a new model of expanding the capacity of your organization contact Dr. Rufus Lynch The Strong Families Commission Incorporated 215-879-1745  E-Mail Address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Website Address: http://www.thestrongfamiliescommission.com/

Deployed Dads: Strengthening Military and Veteran Fathers, Families and Communities. The timely and relevant article serves as a starting point for assisting military and veteran families in accessing available resources to overcome multiple barriers to successful reintegration. Read More

  Website Link: https://peerta.acf.hhs.gov/content/evaluation-marriage-and-family-strengthening-grants-incarcerated-and-reentering-fathers-and  

Let's Alleviate Human Suffering  | A Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream

Fathers & Families Coalition of America has long championed to alleviate conditions that reduce opportunities for children, parents, families and building healthy communities. Dr. Ronald B. Mincy, Sr., introduces an opportunity for a bipartisan plan to press the reduction of poverty. Before  you read on consider the following: The average age of a homeless person is 9 years old in America. More than 3.5 million people are homeless every night, and 1.35 million are children. More than 30 percent of homeless families have an open case for child abuse or neglect. Of the 31.1 million people living in poverty, more than 12 million are children. Now is a time for coming together and reduce the devastation of poverty in America

"Twenty five years, I have been convinced that we will never reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America unless we squarely addressed the adverse employment and earning patterns among less educated men. These patterns are associated with high rates of incarceration, low rates of marriage, and high rates of non-marital births. My work on reducing poverty has focused on reversing these trends ever since. Until my most recent book, Failing our Fathers, I was, unapologetically, focused on reducing poverty and increasing economic well-being among African Americans for whom these trends were and remain the most disappointing. Now however, these negative trends have become widespread across the general population. Increasing rates of incarceration, reduced marriage rates, and increasing numbers of non-marital births are becoming commonplace among less educated young Whites as well.  Although these trends and consequences still are most severe among African Americans, some of our nations’ most prominent poverty scholars, policy researchers, and policy makers, now agree: reducing poverty and increasing opportunity in America requires that we address the needs of young, less educated men.

The result of a bipartisan working group convened by American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution work will be released at a press conference at the National Press Club on December 3rd (go here for detailed information). The report highlights the key features of poverty and diminished economic opportunity in America today.

Through thoughtful  leadership, innovative policies, support for emerging programs and proven models to support children, mothers, fathers, individuals and communities, America can be a better nation for all residents. Children are the future of any community or nation. The investment into our future should examine and change the negative conditions of millions of children who will be our future as a nation. This is a very detailed report  with twelve (12) concrete recommendations that needs champions to review the report and share with stakeholders inturn present to leaders (public, private and elected) to make a difference in the lives of millions. In brief, AEI/Brookings make twelve recommendations (each explained more fully in the report): To strengthen families in ways that will prepare children for success in education and work:

1. Promote a new cultural norm surrounding parenthood and marriage.
2. Promote delayed, responsible childbearing.
3. Increase access to effective parenting education.
4. Help young, less-educated men and women prosper in work and family.

To improve the quantity and quality of work in ways that will better prepare young people—men as well as women—to assume the responsibilities of adult life and parenthood:

1. Improve skills to get well-paying jobs.
2. Make work pay more for the less educated.
3. Raise work levels among the hard-to-employ, including the poorly educated and those with criminal records.
4. Ensure that jobs are available.

To improve education in ways that will better help poor children avail themselves of opportunities for self-advancement:

1. Increase public investment in two underfunded stages of education: preschool and postsecondary.
2. Educate the whole child to promote social-emotional and character development as well as academic skills.
3. Modernize the organization and accountability of education.
4. Close resource gaps to reduce education gaps.

In their final chapter, they discuss the costs of this comprehensive proposals, and how the nation might pay for this comprehensive approach to reducing poverty and enhancing opportunity.   READ THE FULL 85 PAGE REPORT HERE  FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Caitlin Burke at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to inquire about the report or AEI event.    Members of the AEI/Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity: Lawrence Aber | Stuart Butler | Sheldon Danziger | Robert Doar | David T. Ellwood | Judith M. Gueron | Jonathan Haidt | Ron Haskins | Harry J. Holzer | Kay Hymowitz | Lawrence Mead | Ronald Mincy | Richard V. Reeves | Michael R. Strain | Jane Waldfogel