A Shared Sentence: The Devastating Toll of Parental Incarceration on Kids, Families and Communities

More than 5 million U.S. children have had a parent in jail or prison at some point in their lives. The incarceration of a parent can have as much impact on a child's well-being as abuse or domestic violence. But while states spend heavily on corrections, few resources exist to support those left behind. A Shared Sentence offers commonsense proposals to address the increased poverty and stress that children of incarcerated parents experience

Predictors of Social and Emotional Involvement of Non?Residential Fathers

Public policy initiatives to promote nonresidential father involvement tend to focus on economic involvement over social and emotional involvement. The 2006 reauthorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) included funding for ‘responsible fatherhood’ programming and the recently introduced Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act of 2009 (RFHFA) would increase this funding. Using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing dataset, this paper hypothesized that paternal, maternal, child and relational factors would predict non-residential father social and emotional environment by building on a model by Coley and Hernandez (2006). Instead, only paternal and relational factors were significant. Findings suggest a need for more policy initiatives that address fathers involved in the criminal justice system, increasing the early involvement of fathers in their infants’ lives and the need for increased attention toward domestic violence. If passed, RFHFA would address each of these factors.marriage, unwed mothers, births, father involvement, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act

FRAGILE FAMILIES AND WELFARE REFORM

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is designed to shift more of the responsibility for poor children from government to parents. To accomplish this goal, the new law requires welfare clients to work and limits the total number of years they can receive assistance. In addition, the new legislation requires unwed fathers to establish paternity and strengthens child support enforcement among nonresident fathers. Although many people believe that poor children would be better off if their mothers worked and their fathers were more involved in their upbringing, the scientific evidence for these assumptions is weak. We know very little about the ability of poor parents to support their children, and we know even less about their ability to cooperate with one another.

Trends in Child Poverty by Race/Ethnicity: New Evidence Using an Anchored Historical Supplemental Poverty Measure

Official poverty statistics have been criticized, however, for being based on an outdated measure of poverty (Blank, 2008; Citro and Michael, 1995). First put into use in the 1960s, the official poverty measure’s (OPM) concept of needs has been updated for inflation but still reflects the living standards, family budgets, and family structures of that time. Moreover, when tallying family resources, the OPM misses key government programs such as Food Stamps and tax credits that have expanded since the 1960s. For these reasons, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented an improved “supplemental poverty measure” (SPM) in 2011 (Short 2011) for calendar years 2009 and 2010. This SPM is now released annually alongside the OPM (see Short 2015 for the latest data as of this writing), but the Census Bureau has no plans to produce the measure historically. However, historical data on levels and trends in poverty are essential for better understanding the progress the country has made since Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous declaration of the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Understanding what has been successful in the past is important for assessing what might be successful in the future for amelioration of economic disadvantage. What’s more, success and its sources may vary by race/ethnicity. We use a historical version of the SPM to provide the first estimates of racial/ethnic differences in child poverty for the period 1970 to the present using this improved measure. We begin our analysis in 1970 because that is the first year we can reliably distinguish non-Hispanic whites, African-Americans, and Latinos (unfortunately, data limitations prevent us from examining other groups over the long term). We detail below our data and methods, then describe our main results, and conclude briefly. Data and Methods We use data from multiple years of the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement (also known as the March CPS) combined with data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) to produce SPM estimates for the period 1970 to 2014. We use a methodology similar to that used by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in producing their SPM estimates, but with adjustments for differences in available data over time. Our methodology differs from the SPM in only one respect. Instead of using a poverty threshold that is re-calculated over time, we use today’s threshold and carry it back historically by adjusting it for inflation using the CPI-U-RS. Because this alternative measure is anchored with today’s SPM threshold, we refer to it as an anchored supplemental poverty measure, or anchored SPM for short. An advantage of an anchored SPM is that poverty trends resulting from such a measure can be explained only by changes in income and net transfer payments (cash or in kind). Trends in poverty based on a relative measure (e.g. SPM poverty), on the other hand, could be due to over time changes in thresholds. Thus, an anchored SPM arguably provides a cleaner measure of how changes in income and net transfer payments have affected poverty historically (Wimer et al., 2013).[1] [1] All analyses in this paper are also available using quasi-relative poverty thresholds; results are available upon request

Child support reform: some analysis of the 1999 white paper

This paper uses a sample of lone mothers (and former lone mothers who are now repartnered) drawn from the 1997 Family Resources Survey to analyse the potential effects of reforming the UK system of Child Support. The main deficiency of the data is that non-resident fathers cannot be matched to the mothers in the data and this is overcome by exploiting information from another dataset which gives the joint distribution of the characteristics of separated parents. The effects of reforming the Child Support system is simulated for the amount of maintenance liabilities, the amount paid and the net incomes of households containing mothers with care and households containing non-resident fathers. The likely effects of the reform are simulated at various levels of compliance. The analysis highlights the need for further research into the incentive effects of Child Support on individual behaviour

Interaction effects of a child tax credit, national health insurance, and assured child support

If the government offered a refundable tax credit for children, national health insurance, and an assured child support benefit to all families with children - poor families as well as nonpoor families - what would happen to poverty, welfare dependency, and other related issues? The authors simulate the effects of each program operating on its own and of all three acting in concert. They find that the impacts of the programs interacting with one another would be much larger than the sum of the impacts produced by each program alone. With the three programs in place, the poverty rate would fall by 43 percent, the AFDC caseload would shrink by 22 percent, and the annual incomes of poor families would rise by $2500. In addition, AFDC recipients would work more hours. Data come from the 1987 Survey of Income and Program Participation.

Demographic change, children's families and child support policy in the United States

This paper describes recent demographic trends affecting families in the United States and considers how these trends may alter the definition of "family." The paper focuses on trends that affect minor children's family experience. Demographic changes have increased the percentage of children for whom family membership and household membership do not coincide. As a result, rights to children and adults' responsibilities for children are less clearly defined now than in the past. This greater ambiguity affects child well-being because children's access to resources, both time and attention as well as material goods, depends on their ties to adults. U.S. family policies, such as the recent child support reforms, work against demographic trends by emphasizing biological over social ties and reinforcing the importance of biological parents' responsibilities to children.

KIDS COUNT Indicator Brief: Increasing the Percentage of Children Living in Two-Parent Families

Examines trends, by race/ethnicity, in the percentage of children with the economic and other benefits of two-parent families. Offers strategies to raise the percentage, such as basing policies on research linking economic security and family stability

Fathers in Fragile Families

Nonmarital childbearing has increased dramatically in the U.S. since the early 1960s, rising from 6% of all births in 1960 to fully 40% in 2007 (Hamilton, Martin, & Ventura, 2009; Ventura & Bachrach, 2000). Whereas similar trends have occurred in many developed nations, the U.S. stands out in the extent to which such births are associated with socioeconomic disadvantage and relationship instability, giving rise to a new term ‘fragile families.’ The increase in fragile families reflects changes not only in the context of births but also in the fundamental nature and patterns of childrearing, particularly with respect to fathers’ roles and involvement with children.Fragile families, childbearing, nonmarital childbearing, fartherhood, fathers

The Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study: Questions, Design, and a Few Preliminary Results

Nonmarital childbearing is important because it is increasing and because there is concern (and some evidence) that it is damaging to children and perhaps parents as well. We refer to the unions of unwed parents as fragile families because they are similar to traditional families in many respects, but more vulnerable. Most people believe that children in fragile families would be better off if their parents lived together and their fathers were more involved in their upbringing. Indeed, public policy is now attempting to enlarge the role of unwed fathers both by cutting public cash support for single mothers and by strengthening paternity establishment and child support enforcement. Yet the scientific basis for these policies is weak. We know very little about the men who father children outside marria ge, and we know even less about the nature of their relationships with their children and their children’s mothers. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFS) is designed to remedy this situation by following a new birth cohort of approximately 4,700 children, including 3,600 children born to unmarried parents. The new data will be representative of nonmarital births in each of 20 cities and in U.S. cities with populations over 200,000. Both mothers and fathers will be followed for at least 4 years, and inhome assessments of children’s heath and development will be carried out when the child is 4 years old. The survey is designed to address the following questions: (1) What are the conditions and capabilities of new unwed parents, especially fathers? (2) What is the nature of the relationships in fragile families? (3) What factors push new unwed parents together and what factors pull them apart? In particular, how do labor markets, welfare, and child support public policies affect family formation? (4) How do children fare in fragile families and how is their well-being affected by parental capacities and relationships, and by public policies? The paper discusses what we know about each of these questions and how the FFS addresses each of them. It also presents preliminary findings based on data from Austin, Texas, and Oakland, California.