According to the Pew
Research Center, four in ten babies were born in 2008 to unwed women. Approximately
2.6 million households were led by single fathers in 2011, a sizeable increase
when compared to fewer than 300,000 in 1960. Twenty-three percent of
single-household families were father-only families and 77 percent were mother-only
families.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which studied 27 industrialized countries found that 25.8 percent of children in the U.S. are raised by a single parent compared to 14.9 percent in other countries. Seventy-two percent of black children are raised in a single parent household.
The OECD reported public
spending on child welfare and education in the U.S. to be $160,000, higher than
the $149,000 expenditure in other countries, most spending occurring after the
crucial early childhood years. The study indicated that “the United States is
the only OECD country that does not have a national paid parental leave policy.”
It is important to point out that all socialist countries have such a policy that
is sometimes abused by parents who learn how to game the system.
According to the Census
Bureau, 32% of the 35 million families with children under the age of 18 were
run by one parent. www.census.gov/hhes/families/data/cps2013F.html
Because in 2013
twenty-five percent of children under 18 lived in households run by their
mothers, the federal, state, and local governments partnered with public and
private organizations to develop programs to help noncustodial fathers be
financially and personally responsible for their children, boosting involvement
in their children’s lives.
“Responsible fatherhood”
programs are very important because research shows that children raised in
single-parent families are “more likely to do poorly in school, have emotional
and behavioral problems, become teenage parents, and have poverty level
incomes.” www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL31025.pdf
Federal funding for “responsible
fatherhood” programs comes from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF),
TANF state Maintenance-of-Effort (MOE), Child Support Enforcement (CSE), and
Social Services Block Grant (Title XX).
Fifty million dollars per
year in competitive grants to states, territories, Indian tribes, public and
non-profit groups were included in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 for
responsible fatherhood initiatives (2006-2010)
P.L. 111-291 (December 8,
2010) appropriated $75 million for healthy marriage promotion and $75 million
for responsible fatherhood activities. Fatherhood programs promote the
importance of “emotional, psychological, and financial connections of fathers
to their children.” The fatherhood programs include “parenting education,
responsible decision-making, mediation services for both parents, conflict
resolution, coping with stress, problem solving skills, peer support, and job
training activities such as skills development, interviewing skills, job
search, job-retention skills, and job-advancement skills.”(Carmen
Solomon-Fears, Specialist in Social Policy, January 28, 2014)
Child Support Enforcement
(CSE) funds are used to promote access and visitation rights for fathers. Both
single mothers on welfare and the biological father are more likely to have
dropped out of school, have little work experience, and are likely unable to
find and/or keep a job.
Representative Nancy
Johnson said that these fathers are “dead broke,” not “dead beats” and the
federal government “should help these noncustodial fathers meet their financial
and emotional obligations to their children.” (House Ways and Means
Subcommittee on Human Resources, Hearing on Fatherhood Legislation, Statement
of Chairman Nancy Johnson, 106th Congress, 1st session, October
5, 1999, p. 4)
President George W. Bush’s
Executive Office wrote in a “Blueprint for New Beginnings – A Responsible
Budget for America’s Priorities” (February 28, 2001 in Chapter 12, p. 75), “While
fathers must fulfill their financial commitments, they must also fulfill their
emotional commitments. Dads play indispensable roles that cannot be measured in
dollars and cents: nurturer, mentor, disciplinarian, moral instructor, and
skills coach, among other roles.” http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2002-BLUEPRINT/pdf/BUDGET-2002-BLUEPRINT.pdf
To make matters worse,
some noncustodial fathers are incarcerated and, upon release, must re-enter the
lives of their children but do not have the skills to cope with such a
monumental undertaking, further negatively affecting the fragility of the
family that needs healthy relationship skills training.
Women’s groups such as the
National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Women’s Law Center expressed
concern that:
-
Single-mother
families might be under-valued by the
emphasis on the importance of the father.
-
Services for
fathers would take away from services for mothers.
-
Fathers’ rights
groups would get more leverage in child custody cases, child support, and
visitation arrangements.
Solomon-Fears asks the
following questions in a Congressional Research Service report:
1.
Is the federal
government promoting and supporting the father’s involvement in their children’s
lives regardless of the father’s relationship with the mother?
2.
What if the
father has children by more than one woman?
3.
What about
incarcerated parents or recently released from jail?
4.
Federal
government support for counseling, education, and supervised visitation for
abusive fathers who may or may not want to reconnect with their children? (RL31025,
p. 13)
The Child Support
Enforcement (CSE) system has improved its collection of child support payments during
1978-2011 from $1 billion to $27.3 billion, located more parents, discovered
paternities, and established child support orders.
Proponents of the CSE
program additionally approve of the “increased personal responsibility and
welfare cost-avoidance.”
Critics of the CSE program
enumerate the nanny state, “big brother” compliance venues such as withholding
licensure (professional, driver’s, recreational), passport revocation, seizure
of bank accounts, retirement funds, lottery winnings, and automatic withholding
from pay checks. The CSE program ”collects
only 20 percent of child support obligations for which it has responsibility
and only 57 percent of its caseload.”
CSE program is based
exclusively on financial support, critics say, alienating low-income fathers
from their children when they cannot meet their child support payments. Such a
narrow view of fatherhood, specialists say, devalues fathers and robs them of the
role as “nurturer, disciplinarian, mentor, and moral instructor.” On the other
hand, it is hard to be a disciplinarian or moral instructor to your child when
you lack the moral compass to begin with or are in jail.
Noncustodial fathers from
welfare supported families complain that the CSE program does not help their
children because child support payments are used for welfare reimbursements to
the federal government and the state. Mothers use the CSE program as a threat
to report fathers to the CSE authorities, to take them back to court, to have
more wages garnished, and to have them arrested.
The 1996 welfare reform
law stated that “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” “Marriage
is an essential institution of a successful society that promotes the interests
of children. However, some child welfare advocates argue that marriage is not
necessarily the best alternative for all women and their children,” especially
when taking into account an abusive father. (CRS report, “Fatherhood
Initiatives: Connecting Fathers to Their Children,” Carmen Solomon-Fears, p.
14)
Research found in 2011
that 72.11 percent of black births were to unmarried women and 29.1 percent of
white births were to unmarried women. Based on this demographic, the
researchers, Ronald B. Mincy and Chien-Chung Huang, from Bowling Green State
University, thought it “racially insensitive” to devote five times as much
money for marriage promotion as for responsible fatherhood promotion. Thus in
2011, P.L. 111-291 made the funding for responsible fatherhood grants equal to
marriage promotion grants.
The federal government is
trying to redress the disintegration of the American family, a problem it has
created through generous welfare programs that have rewarded out-of-wedlock
motherhood and replaced fathers. Many generations of welfare cases and a
perennial poor underclass have been created, with no work ethic, no desire to
succeed, no interest in education as a way out of poverty, and no personal
responsibility.
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