The Fatherhood Industry.

Welfare Reformers Set Their Sights on Wayward Dads

As the sun sets low on the horizon, a herd of male elephants appears in silhouette. Birds swarm around them, and drums beat in the background. A narrator intones: "When young bull elephants from a national park in South Africa were moved to different locations without the presence of an adult male, they began to wantonly kill other animals. When an adult male was relocated with them, the delinquent behavior stopped."

Segue to a basketball court, where a black man hugs a black youth. Narrator: "Without the influence of their dads, kids are more likely to get into trouble, too. Just a reminder how important it is for fathers to spend time with their children."

This commercial, which ran during the Late Show with David Letterman on September 7, is part of a national campaign produced by the Ad Council for the National Fatherhood Initiative.

Created in 1994 to "counter the growing problem of fatherlessness by stimulating a broad-based social movement to restore responsible fatherhood as a national priority," the National Fatherhood Initiative believes that "fathers make unique and irreplaceable contributions to the lives of their children."

In its first year, the group convened a National Summit on Fatherhood in Dallas. The purpose, according to the group's literature, was to gather the nation's "civic, business, and philanthropic leaders" together to "build a national consensus on the need to quickly reduce father absence." The National Fatherhood Initiative provides technical assistance to the Governors' Task Force on Fatherhood Promotion, whose goal is to help "rebuild the institution of fatherhood" in the twenty-first century. And the group works with the bipartisan Congressional Task Force on Fatherhood Promotion, formed in 1997 to promote leadership in combating "fatherlessness."

Wade Horn is president of the National Fatherhood Initiative and a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. He also sits on the board of Marriage Savers, a Maryland-based group pushing "community marriage covenants" that are designed to make divorces more difficult to obtain.

A former U.S. Commissioner for Children, Youth, and Families, Horn urges state officials to seize the opportunities created by welfare reform to remedy what he and many cultural conservatives call the crisis of the broken family. In a 1997 report he wrote with Andrew Bush, director of the Hudson Institute's Welfare Policy Center, Horn recommended that states discriminate against single-parent families by establishing "explicit, preferential treatment for marriage in the distribution of discretionary benefits such as public housing and Head Start slots."

Fatherhood is hot right now. Its promoters include not only ideological groups like the National Fatherhood Initiative but also liberal philanthropies like the Ford Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, as well as the government at the state and federal levels. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, all fifty states have some kind of "responsible fatherhood" program in place, ranging from public information campaigns to parenting classes for young fathers to job training for incarcerated dads.

Call it Welfare Reform, Part Two. While single moms were the focus a few years ago, now wayward dads are getting a lot of the attention.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which ended the entitlement to welfare, spurred on these fatherhood programs by deeming marriage the "foundation of a successful society." The objectives of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, codified Congress's stance on the supremacy of traditional, nuclear families. The stated goals of the program include: "End the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage"; and "Encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families."

The Responsible Fatherhood Act of 1999, sponsored by Senators Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, and Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, goes one step further. The bill calls for more than $150 million in federal funding for media campaigns and parenting projects to "allow states to implement programs that promote stable and married families and support responsible fatherhood." The goal, according to Domenici, is to reverse the "growing trend toward absentee fathers [that] has taken a terrible toll not only on our children but our nation as a whole."

Where welfare reform's social engineers once saw family caps on benefits as a way to deter single moms from having more children, they now see government-funded responsible fatherhood programs as the key to bringing absent dads back into the family fold. They also claim that having the father return as a breadwinner--either paying child support or reuniting with the mother--will relieve the government of the responsibility for taking care of that family.

As Representative Benjamin Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, told his colleagues when introducing a bill to authorize another $1 million in welfare-to-work grants, the clock is ticking: "By the end of 1999," he said, "recipients and their children will have reached welfare time limits in nineteen states."

The problem is, bringing fathers back into the fold will not take the place of welfare funds, since many of these fathers don't have good paying jobs. Nor is the preference for the mother-father model of parenting at all costs necessarily prudent social policy. And by spending money on nonprofit groups and bureaucracies that are trying to engineer family situations, states and the federal government are diverting money from the poor who really need it.

As states around the country scramble to put fatherhood programs in place, Wisconsin's Children First is being held up as a national model.

The program--which debuted as a two-county pilot program in 1990 and currently operates in more than half of Wisconsin's seventy-two counties--is supposed to help dads who don't live at home find jobs so that they can pay their child support. The choice for many delinquent dads is either Children First or jail.

Scott Hendrickson, the father of an eleven-year-old daughter, is well acquainted with both options. Today, he's back in jail for not paying child support and court-ordered, once again, into Children First.

He interviewed at a bakery and was offered a job. But, in a Catch-22, he doesn't have the money he needs to win his release from jail.

"They want me to go to get a job so that I can pay my child support," says Hendrickson. "Now, I got the job but how am I going to get the $126 to get out of jail? It's frustrating. I'm trying to work with the program but it seems I'm not getting anywhere."

Hendrickson says he hasn't seen his daughter for six years, and he blames his ex-wife for moving hundreds of miles away. Still, as part of his Children First requirements, he must attend weekly parenting sessions designed to "build healthy relationships" between kids and their parents. Many of the participants express regret that they don't see their children more, but they're also bitter about owing thousands of dollars in back child support and frustrated by a system that doesn't take into account their own hard times.

Hendrickson, for instance, says he was current with child support when he was making $9.50 an hour as an industrial painter. But he hurt his arm, lost his job, and started falling behind in payments.

"I really don't think the system is working," says Hendrickson, who was let out of jail to attend a fatherhood class at the Children First offices in downtown Racine.

But for men like Tom and Billy, who asked that their real names not be used, the program has provided a needed boost.

Tom lost a good job in Illinois at Motorola when he hurt his back and had to go on disability. When he subsequently got a divorce and moved to Madison, he continued to pay child support directly to his ex-wife, but not through the formal system. That's a no-no in Wisconsin, which does not count such payments. So Tom, between jobs, found himself several thousands of dollars in arrears. He credits the skills classes at Children First with helping him land a job doing computer support work.

Billy, a professional indoor football player, says the only real work he's ever known has been on the gridiron. And with five children, he's often fallen behind in child support payments. Children First, he says, helped him figure out a way to continue playing football and supplement his income with a second job to satisfy the folks at child support enforcement.

But Tom and Billy may be the exceptions.

Jean Rogers, administrator of the Wisconsin Division of Economic Support, cites a 1995 report that she says shows Children First raised the income of participants. Actually, the evaluation shows that the program did not increase the wage rate of participants and that just under 7 percent of the men were actually placid in a job--most received Children First services like "assessment and orientation" and "job readiness and motivation."

The results were similarly discouraging when the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation released its final report last September on the Parents' Fair Share Demonstration. This program, which started as a federal pilot in 1992, was supposed to test a new approach. In exchange for cooperating with the child support system, fathers received such services as training and employment counseling, peer support, and parenting classes. The evaluation showed that while child support payments among participants went up a modest amount, there was "no corresponding increase in fathers' employment and earnings."

At Children First, attests case worker Bobby Wells, the vast majority of participants get placed in temporary jobs. "They hold them for two to three weeks, their self-esteem gets built up, and then all of a sudden they get laid off," he says. "There are only so many blows they can take until it has an effect on them."

The Institute for Responsible Fatherhood and Family Revitalization, a program with centers in six cities including Milwaukee, San Diego, and Yonkers, New York, landed a $4.5 million welfare-to-work grant in 1998 even though its focus is not on employment. At the time, the Institute owed the Internal Revenue Service $57,000 in unpaid employee withholding taxes and nearly $50,000 to United Way Services of Cleveland, as the Plain-Dealer reported last November.

The goal of the Institute's programs, run by married couples who live in inner-city neighborhoods, is to reconnect unmarried men with the mothers of their children. Founder Charles Ballard says that about 10 percent of program participants end up getting married. Ballard, a pioneer in the responsible fatherhood movement, is an outright skeptic of job training programs. The way he sees it, the key to getting financial support from dads is to strengthen their emotional ties to their kids.

"You will get your child support," said Ballard at a fatherhood conference in June 1998 sponsored by' the Wisconsin Department of Work Force Development. "They'll do it voluntarily because they love their kids."

Child support, as a formal enforcement mechanism of government, was created in the 1970s because the feds were getting tired of rising welfare costs--a result of an increase in divorce and out-of-wedlock births. Over the years, stricter enforcement measures have been passed to make fathers provide more economic support for their kids.

But when it comes to poor families, stricter enforcement has not necessarily translated into more household income. Under TANF, the state is allowed to keep all of the child support collected on behalf of families on assistance. Jacquelyn Boggess, an attorney with the Center on Fathers, Families, and Public Policy, with offices in Chicago and Madison, calls this a "built-in contradiction and a major disincentive to dads who want to give money directly to moms. Even if a guy has a great job--$300 a week--the mother will never see a penny of it. They will go underground. It's what any rational family would do."

To their credit, several states, including Wisconsin, have applied for federal waivers to allow recipients to collect most or all of their child support awards. And Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, has introduced a bill that would allow states to do this without a waiver.

While such efforts have the child's interest in mind, child support payments can nevertheless be a daunting proposition for poor dads, and child support debt a crippling burden. Child support arrears continue to accrue--with 18 percent interest-even for fathers who are unemployed, disabled, or incarcerated.

The child support system has historically failed to distinguish between the "deadbeat dad" and the "dead-broke" dad, says Jerry Hamilton, the manager of Children UpFront, a program of Goodwill Industries, which used to work with Racine's Children First program. "It is a myth that low-income fathers don't want to comply with child support. Most of these parents are very much involved in the lives of their children, but once [government] starts to be involved, it strains the relationship."

Are absent dads getting off easy when it comes to paying the bills? Using Census data from 1990, Elaine Sorenson of the Urban Institute determined that such fathers paid, on average, only 7 percent of their income in child support. More than half paid no support at all, and among those who did, more than half paid less than 15 percent of their income on it. In all, Sorenson found that dads could pay as much as $34 billion more in child support. But only about $7 billion, or about 20 percent of the additional support collected, would go to poor moms and their children.

And that's only part of the story. The Urban Institute report also found that in 1990, nearly a third of these dads would have qualified for food stamps after paying child support. Their average wage--more than half worked at least part-time--was $7.07.

The numbers just don't add up: Stricter child support enforcement would not provide the magic cushion for families forced off the welfare rolls. And it would impoverish many men.

Like workfare, the crackdown on "deadbeat dads" does not deal with the underlying issue of poverty. In fact, it may exacerbate the problem.

"For both men and women, the one thing that more than any other has been shown to raise people out of poverty and off welfare is a college degree," says Linda Gordon, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and author of Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Free Press, 1994). "Without a college degree, the jobs these people are being moved into are just not going to pay a living wage."

But one of the first things to go under welfare reform was access to post-secondary education. "Community colleges, universities, and adult education programs have seen dramatic declines in enrollment among welfare recipients," notes an April 1998 report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, based in Washington, D.C.

Says Gordon: "The TANF program is being very shortsighted in not supporting welfare recipients to get a college education. And the same thing is true for [programs aimed at] men."

Wade Horn and others in the responsible fatherhood movement argue that a panoply of social ills--juvenile delinquency, child poverty, teenage pregnancy, Substance abuse, etc.--can be traced to the absence of fathers in the lives of their children. David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., goes so far as to say that fatherlessness is the "engine that drives our most pressing social problems."

But an article in the June issue of American Psychologist casts these claims in doubt. In "Reconstructing the Essential Father," co-authors Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach conclude that "neither a mother nor a father is essential" to the well-being of children. What does matter, they say, is that children have a warm, loving, and consistent relationship with at least one adult. The authors are professors of psychology at Yeshiva University in New York. Silverstein says their article was the "first comprehensive review of the empirical literature on fathers."

It quickly drew fire from Rush Limbaugh and the fatherhood crowd. Because of the article, Horn, a psychologist by training, threatened to resign from the American Psychological Association, which sponsors American Psychologist. After the piece appeared, he promptly fired off a seething letter to media outlets around the country. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist with The Boston Globe, happily took the bait, calling Silverstein and Auerbach's arguments "shallow," their conclusions "disproved by a mass of scientific evidence," and their political bias "blatant."

It's not surprising that Horn would feel threatened by the study. If true, it undermines the central argument driving much of the work around responsible fatherhood: that a traditional nuclear family is the only viable environment for raising kids because fathers are biologically wired, as his group puts it, to make "unique and irreplaceable" contributions to their children's lives.

Silverstein believes the article "struck a nerve" because it was the first time anyone had "publicly challenged the science" behind the claims of the fatherhood movement. She says her study shows that the absence of a father in a home "does not suggest that a two-parent, heterosexual marriage is necessarily the best context for positive developmental outcomes for children."

The article's conclusion received unwitting support from a study released in August by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, which is headed by Joseph A. Califano Jr. This study found that "a child living in a two-parent family, whose relationship with the father is fair or poor, is 68 percent likelier to smoke, drink, and use drugs than teens living in an average two-parent household." A child living in a household headed by a single mom, on the other hand, was' only 30 percent likelier to engage in such behaviors.

"Family structure," the report's authors assert, "is not a strong predictor of substance abuse."

And yet the push for traditional nuclear families remains strong, even if it means bringing abusive dads back where they can do more harm.

"There are some situations when women want to be rid of men, and it is in the children's interests, too," says Gordon. "I'm talking about guys who range from unreliable to worse."

In the TANF program, women are under tremendous pressure to identify the father of their children because otherwise they can be docked up to `25 percent of their welfare checks. "She's going to get him into this vicious cycle that could cause conflict," says Boggess of the Center on Fathers, Families, and Public Policy.

Jodi Driver of Wisconsin knows what that pressure feels like. Driver was pregnant with her second child when her then-boyfriend beat her so badly she ended up having to seek medical care. This wasn't the first time her boyfriend had abused her, but she was determined it would be the last. She ended the relationship and obtained a restraining order against him. At the hospital, she wrote "none" for father on the birth certificate, but her caseworkers leaned on her to establish paternity. She tried to get out of it by filing a "good-cause exemption," based on the father's history of abuse, but she was turned down. "The investigators determined that he was a severe threat to me and my child but that didn't mean he had the right to skip out of paying child support for his children," says Driver. Fortunately, Driver says her ex has made no subsequent efforts to have contact with her or his daughter.

The threat of violence does not appear to discourage most women from going after child support. Jessica Pearson, director of the Center for Policy Research, which conducted a recent study in Colorado, concluded: "Although domestic violence is a common problem for many women who apply for or receive child support, they don't want to apply for a waiver."

In 1997, researchers from the center interviewed 305 TANF recipients. Seventy-five percent indicated that they had been abused by former partners, and 24 percent reported abuse by both a former and a current partner; 75 percent of the women reported that their abusers were the fathers of one or more of their children. Yet fewer than 7 percent of the victims expressed interest in applying for a good-cause exemption from cooperating with child support enforcement. Why? Ninety-three percent agreed with the statement, "I want child support."

The study, however, does not tell us whether these women experienced more conflict or abuse as a result of filing for child support.

Attempts to artificially foster family unity may well produce more conflicts for those who are already under tremendous emotional and financial stress.

"We can't decide whether or not a father is going to be an integral part of a family," says Boggess. "Let them make that decision. Help families economically but don't tell them how to live their lives."

Meanwhile, the National Fatherhood Initiative's media blitz continues, moving from the wilds of South Africa to the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

"The male emperor penguin of Antarctica balances his unborn offspring on his feet for weeks in sub-zero temperatures," says the narrator of another TV spot. "Then, after it hatches, he provides shelter for the chick in a fold of skin and feathers. If the father is unwilling or unable to do this, the chick will not survive."

Cut to a homespun front porch, where a white dad reads to his two kids. Narrator: "Just a reminder how important it is for fathers to spend time with their children."

Judith Davidoff is an editor at Isthmus, a weekly newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.