Statement of Jeffery M. Johnson, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer,
National Center for Strategic Nonprofit Planning and Community Leadership

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources
of the House Committee on Ways and Means

Hearing on Child Support and Fatherhood

June 28, 2001

Good Afternoon. I want to thank Chairman Herger and members of the Human Resources Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee for this opportunity to testify on your efforts to promote fatherhood. I am Dr. Jeffery Johnson, President and CEO of the National Center for Strategic Nonprofit Planning and Community Leadership (NPCL) and on behalf of the board and staff of NPCL, the 10 Partners for Fragile Families Demonstration Sites, the 6 Charles Stuart Mott, Fathers-At-Work Grantee Sites and over 3,000 fatherhood professionals that we have trained over the pass few years, partners from the faith-based community and an array of non-governmental organizations, I commend you and thank you for squarely addressing this long-neglected aspect of family social policy. If Congress is successful at passing legislation to support fatherhood programs, it will be a crucial step towards helping fathers assume emotional, legal and financial responsibility for their children. Legislation that seeks to strengthen the relationships between and among fathers and families covers a complex web of interrelated factors that can, on a practical level, make or break the brittle and weak family tie. The same bill also has implications for the success of greater child support collections as well as welfare to work initiatives.

My testimony is based on the work I have done over the past 20 years around fathers and families as well as my personal experience. For 12 years, I had the wonderful opportunity of being reared in a family with two loving parents. Unfortunately, my father died at the age of 39 leaving behind a widow and 10 children. Despite the positive example set by my mother, life was a struggle. She struggled to make ends meet and each of my brothers and sisters faced their own unique challenges that made it more difficult for a single parent. So, I know first hand the importance of fathers in families and I try to bring that knowledge to my work.

The mission of NPCL is to enhance the capacity of community-based organizations to address identified local needs, primarily through family and neighborhood empowerment. Simply put, NPCL works to help communities and families help themselves. And, as we know, strong families are critical to the health, economic, emotional and developmental well-being of children.

NPCL now runs or provides technical assistance on several projects aimed at strengthening the ties between fathers and families, including our ten-city demonstration project Partners for Fragile Families, the Fathers-At-Work demonstration project supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the HUD/Public and Indian Housing Responsible Fatherhood Initiative and the Strengthening Fragile Families Initiative, a research, policy and practice consortium supported by the Ford Foundation to encourage the development and implementation of policies aimed at fortifying the ties among poor, low-skilled, unmarried parents and their children. We call them "fragile families."

Partners for Fragile Families (PFF) is the first comprehensive national initiative designed to help poor, single fathers pull themselves out of poverty and build stronger links to their children and their children=s mothers. PFF reflects lessons learned from previous failed demonstrations and is the child of best practices culled from over 40 years of social policy research and experimentation in this area. It is a collaborative effort funded by grants from NPCL and operated in 10 test cities by public and private groups, grass roots community-based organizations, federal and state child support enforcement agencies and private employers.

The idea is a partnership that leverages resources in a broad working coalition toward the shared goal of strong families where children are cared for by both mothers and fathers. Our guiding principle is that fathers have value to their children, even if they do not have money.

And make no mistake about it, the population that we refer to as "dead-broke dads" have very little money. Unlike "deadbeat dads, " the men we serve likely qualify for food stamps themselves and statistically look much like mothers on welfare, (formally Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]).

The difference between "deadbeat dads" and "dead-broke dads" is that the former can pay child support, but will not; the latter are willing to pay child support but cannot.

We know this because research demonstrates that fragile couples are typically in a relationship when they have a child.

According to the Princeton’s¹ Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study1, a longitudinal four-year survey currently in progress to document the course of "fragile" relationships, 82 percent of unmarried mothers and fathers are romantically involved at the time their child is born. Forty-four percent of these couples are living together and over 70 percent of mothers, who are interviewed in the hospital within 48 hours of their child’s birth, say that their chances of marrying the baby’s father are "50-50" or greater. Among couples who are not romantically involved at the time of birth about half of the mothers hold that they are friends with the father. Further, two-thirds of mothers and three-fourths of fathers agreed with the statement "it is better for children if their parents are married."

Clearly, there is a will here to form a family, what has been lacking is a way. And let me address the issue of marriage, here, by stating that the research shows the families support, it and so do we. The question for us is not whether we support marriage, but how we get there. And it seems to us that current proposals pushing marriage as a panacea ignore current data on the issue.

In the African-American community, rates of marriage are positively correlated to levels of education, according to studies conducted with census data and reported in William Julius Wilson’s seminal treatise on the effects of unemployment on inner city families, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.

Wilson has also argued that the sharp increase in black male joblessness since 1970 accounts in large measure for the rise in the rate of single-parent families. In fact, employment status of the male is a significant indicator of the probability that single parents of a child born out-of-wedlock will marry. There is also a very strong positive relationship between annual earnings of young black men and their marital status, especially for young men between the ages of 18 and 31, roughly the cohort with which we work. As reported by Wilson, black men who are stably employed are twice as likely to marry the mother of their children.

Therefore, the mandate is evident.

If we provide support through public policies and programs aimed at increasing the family’s employment and earning prospects as well as corollary services such as transportation, medical assistance, childcare and parenting education, low-income fragile families are very likely to stay together. In short, we believe that if we make men "marriageable" they are more likely to marry and their children will benefit.

It is as simple as that. But, we are talking about a wide spectrum of support services, which in turn suggests that broad partnerships are necessary to make these comprehensive efforts successful and sustain families. The converse of that however, is that as job prospects fade, the foundation for a stable relationship weakens and puts the fate of the family – and the well-being of children – in jeopardy.

For these reasons, NPCL and its work directed at fathers is focused on dealing with the fathers where they are, then bringing them into programs where holistic support is available. One very positive result of our PFF demonstration has been our ability to find fathers living below the radar screen, outside organized society and out of the reach of the child support enforcement system. Once we find these men and convince them to join a program however, we have seen promising signs. Not only do we provide job training, we also try to give men the tools they need to make all their relationships work: with in-laws, the mothers of their children, with the children themselves. We believe that education is of supreme importance, so we try to educate men about everything from anger management and conflict resolution to the child support system and family planning. They are part of a peer support group where men in similar situations share their experiences and more experienced men can lead by example. Peer groups are powerful forces, encouraging men to find work, provide for their children, negotiate with mom, be there for their kids. We’ve learned to trust the process.

We have also learned that the child support enforcement system must change. To that end, we have developed Peer Learning Colleges, through which we bring together child support experts, researchers and leaders in the field to focus on ways in which the child support system might better work with "dead-broke dads" and address the needs of low-income families. Child support enforcement agencies are beginning to realize that poor fathers require a different approach than "deadbeat dads" because they often want to support their children, but need help. If child support enforcement has at the heart of its mission the desire to promote child well-being, it makes more sense in the case of low-income fathers to help them find a job, negotiate a payment schedule for support or reduce arrearages, than it does to lock them up for non-payment of support: after all, if you have no job skills and, therefore, can’t find a job to enable support payments, you won’t find those skills in jail.

Community-based organizations can gain the trust of hard-to-reach fathers, help them establish legal paternity, learn their legal rights and teach what we call T-E-A-M parenting, meaning that parents work together for the benefit of their children regardless of their marital status. Child support enforcement agencies can work with fathers at the outset to modify child support orders, help or allow fathers time to train for work and some, private employers are willing to hire well-skilled and dependable workers.

Whether or not they are married, the child needs food, clothes, care, love and two supportive, nurturing parents. After he becomes self-supporting and an integral part of his child(ren)=s lives, hopefully, marriage is a result if that is something the couple seeks for themselves.

It is imperative that any new or revised policy initiatives work towards supporting these efforts to assist fragile families.

Of the current proposals, H.R. 1471 provides for the kind of service delivery system that is inclusive of fathers and would serve to move fragile couples and their children toward traditional family formation. The President’s proposals, while welcome, do not contain an adequate level of funding.

Our goal is to help fathers become nurturers, emotionally involved and devoted to their children, in other words, as integral to the developmental well-being of children as mothers. But, it is also to spur independence and self-sufficiency.

We, now, face the second chapter in the welfare reform story. If we are serious about ending "welfare as we know it" we must support self-sufficiency as we envision it. The savings states are realizing from the reductions in welfare rolls should go into real job-training programs and comprehensive family and social services that have as their ultimate objective, the ability to live and support a family by working. But, these efforts are both deep and broad, they take commitment and scope. That is why all PFF grantees must address a range of issues. It is why they are required to institute or provide access to intensive career and personal development skills training in preparation for placement in family-sustaining, wage-growth jobs. We are talking about boot-camp-job-readiness programs. Grantees are also urged to perform long-term follow-up for clients to maximize the chances for job retention.

Because rates of morbidity, mortality, unemployment, and incarceration of young men are so high in their communities, there is little evidence of successful marriage for young people to emulate. None of this means that these young people are any less responsible for their children. They are and should be expected to be accountable for the Aoops@ once it happens. And, happily, research shows that many of these young men are indeed interested in being good fathers, they just don't know how. Our practitioners have a saying: AIf you=ve never seen [fatherhood] and never experienced it, you can=t do it.@ But they do try.

One 30-month study of 16-26 year-old, poor single fathers revealed that 75 percent visited their child in the hospital; 70 percent saw their child at least once a week; 50 percent took their child to the doctor and large percentages reported bathing, feeding, dressing and playing with their children; and 85 percent provided informal child support in the form of cash or purchased goods such as diapers, clothing or toys. In addition, the average mother on welfare receives about $33 a month in covert support from poor fathers.

The heart is indeed willing, the ability is lacking. Multiple, flexible strategies will be necessary to address the challenges these men and their families face. Part of that response, we believe, is programs like Partners for Fragile Families.

¹ Fragile Families & Child Well-Being Study, Irwin Garfinkel, Ph.D. and Sarah S. McLanahan, Ph.D., Princeton University.

[The attachment is being retained in the Committee files.]