Father's Role Essential, Panel Says

Fathers are an integral--and often missing--part of urban and inner-city families, five experts who deal with the problem of family breakdown told an audience of nearly 100 at the Kennedy School of Government's ARCO Forum last night.

Panelists warned that single families are becoming increasingly prevalent in America, with a quarter of all families having only one parent. If current trends continue, one half of all children will experience part of their childhood in families with only one parent, they said.

While Massachusetts has one of the lowest rates of out-of-wedlock births and divorce in the country, 14,000 children see their parents separate, and 20,000 children are born out of wedlock in an average year in the state, according to panelist Marilyn Ray Smith, a legal counsel for the state's Child Support Enforcement Division.

States have focused more on the issues surrounding poor urban separated families since the passage of the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as the "Welfare Reform Act."

Among the many provisions of the act was a provision requiring state child support offices to establish paternity in the birth of out-of-wedlock children receiving welfare. States must make progress towards establishing the father in 90 percent of these children, or else lose massive amounts of federal welfare money paid out in block grants.

Before the establishment of this act, child support offices had little reason to establish paternity for children in poor urban areas, said Ronald B. Mincy '74 a senior program officer with the Ford Foundation, which is supporting study of the issue.

Because there was little chance the absent father had any means to pay child support, departments decided to focus on middle-class families, where significant money could be recovered, he said.

Now, child support departments are encountering a new sort of fathers, ones who often lack education, employment skills and have criminal records.

This presents the new and important challenge of helping poor fathers out of poverty and into situations where they can help to support their families, said Jeffery M. Johnson, president of the National Center of Nonprofit Strategic Planning and Community Leadership, a group researching and trying to alleviate the problem of unmarried urban fathers.

"What it does for the first time is puts before child support [agencies] fathers who don't have money," Johnson said. "What the heck do you do with him?"

Johnson said community-based organizations are important in solving the problems of urban fathers and families, stressing that non-profits at the local level can closely interact with families.

Additionally, government agencies need to help keep unmarried couples together soon after children are born, when the parents are often still very close, panelists said. Studies show that 51 percent of parents at the time of out-of-wedlock births are living together and another 30 percent are romantically involved.

"Is the primary role of government child support offices just to collect money?" Mincy asked. "Can government instead help bring families together?"

Geyser University Professor William Julius Wilson, the moderator of the forum, said that his studies of the problems of separated fathers in Chicago show that poor unwed fathers without work often lose self esteem, leading them to rationalize that they do not have a responsibility to provide for their children.

"How are we going to help dads who can't pay but are involved in his child's life?" Mincy said.

A final panelist was Stan McClaren, the director of Father Friendly Initiatives, a Boston community-based organization to help separate urban fathers.