Breaking the Parent Trap: Helping Dads Help Children : Families: Rather than lock up fathers who can’t pay support, a welfare reform project offers job training.

David Misterka is a 23-year-old whose ex-girlfriend became pregnant when she was 16. Juan Alamo, 38, is divorcing his wife of 17 years. Shaun Benton is fresh from prison after serving time for robbery and hasn’t seen his son for three years.

Despite their differences, they have some things in common. They are absent fathers. Their children receive welfare benefits.

And the government is about to send them the bill, even though they are without jobs and say they cannot pay. The government is about to help them do that too.

The men, all from western Massachusetts, are part of a pilot program begun two years ago to teach the responsibilities of fatherhood, help develop job skills and find lucrative enough employment so fathers can send child support checks every two weeks.

The program, dubbed Parents’ Fair Share, is one of scores of innovative efforts by reformers across the country aimed at decreasing welfare costs by making fathers pay up.

“I’m glad the government didn’t lock me up but instead put me in this program and said: ‘You’re not alone, we’re going to help you help yourself,’ ” said Alamo, who had been earning some money as a private investigator but not enough, he said, to help support his three children.

President Clinton’s vision for revamping the welfare system calls for an assortment of new measures to catch up with fathers like Misterka, Alamo and Benton--and the occasional absent mother as well.

The crackdown on non-custodial parents who fail to support their children is immensely popular politically. The President’s denouncement of such parents during his State of the Union Address met with the loudest cheers of any of his proposals that evening.

The government will “say to absent parents who aren’t paying their child support: ‘If you’re not providing for your children, we’ll garnish your wages, suspend your license, track you across state lines and, if necessary, make some of you work off what you owe,’ ” Clinton said. “People who bring children into this world cannot and must not walk away from them.”

The Administration estimates that it can save $1.4 billion by the 10th year of the program. The savings would be achieved primarily by persuading unwed fathers to admit paternity while their newborns are still in hospitals--the period when, research shows, they are most likely to do so.

Other savings would be achieved through a nationwide computer network to track deadbeat parents, enabling government officials to attach their wages, according to Bruce Reed, a presidential adviser and one of the chief architects of the President’s evolving welfare reform plan.

While there appears to be widespread support for the crackdown, expensive efforts over the last two decades to collect from non-custodial parents have not been overwhelmingly successful.

“I’m skeptical. We’ve spent the last 15 years trying to increase the child support for (welfare) families and have had only modest success,” said Doug Besharov, a welfare specialist at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a nonpartisan research center.

“There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on. The loudest round of support the President got in the State of the Union (Address) was when he talked about deadbeat dads because the politicians of both parties think that’s the easiest target. There’s a feeling these guys are no good--that might be true--and that it’s going to be easy to collect--that’s not true,” he said.

Despite marked increases in establishing paternity, child support collections from fathers whose children receive welfare benefits have stayed constant or increased only gradually in most states.

In 1992, state governments collected child support payments from only 832,000, or 12%, of the 6.8 million absent parents whose children received Aid for Families With Dependent Children. Comparatively, the collection rate in 1988 was 11%, or about 621,000 of 5.7 million absent parents. Total collections have increased, from $1.5 billion to $2.3 billion, over the same period. But the welfare rolls have swelled as well.

A large share of the absent parents are just not able to pay much child support, experts say.

“Most people think that it’s easy to lower welfare costs by using the (Internal Revenue Service) to force fathers to pay child support,” said Gordon Berlin, a senior vice president at the New York-based Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., which designed the Parents’ Fair Share program. “But most of these fathers are not paying taxes because they don’t have mainstream jobs. These fathers work periodically off the books. The system has few options when fathers say they don’t have any money.”

Putting them in jail clearly would be counterproductive. The Administration believes the answer is to be tough--and to give them the kind of help custodial parents on welfare get: job training and placement.

Researchers and administrators in nine cities experimenting with Parents’ Fair Share say it is too early to declare conclusively that the program is an economic solution to the child support dilemma. But they say they believe that initially, large investments in such efforts will pay off in long-term increases in child support payments and by encouraging absentee parents to be more involved in their children’s lives.

Administrators in states at the cutting edge of implementing in-hospital paternity establishment, such as Washington, Virginia and West Virginia, also said they have no hard data to prove their programs save welfare money.

“But I think over the long run it will decrease public assistance--but not 100% because a lot of these fathers aren’t breadwinners, so they’re never going to be able to pay,” said Martha Hill, director of child support enforcement in West Virginia. The state has a new program that established legal paternity for more than half the children born out of wedlock last year.

Many of the fathers in Parents’ Fair Share in Springfield--only a few mothers have gone through the program--say the title “deadbeat dad” is a bum rap and argue that people should consider their perspective.

Supporting themselves and their children at the same time can simply be impossible, they argue. Misterka, for instance, said he gave the mother of his 2-year-old daughter money until he lost his job at an ice cream factory--even though he never wanted to have a child.

“It doesn’t bother me to have to support my daughter, as long as I can still pay my own bills,” said Misterka, 23, who is no longer involved with the mother. “In a way it’s fair, but in a way it’s not. It’s the woman’s decision to keep the baby or have an abortion. Guys don’t have any control.”

Misterka called the system biased against men. The state is demanding back child-support payments from him, even though he is out of work, he said, while his former girlfriend collects welfare, goes to college classes paid for by the state and sends their child to a subsidized day-care center.

Benton, a high school dropout who served three years in the state penitentiary for robbery, agreed:

“I’m hustling for a job, but I’ve got no . . . high school diploma, no job skills. I need a break. I need time off, but my child-support back payments are already piling up. I know I need some education, but I need to pay child support.”

Like Benton and Misterka, many absent parents are part of the socioeconomic group that has seen its real wages decline most rapidly in recent years: men without high school educations as well as those with diplomas but no job skills.

Ronnie Coleman, 30, is a high school dropout who has never held a job for long.

“I’ve had lots of jobs, but they never last more than six months,” he said. “They always seem to be dead-end things. The highest salary I’ve made in three years is $7.50 an hour.” Parents’ Fair Share has raised his hopes higher than they’ve ever been, he said.

“They tell me I can get a solid job, a permanent job so I can take care of my family,” Coleman said as he nervously prepared for an interview one recent afternoon. “All I can do is pray.”

Many men in the program said they are providing for their children but not through the government. When custodial parents are on welfare, the child-support enforcement system collects directly from the non-custodial parent and gives the custodial parent $50 a month--in part to encourage them to cooperate in naming and tracking down the other parent. The rest of the money is used to offset the welfare payment.

But there is a lot of incentive for both parents to avoid the system. Some absent parents, for instance, say they resent that the government decides how much they can afford to pay, while others complain that only a fraction of the money they provide reaches their children. Many custodial parents think they can get a better deal by collecting the payments themselves and keeping the arrangement secret from welfare caseworkers.

Frank Calabrese, who went through the Parents’ Fair Share program, said he learned about that practice the hard way when he was called into court and told that he owed more than $10,000 in child support.

“I never deadbeated,” said Calabrese, 28, who was unemployed when he started the program but now works in an auto body shop. “She (the mother of his child) was collecting welfare without telling me while I was paying her child support.”

Since he began working more than a year and a half ago at a job the program helped him get, Calabrese’s wages have been attached, his tax refunds have been confiscated and his credit has been ruined, he said.

“I really am fired up about it,” Calabrese said, his face flushing with anger. “I can see why guys don’t want to pay. I never wanted to lose my family. Now she stays home, collects welfare and has some guy living with her, while I’m out working. . . .

“They forced me to go to that program and get a job,” he added. “She should be forced to work too.”

Calabrese’s case is a success for the system. For more than a year and a half he has been paying child support to the government and offsetting the welfare payments his ex-wife receives.

But such successes come at great cost.

Since its beginning in July, 1992, the Springfield program has cost $910,000. By the end of last month, 569 people had participated, 134 were given unsubsidized jobs and 78, including Calabrese, were placed in apprenticeships in which the program paid half of their salaries for up to four months.

The program also is credited with getting dozens more absent parents to pay child support in an unexpected way: When a judge ordered them to attend the program full time for 17 days, they confessed to having jobs and began making the payments voluntarily. In Grand Rapids, Mich., another Parents’ Fair Share site, 14% of the absent parents ordered to participate in the program admitted to having jobs and subsequently began paying child support, Berlin said.

Berlin, the Administration and welfare administrators around the country argued that no welfare reform plan will work unless it is designed to ensure that both parents contribute.

Many of the custodial parents who would be forced to work under the anticipated Clinton welfare plan are unlikely ever to get jobs that would pay enough to lift them out of poverty.

“We’ve got to put together an income stream that has everybody contributing--Mom, the government and Dad too,” Berlin said.

With 30% of all children born out of wedlock, up from 18% in 1980, the system must start with early paternity establishment, officials argue.

By Jan. 1, 1995, all states will be required to have systems that will enable fathers to be identified in all hospitals and birthing centers. Such programs have been surprisingly effective. In West Virginia, more than half of the unwed fathers were identified last year under that state’s new paternity program.

Welfare administrators and child-support enforcement officials like such programs because collecting support for welfare children without legal fathers is so difficult.

To be eligible for AFDC, the government requires mothers to name the father so they can track him down and order him to pay child support. But many mothers claim that they do not know the father’s identity--or they give a false name.

In South Carolina, in the first 11 months of 1993, for example, 37% of the 2,840 fathers named were excluded by genetic testing.