Debate Over Welfare Reform Broadens to Include Fathers

It was a group of fathers with a lot of explaining to do.

Child-support debts soaring into tens of thousands of dollars. Tenuous ties to their kids. Bitter ex-wives and ex-girlfriends. Scant evidence that lifelong behavior patterns were about to change.

The judge could have shipped them off to county jail for failing to support their children. Instead, he sent them to school.

“I was mis-educated,” declares Lee A. Council, 38, father of eight children by four women, as other men murmur agreement during the recent class in responsible fatherhood. “I’m being re-educated now.”

For six years of welfare reform, attention has focused on the struggles of poor children and single mothers. But now, an emerging movement says it is time to spotlight the father--that long-overlooked family member who may be missing, estranged, incarcerated or trying to find a way back into the lives of his kids.

More than 2,000 grass-roots efforts have cropped up across the country in recent years to counsel and advocate for nonresident dads, according to the National Fatherhood Initiative, a Maryland-based group. And as Congress debates the next stage in welfare reform, some lawmakers want to add hundreds of millions of dollars to spread the responsible fatherhood message.

About 7 million poor children live without their fathers, according to research by Elaine Sorensen, an Urban Institute economist. Their absence, advocates maintain, is linked to a grim catalog of social woes: poverty, drug use, violence, teen pregnancy, academic failure, depression and suicide.

Yet if fathers’ financial and personal contributions could potentially transform the lives of their children, welfare policy has focused little on their role.

“There’s more to welfare reform than simply saying that these mothers have to get a job,” notes David Blankenhorn, author of “Fatherless America” and president of the Institute for American Values. “And the main ‘more’ is recognizing that these children have fathers too.”

Such fathers are not just invisible in national policy. They are villains in popular culture, scorned as “deadbeat dads,” living symbols of irresponsibility.

But those who speak on their behalf maintain that the traditionally punitive approach toward them often fails, and that not every “deadbeat dad” wants to stay that way.

The path forward can be difficult, however, particularly for those lacking in job skills. The child-support debt rises each month; states may charge interest on the red ink. Typically, government safety net programs are not designed to help such men.

“The question isn’t whether they’re deadbeat. The question is whether they’re dead broke,” insists Jeffery M. Johnson, president of the National Center for Strategic Nonprofit Planning and Community Leadership, which has closely followed the issue. “The unfinished business of welfare reform is, how do we now increase the skills and educational levels of low-income men, so they can be contributing financial partners of women leaving the welfare system.”

The 10 men seated around a table in the Kansas City classroom--blue-collar workers, former athletes, hardened street survivors--have reached the last of their 12 classroom sessions. But the organizers do not want to let them graduate without a final round of soul searching.

“Who would like to be the first to share?” asks George R. Williams, executive director of Kansas City’s Urban Fathering Project. “Involvement is what?”

Thomas Caffrey, a bearded man in a gray carpenters union shirt, responds in a low, deliberate voice: “Being there mentally, physically and emotionally with my kids.” Others nod approvingly.

Craig Scott, a muscular man in sunglasses, jumps in with his own contribution: “Spending time with children and listening to what the children have to say.”

Instructor Amos Johnson III wants everyone to hear the message loud and clear: “This isn’t Week Three anymore,” he admonishes. “We’ve got to cut through the fat and get right to it. There’s no excuse for not making time to be with your child!”

The National Center for Fathering in Kansas City launched the urban effort four years ago in a bid to increase child-support payments from the many dads who were paying nothing at all. Under the program, fathers charged with criminal nonsupport may opt for rehabilitation instead of punishment.

Charges are dropped for men who report regularly to the judge, attend the fathering class, begin paying their debts, stay clear of drugs, hold on to jobs and meet other requirements. The program even directs some of the fathers to job counseling.

But aims reach beyond the financial. Organizers want the nonresident fathers to establish lasting emotional bonds with their children--an effort that may force clear-eyed reflections on the meaning of manhood, commitment and personal responsibility. To move forward, many of the fathers must try to break a pattern of distant, unreliable fatherhood that has been passed down from one generation to the next.

“How many of you can remember your father not coming to an event that you were in?” Williams asks at one point. “What was that like?”

For James Lewis, who has access to six of his nine children, the memory still stings almost 20 years later: “I can remember my first college football game. My uncle went--but my father didn’t.”

Across the room, Kirk Braden, 42, a factory worker with a child-support debt of about $30,000, recalls his military graduation ceremony: “Nobody showed up.”

To Williams and Johnson, who teach the fatherhood classes, finding a way to heal the old wounds is key to a fresh start, even when that means drawing out the softer side of men who are not used to revealing it.

“We had the men going around the room saying, ‘I love you,’ ” Williams recalls of one session. The fathers preferred to tack on words at the end, he noted, offering phrases like: “I love you, man. I love you, brother.”

Similarly, a hugging exercise morphed into a series of half-hugs and pats on the back, Williams, a marriage and family therapist, recalls with some amusement: “We start where they’re at,” he says.

Lee Council, whose second marriage has lasted eight years, says that he did not get to know his father until he graduated from high school, and that he grew up “without a full understanding of a woman’s worth.”

The fatherhood course, he says, “changed the way I think about my mother,” and he vowed to work harder to establish a meaningful relationship with all of his children, including the five he does not live with.

But if the men in Kansas City have explaining to do, they also have stories to tell--of hostile, vindictive mothers who block them from seeing their children, a practice that they said only makes the children hurt more. “I think we need education for women and men,” Council says.

The Urban Fathering Project is one of a growing number of efforts nationwide to provide support for struggling dads, with orientations that vary from faith-based to fathers’ rights to job training.

From Los Angeles to Tampa, San Antonio to Virginia Beach, programs have targeted Latinos, adolescents, prisoners, the poor and suburban middle-class dads.

“Ten years ago, there was very little activity going on,” says Wade F. Horn, a longtime fatherhood activist who is assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Today there’s activity all over the place. We’ve come a long way in recognizing father absence as an important social problem.”

Politicians are debating how far the federal government should go to underwrite such efforts.

For the first time, a major welfare bill that passed the House in May would make responsible fatherhood an official U.S. goal. The bill also would provide $100 million over five years to pay for such initiatives. In addition, officials seek technical changes to the child-support system that could get more money into the hands of needy families. But some in the Senate, which may begin its own welfare debate this week, would go further.

“If you’re talking about breaking the cycle of poverty, this is one of the best things you can do,” says Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who has sponsored a bill with Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) that would provide more than $350 million over five years for fatherhood programs.

Others contend that fatherhood initiatives may provide a more reliable payoff for the country than efforts to promote marriage, which have been advocated by the White House and many conservatives. Public officials do not know how to make marriages work, they argue; raising men’s awareness about their own children--or the consequences of having children out of wedlock--may be a more realistic goal.

“Everybody is in favor of marriage, and should be,” says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and senior domestic aide in the Clinton White House. “But when the majority of poor children don’t see a dime of child support every year, we’re a long way from the altar.”

Indeed, government figures suggest that nonresident fathers in 2000 owed low-income, single-parent households more than $11 billion. A survey commissioned by the Urban Institute found that, for the minority of poor single-parent households that receive it, aid from fathers may add up to 26% of their income.

In the chambers of Robert M. Schieber, the “fathering court” judge in Kansas City, the national debate seems far away.

He deals with individuals, including a petty thief who recently left jail for a halfway house. Schieber, whose courtroom is decorated with posters that exalt responsible fathers, tells the man to begin paying $5 a month “just to get him started” in the habit of regular payments.

Schieber says that outside the courtroom he sometimes runs into people who argue that fathers who drift from their children deserve no special treatment. But he takes heart that the initiative, financed in part by a local sales tax, has yielded more than $364,000 in child-support payments that likely would not have been made without it.

A check of the first 29 graduates of the fatherhood program found that 25 were paying child support; the others include two men who moved back in with their wives and reconciled disputes.

“A lot of people are against this kind of diversion, this kind of intervention,” he concedes. “But it’s hard to argue with these results.”