City Making Active Effort to Reengage Its Absentee Fathers

BALTIMORE — In the sweeping welfare reform bill enacted last August, fathers such as 34-year-old John Stevenson were pretty much where they have been in the nation’s poorest communities for much of the last couple of decades: mostly absent.

In their bid to wean poor mothers from welfare dependence, federal lawmakers set aside billions of dollars for states to deliver job training and placement, child- care support, transportation and health benefits to the 3.6 million single women who were raising children with the help of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

The fathers, by contrast, were the same shadowy presence in the legislation that they were in the homes of many of their children. They were part of the “two-parent households” whose “formation and long-term stability” states should foster in drawing up their welfare reform plans. And they were the “deadbeat dads” who would be subject to a new federal effort to collect child-support payments.

This Father’s Day, as local communities from Baltimore to Los Angeles brace for welfare reform to hit home, activists and officials are warning that fathers like Stevenson can make or break the historic effort to “change welfare as we know it.” They cautioned that many of the welfare bill’s provisions, if not checked, could drive parental partners further apart rather than closer together.

Unless something is done to engage men in the lives of their children, they added, the drag of poor and aimless males, absolved of parental responsibility, will condemn states and communities to a Sisyphean task of fighting dependence anew with each generation.

From Absent to Involved

Some communities are doing something. Here in Baltimore, Stevenson, a onetime absentee father, graduated Friday from an innovative program called “Young Fathers/Responsible Fathers.”

Seventeen years ago, when his first child--Tavon--was born, Stevenson wandered in and out of the baby’s life while his mother went on and off welfare.

But on Friday, Stevenson--who adoringly bounced his 2-year-old daughter, Jaquell, on his hip--was a very different kind of father than his past would suggest. Today, Tavon and Jaquell both live with Stevenson and Jaquell’s mother. And Stevenson said: “I eat, breathe and sleep my children.”

Soon Stevenson, a laid-off assembly worker who has landed a job in a hotel kitchen, plans to take the final commitment step. He will marry Jaquell’s mother.

In many states, governors and legislatures are moving to fix or remove some of the policies that discouraged poor women from marrying and men from playing active rolls in their children’s lives.

Currently, 24 states have chosen to extend welfare benefits to households where two parents are present, and New York soon will join the list. Alone among the states, California has proposed a “wedfare” program that would provide transitional child care and health benefits to low-income mothers who choose to marry.

But a number of states are looking to do more than remove obstacles to fathers’ involvement. They are designing programs offering “noncustodial parents”--virtually all of them men--the same kind of job training, counseling and placement that female welfare recipients are getting. Eighteen states are extending such services and seven others have proposed to join them. California has no such state-level program.

A Model for Fatherhood 101

Some states, including Maryland, are going further, devising a model many believe should be copied nationwide. In addition to readying fathers to uphold their financial responsibilities with job assistance, they are seeking to draw them into their children’s lives with programs designed to make them better nurturers.

“Practitioners tell us that when you have a low-income person who is disconnected from the labor market, the best way to give him a reason to get engaged in it is to make him responsible for his family,” said Ron Mincy of the Ford Foundation, which has spent $5 million in three years to launch a nationwide fatherhood project.

“When you do that, you can encourage him to do things he would probably not do for himself, including participating in training and job placement programs. So you really have got to do it both ways.”

The Ford Foundation hopes to bring its approach to building fatherhood to Los Angeles, which has an out-of-wedlock birthrate among the highest in the country.

Jeffrey Johnson, a leader of Ford’s nationwide effort, acknowledged that child-support enforcement agencies and advocates for the poor make “strange bedfellows.” But he said that if they did not cooperate, welfare reform could make poor fathers vilified and useless outcasts.

“The business-as-usual approach hurts fathers because it does not validate their significance as fathers,” said Johnson, who is president and chief executive officer of a Washington-based organization called the National Center for Strategic Non-Profit Planning and Community Leadership.

“If all welfare initiatives are directed at making mothers more self-sufficient, what does that say about a guy that doesn’t measure up to them in terms of skills or earning potential? You create competition, and that sometimes turns violent.”

Building on a Sense of Responsibility

Last year’s welfare bill established strict targets for states to increase the numbers of public aid recipients who identify the fathers of their children. That information will be turned over to federal child-support enforcement officials in order to target those men for collection of child-support payments. And states were given a range of punishments to enforce compliance, ranging from cutting an uncooperative mother’s welfare check to garnisheeing a nonpaying father’s wages or withholding his driver’s license.

But what is needed, said the Ford Foundation’s Mincy, is “enhanced paternity establishment,” in which fathers would be identified and helped to uphold their financial and emotional responsibilities. Developing a man’s ties with his children, while not enough, may be the place to start.

In Baltimore, that is the starting point for “Young Fathers/Responsible Fathers,” which graduated 70 men--the largest class in its three-year history--on Friday.

The program, about half of whose participants come voluntarily and half through court referrals, promises men an intensive course of mentoring, goal-setting and counseling on the gentle art of fatherhood. It then helps them address the obstacles that keep them from the emotional and financial support of their children--from substance abuse to low job skills to a frayed relationship with women.

In the process, the program participants plot out, with assistance, how they will meet the state’s stiff new child-support requirements and figure out how they will satisfy outstanding payments.

Across town another state-sponsored program, the “Men’s Services” component of Baltimore’s “Healthy Start” program, does much the same thing. But because it is part of a program aimed at reducing infant mortality, the program enlists men when the infant is still in the mother’s womb.

For John Stevenson, the “Young Fathers/Responsible Fathers” program built on a sense of responsibility that was already there.

But the program helped give shape to his yearnings. It assisted him with a job search after he was laid off from an assembly job at the Baltimore General Motors plant. It has meant discussions that helped him reconnect with his son during his critical teen years. And it has helped him ready himself for the once-in-a-lifetime commitment he wants marriage to be.

On Friday, Stevenson watched lovingly as daughter Jaquell held her hand out during a sudden downpour, looked at him wide-eyed and said simply, “Rain!” He fussed with her pretty dress and matching hat and hiked her up a little higher on his chest to protect her from stray raindrops.

Although Stevenson was graduating from a program for fathers, he sounded and looked more like a man at his own wedding. He was joyful and boisterous, solemn and scared.

“I love her openly and honestly,” said Stevenson, leaning his head close to Jaquell’s. “I plan on always being there, through the good and the bad. Nothing will ever change that.”