Do Responsible Fatherhood Programs Work? A Comprehensive Meta‐Analytic Study

• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Erin Kramer Holmes,Braquel R. Egginton,Alan J. Hawkins,Nathan L. Robbins,Kevin Shafer
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12435

E K HBrigham Young University

B R. EUniversity of Missouri

A J. HBrigham Young University

N L. RCornell University

K SBrigham Young University

Do Responsible Fatherhood Programs Work? A

Comprehensive Meta-Analytic Study

Objective: To investigate the effectiveness of

fatherhood programs targeting unmarried,

low-income, nonresident fathers.

Background: Programs for unmarried, nonres-

ident, and low-income fathers increased in num-

ber and scope over the past decade. Programs

for fathers have typically targeted ve broad

areas: positive father involvement, parenting,

co-parenting, employment, and child support

payment.

Method: We conducted a systematic search

for published and unpublished evaluations of

fathering programs targeting unmarried, never

married, and low-income fathers. We identied

25 reports with 30 independent studies. Of these,

21 employed a control–treatment design, and

nine employed a one-group/pre–post design.

Results: These programs produce small but

statistically signicant effects (d=.099,

p<.01). We found that only father involve-

ment (d=.114, p<.05), parenting (d=.110,

p<.01), and co-parenting (d=.167, p<.05)

School of Family Life, 2086 JFSB, Brigham YoungUniver-

sity, Provo,UT 84602 (erin_holmes@byu.edu).

[Correction added on June 6, 2020 after rst online publica-

tion: The Second author’s name have been corrected.]

Key Words: co-parenting, fatherhood, meta-analysis, non-

resident fathers, responsible fatherhood programs.

were signicantly affected; the strongest effect

size was in co-parenting. Unfortunately, these

programs did not signicantly inuence father

employment and economic well-being, nor did

they signicantly impact father payment of child

support.

Conclusion: Although programs for

low-income, unmarried, nonresident fathers

have a small statistically signicant effect, eval-

uation work may increase the impact of these

programs.

Implications.: There is a continued need for

evaluation focused on unmarried, nonresi-

dent, low-income fathers. There is also need

for improved statistical reporting, reports of

attrition, assessment of child outcomes, obser-

vational measures of outcomes, and better

assessment of moderators, such as father age,

program location, child developmental stage,

multipartner fertility, and other barriers to

father involvement.

Responsible fatherhood programs for unmar-

ried and nonresident fathers have increased

in number and scope over the past decade,

spurred by greater scholarly attention to the

risk factors associated with family instabil-

ity (Amato, 2005; Cherlin, 2010), increased

federal funding for programs for unmarried

Family Relations 69 (December 2020): 967–982967

DOI:10.1111/fare.12435

968 Family Relations

or nonresident fathers, and rigorous evalua-

tion studies of some programs (e.g., Fagan,

2008; Fagan, Cherson, Brown, & Vecere, 2015;

Fagan & Stevenson, 2002; Florsheim etal.,

2012; Zaveri, Baumgartner, Dion, & Clary,

2015). An important reason for the growth

of responsible fatherhood programs has been

the Administration for Children and Fami-

lies (ACF) responsible fatherhood initiative.

Although use of the term responsible father-

hood has been debated (see Doherty Kouneski,

& Erickson, 1998; Doherty, Kouneski, & Erick-

son, 2000; Walker & McGraw, 2000), this term

also names a specic federal policy initiative.

This initiative, which has extended the work

of nonprot organizations, including com-

munity, state, private secular, and faith-based

efforts, to strengthen fathers’ connections to

their children, has allocated $50 to $75 mil-

lion a year from 2006 to 2018 to support

fatherhood programs for a total of about $725

million (for more details, see Pearson, 2018;

Tollestrup, 2018). For some reason, however,

work addressing the impact of these programs

on fathers and children tends to be understudied

by academics (Holmes, Brotherson, & Roy,

2012; Holmes, Cowan, Cowan, & Hawkins,

2013). Despite the signicant numbers being

served by these federally funded programs

(Hawkins & Simpson, 2015) and some rig-

orous evaluation studies (Avellar, Covington,

Moore, Patnaik, & Wu, 2018), the ACF respon-

sible fatherhood initiative has not received the

scrutiny (or criticism) that the parallel ACF

Healthy Marriage and Relationships Education

initiative has received (e.g., Johnson, 2012;

Randles, 2017). The time seems right, then,

to synthesize for researchers, practitioners,

and policy makers this emerging body of

applied family science research that aims to

increase fathers’ positive involvement with their

children.

This article highlights the results of a compre-

hensive meta-analysis of responsible fatherhood

program evaluation studies targeted primar-

ily to unmarried, low-income, nonresident

fathers. The overall research question is: How

effective are responsible fatherhood programs

at increasing unmarried, low-income, non-

resident fathers’ positive father involvement,

parenting, co-parenting behavior, employ-

ment, economic prospects, and child support

payments?

T P  I

 N F

Nonresidential fatherhood is a growing phe-

nomenon in the United States. According to the

U.S. Census Bureau, 23% of children (17 mil-

lion) lived in father-absent homes in 2017 (U.S.

Census Bureau, 2017). Demographers estimate

that half of all children in the United States are

expected to live with a single parent at some time

in their life (Livingston, 2014), and 84% of these

children will have a nonresident father (Lip-

pold, 2017). Nonresident and unmarried fathers

are signicantly less likely to stay involved

with their children when their romantic relation-

ships dissolve (Castillo, Welch, & Sarver, 2011;

Osborne, Manning, & Smock, 2007).

A generation of research has shown that

fathers make important contributions to child

development (for reviews, see Sarkadi, Kris-

tiansson, Oberklaid, & Bremberg, 2008;

Yogman & Gareld, 2016), and the same

research has established potential threats to

child development when fathers are absent

from their children’s lives. For example, father

absence has been correlated with signicantly

higher levels of child poverty (U.S. Census

Bureau, 2017), poorer mental health (Culpin,

Heron, Araya, Melotti, & Joinson, 2013; Elam,

Sandler, Wolchik, & Tein, 2016), higher lev-

els of delinquency (Koer-Westergren, Klopf,

& Mitterauer, 2010), higher levels of drug

use (Hoffmann, 2002), and more risky sexual

behavior (Ellis, Schlomer, Tilley, & Butler,

2012). Some have provided evidence that this

association between father absence and negative

outcomes may be causal (McLanahan, Tach,

& Schneider, 2013), and others have presented

evidence that there is intergenerational conti-

nuity (Pougnet, Serbin, Stack, Ledingham, &

Schwartzman, 2012). Others have also provided

evidence that family structure, such as non-

residential fatherhood, matters less for child

outcomes than the quality of the relationship

between the father and his child or access to

the economic and social resources children

need (for review, see Lamb, 2012). Fathers

themselves say their barriers include access to

their children, poor co-parenting skills with the

mothers of their children, and the need to both

nd and secure employment (Holcomb etall,

2015; Osborne, Dillon, Craver, & Hovey, 2016;

Tollestrup, 2018). Thus, researchers and poli-

cymakers have been invested in understanding

how to buffer the potentially negative effects of