What Does "Marriage Promotion" Mean for Fatherhood?
By Tom Sylvester

Ending welfare as we knew it has turned out rather well.  Five years after the most ambitious and significant shift in public policy since the War on Poverty, millions of Americans have left welfare for work, child poverty has declined, and the decades-long rise in father absence appears to have stopped.  But the economic boom of the 1990s is over.  And this spring, the program created by welfare reform, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), is set to be "reauthorized" by Congress, giving policymakers the chance to make changes to the original program.

While TANF's core components will likely stay in place, there is debate over child care funding, work requirements, and other measures that are vitally important but boring to the majority of Americans who aren't policy wonks or advocates for the poor.  Yet there has been much media coverage around one issue that hits close to home: marriage.  The Bush Administration's controversial TANF reauthorization plan sets aside $300 million per year for efforts to strengthen marriage.  If welfare reform in 1996 was about getting people to work, this time around, according to some accounts, it's about getting people to the altar.

However, to imagine Uncle Sam, with a shotgun in one hand and a Bible in the other, coercing poor, unmarried parents to get hitched is to misunderstand grossly what "marriage promotion" proposals actually consist of.  The initiative's explicit goal, according to Bush administration official (and former NFI President) Wade Horn, is "to help couples, who choose marriage for themselves, develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain healthy marriages."  This would translate into providing services, such as marriage-skills education, to interested couples. 

Does a focus on marriage mean neglecting efforts to promote responsible fatherhood? In fact, one of the most effective ways to promote positive father-child relationships may be through promoting positive father-mother relationships, particularly within marriage. 

Mothers are usually highly involved in childrearing no matter what.  A father's commitment to his kids, on the other hand, is more likely to parallel his commitment to their mother.  Unmarried and divorced fathers, for example, are far less likely than married fathers to be consistently involved in their children's lives.  One new study even finds that cohabiting biological fathers invest less time in and show less warmth toward their children than do married biological fathers.  This evidence, the researchers explain, "support[s] the view that marriage per se confers advantage in terms of father involvement above and beyond the characteristics of the fathers themselves…."

After reviewing the social science literature on fatherhood,  three University of Minnesota researchers concluded, "We believe that the research strongly indicates that substantial barriers exist for most men's fathering outside a caring, committed, collaborative marriage and that the promotion of these kinds of enduring marital partnerships may be the most important contribution to responsible fathering in our society."  In other words, healthy marriages and involved fatherhood are often two sides of the same coin.

Yet for too long, too many fatherhood programs have been reluctant to acknowledge the obvious links between marriage and father involvement, let alone incorporate positive support for marriage into their work.  For example, the overseer of Washington, D.C.'s fatherhood program told the Washington Post that they would not encourage couples to stay or get married.  "We're going to focus on co-parenting," he said. "The elimination of father absence is what we're focused on."  But how can one hope to eliminate father absence by ignoring its most direct cause?

Fortunately, the new "healthy marriage" proposals have led some fatherhood programs to become a little less afraid of the "m-word."  One initial skeptic, Joe Jones, who directs a prominent fatherhood program in Baltimore, recently said that marriage promotion "has a lot of value" and "does have a place."  Indeed, education about the importance of marriage is relevant even for fathers who are unlikely to get married themselves.  For instance, informing fathers about the benefits of marriage for children could help reduce the troubling incidence of unwed childbearing and multiple-partner fertility.  And if programs care about reducing father absence down the road, they would encourage fathers to teach their sons and daughters to wait until they are married before having kids.

Nevertheless, marriage promotion does present a challenge to the fatherhood field.  With "marriage" as the hot new issue, awareness (and funding) for "fatherhood" could fade.  Columbia professor Ronald Mincy warns that "a whole infrastructure of [fatherhood] services and practitioners and people who were being served is dying on the vine." 

If marriage promotion pushes fatherhood initiatives out of the picture, many fathers (and their children) could be left behind.  Many fathers are in no position to marry.  Yet relationship-skills education, if not limited to marriage, could help them as well.  When unmarried parents have a bad relationship, it is unlikely that a father will regularly see his child.  Some studies even show father visitation to be harmful to children when the parents have a highly antagonistic relationship.  Programs that help unmarried parents reduce conflict could help fathers become positively involved in their children's lives.

Just as supporting strong marriages indirectly encourages involved fatherhood, fatherhood programs can indirectly promote marriage.  Many fatherhood programs include employment services to help dead-broke dads fulfill their child support obligations.  Improving the economic prospects of low-income men, good in and of itself, will also improve their marriage prospects.  Low-income single women consistently tell researchers that they want to get married, but only to men who will be stable breadwinners.

On a conceptual level, fatherhood programs provide an effective pathway for introducing the subject of marriage.  In many communities, an apparent "hard-sell" approach to marriage could come across as irrelevant or moralistic.  Yet there is less resistance to the notion that fathers should be involved in their children's lives.  Expanding and strengthening fatherhood programs would help lay the groundwork for introducing marriage education in a way that won't cause people to run out of the room.

An anti-poverty plan most likely to help children would consist of a full spectrum of well-funded policies and programs.  Income supports, child care, education and job training?  Yes, yes, yes.  Family formation?  Yes.  Marriage?  Yes.  And don't forget about the men.  Because Katharine Boo, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who chronicles the lives of the less fortunate, is right.  Her conclusion: "For better or worse, the long-term well-being of [poor] children-and of their country-depends less on their day care than on their fathers."

Tom Sylvester, who would like to see more of your (and his) tax dollars spent on welfare programs, writes daily for the website marriagemovement.org.