Hoping to boost community fatherhood programs, a House GOP welfare leader is proposing a $2 billion, five-year program.
Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., hopes a new block grant program would encourage marriage and better parenting. Too often, he said, policymakers focus only on getting fathers to pay child support."The foundation of our civilized society has always been the two-parent family," said Shaw, chairman of the House Ways and Means human resources subcommittee.
Shaw, a primary author of the 1996 welfare reform law, argued that the law has encouraged many mothers to move toward self-sufficiency, but fathers of children on welfare "still face a host of unsolved and largely unaddressed problems." Among them: lack of positive role models, poor education, drug and alcohol addiction and poor work opportunities.
The number of children living apart from their fathers steadily climbed from 5.1 million in 1960 to 11.4 million in 1980 and 19.5 million in 1995. Already, some small community-based organizations have created programs to work with fathers, Shaw said. He argued that the federal government should give them money and run evaluations to see which are successful.
So far, he said, programs have succeeded in increasing fathers' involvement with their children and persuading them to pay more child support. But they've had only modest success in increasing income or marriage rates, he said.