Money and More: Merging Responsible Fatherhood and School Readiness

R O NA L D B . M I N C Y

Maurice V. Russell Professor of Social Policy and Social Work Practice

Columbia University School of Social Work

1255 Amsterdam Avenue, Room 736

RISE for Boys and Men of Color 3 RISE for Boys and Men of Color 2

The general decline of earnings, especially among men lacking a college

degree, has challenged the ability of many men to provide for their families.

Fathers’ earnings account for the majority of income in two-parent families,

and nonresident fathers’ child-support payments account for nearly 45 percent

of the income available to low-income single-parent families that receive it

(Mincy, Jethwani-Kaiser, & Klempin, 2014). As a result, many observers are

concerned about what the general pattern of stalled earnings among less-

educated men will mean for children (American Enterprise Institute for Public

Policy Research and the Brookings Institution, 2015). Two recent studies

addressed this question by examining the direct and indirect associations

between children’s behavior, cognitive skills, and academic achievement

by age nine and father’s earnings (or financial support), through parental

investments, socialization processes, and parenting stress. The studies focused

on earnings of resident fathers (Cabrera, Mincy, & Um, 2017) and financial

support of nonresident fathers during the first three years of life (Mincy,

Cabrera, Um, & De la Cruz Toledo, 2017) when many studies show that income

has the largest effects on children (Duncan, Ziol-Guest, & Kalil, 2010).

MONEY AND MORE: MERGING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD AND SCHOOL READINESS

Results suggest similarities and differences in the relationship between fathers’ earnings (or financial support) and

outcomes for young children with resident and nonresident fathers. These similarities and differences have race and

ethnic implications because Black children are much more likely to experience nonresident fatherhood during the first

three years than children of other races and ethnic groups (Mincy, Pouncy, & Zilanawa, 2016).

First the similarities: large increases in financial support (whether through earnings or child support) matter much more

than small increases. Unfortunately, few policies or programs that can produce such large increases for men lacking

college degrees have been identified. Further, to affect academic achievement at all, those increases must boost

cognitive skills by the time children enter school (age five), which facilitates academic achievement once children enter

the fourth grade (age nine).

Now the differences: two-parent families with incomes well above the poverty line use their higher incomes to buy

toys, books, and other learning materials that give children an edge over children in lower-income families (Cabrera,

Mincy, & Um, 2017). Interestingly, in two-parent families, higher income (or earnings) is not associated with mothers or

fathers spending more time with children in learning activities. By contrast, in single-parent families, higher financial

support from fathers is not associated with more toys, books, and other learning materials that enrich the home learning

environment for children. Instead, even small increases in financial support from nonresident fathers are associated

with significant increases in the amount of time fathers, but not mothers, spend with their children in learning activities

(Mincy, Cabrera, Um, & De la Cruz Toledo, 2017). Unfortunately, this additional time does not appear to improve

children’s cognitive skills by school entry. This closes a path from early financial support to higher academic achievement

by the fourth grade. Simply stated, nonresident fathers who provide more support also spend more time with their

children in learning activities, but the quality of this time may not be high enough to make a difference.

RISE for Boys and Men of Color is

a field advancement effort funded

by The Atlantic Philanthropies,

W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Annie

E. Casey Foundation, Marguerite

Casey Foundation, and members

of the Executives’ Alliance to

Expand Opportunities for Boys

and Men of Color.

RISE for Boys and Men of Color 5 RISE for Boys and Men of Color 4

MONEY AND MORE: MERGING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD AND SCHOOL READINESS MONEY AND MORE: MERGING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD AND SCHOOL READINESS

These findings may have important implications for the way we allocate resources to improve school readiness among

children, especially boys of color, and the degree to which those resources engage or fail to engage men of color.

These implications arise from what we know about race and gender differences in the sensitivity of parenting received

by children before age three. In particular, Black boys are more likely to experience authoritarian parenting than White

boys, less likely to experience positive parenting than their sisters or White boys, and less likely than both White

boys and Black girls to receive expressions of love, respect, and admiration from their parents (Iruka, 2017). For these

reasons, closing the achievement gap must involve parental—both mothers and fathers—contributions and activities

that increase school readiness before age five. Increasing the quantity and quality of reading to children, especially

boys, is key to achieving this goal (Brooks-Gunn & Markman, 2005). Head Start reaches many four- and five-year-old

Black children in low-income families, and the more recent Early Head Start program reaches these children at or

before age three. However, these programs do little to overcome differences in the sensitivity of parenting that Black

boys receive, and despite widespread evidence that fathers make important contributions to children’s early cognitive

and language skills, these and other early childhood programs rarely engage fathers (Panter-Brick et al., 2014),

especially Black fathers.

UInstead, family policy and practice that engages fathers has been focused primarily on improving relationship quality or marriage rates

among resident fathers and formal child-support payments among nonresident fathers. There is evidence that relationship satisfaction

improves middle-class children’s well-being, but rigorously evaluated attempts to adapt such interventions to low-income families of

color where the couples are married or interested in marriage have had disappointing results (Dion, 2005; Wood et al., 2012). After three

decades, few evaluations have been undertaken of interventions attempting to increase child-support payments among low-income

nonresident fathers, in which men of color have been highly overrepresented (Avellar et al., 2011). Those interventions that have been

evaluated have shown some success at inducing nonresident fathers to pay something versus nothing on their formal child-support orders,

but they have had very modest effects on employment, earnings, or the amount of child support paid (U. S. Department of Health and

Human Services, 2011).

The consistency and scale of these efforts, especially concerning child support, far outstrips the efforts made to engage fathers in helping

improve their children’s school readiness, and the gap between child support and school-readiness efforts is most severe in the case of

Black men and boys. What is more, we are failing to engage Black fathers in school readiness at the time they are best positioned to be

engaged and the time at which their children might benefit from such engagement most.

1 Race and Ethnic Implications of Pathways from Financial Support to School Readiness

To understand more about this failure, let us review findings from several recent studies of father involvement

with children born to unmarried parents, who now account for 41 percent of all births in the United States and

considerably higher proportions (50 to 70 percent) of Black and Latino births (Cabrera et al., 2008; Edin, Tach, &

Mincy, 2009; Mincy, Pouncy, & Zilanawa, 2016). These studies separate children into three or four groups, depending

on parents’ residential and relationship status at birth: cohabiting, romantically involved (but not cohabiting), or

just friends and in no relationship. Often the last two groups are joined into a single group. Because of the general

decline in marriage rates since the mid-1970s, researchers have devoted much attention to children in the first

group, with conventional wisdom presuming that most nonmarital children are in the last two groups. However,

little attention has been paid to children in the second group. Because their parents are romantically involved but

not living together, and the concept of the nuclear family—mother, father, and child(ren) under the same roof—so

dominates the way Americans think about family, researchers have struggled with what to call these relationships.

This should not be so difficult. When romantically involved but unmarried couples emerged on the landscape, family

scholars called the first type marital unions and the second type cohabiting unions. Now that romantically involved

but non-cohabiting couples have made a similarly important appearance, especially in the Black population, let us call

them visiting-parent unions.

Mincy, Pouncy, and Zilanawala (2016) estimate that births to visiting-parent unions represent about 13 percent of all births in the United

States. They studied father involvement over the first 9 years of life for a sample of 3,709 children born in nonmarital relationships between

1998 and 2000 in metropolitan areas of 200,000 or more. Interestingly, Black mothers gave birth to almost 64 percent of children whose

parents were in visiting-parent unions, and fathers in such unions saw their children an estimated 24 days a month, almost as much as

fathers who lived with mothers and children. Five years later only 20 percent of parents who gave birth to children in visiting-parent unions

were still romantically involved. Even after the parents had broken up, the children of visiting unions saw their fathers between 10 and 15

days per month. If the children were Black, they saw their father at the upper end of that predicted range. If they were not Black, they saw

their father at the lower end of that range.

In short, Black children are exposed to nonresident fatherhood earlier in life than children of other race and ethnic groups. Nevertheless,

during their critical first three years they have almost as much contact with their biological fathers as other children. If we knew how to

engage fathers in interventions designed to improve children’s cognitive and language skills and engaged fathers in these efforts without

regard to residence, would Black children, particularly boys, be as ready for school as other children? What do we know about such

interventions? How often do such interventions engage fathers and to what effect? What roles do race, residence, and relationship status

play in who takes advantage of these interventions?

2 Race, Ethnicity, and Nonresident Fatherhood

RISE for Boys and Men of Color 7 RISE for Boys and Men of Color 6

Researchers have made much progress in understanding how children learn to read. One important development in

the field is called emergent literacy (Whitehurst & Lonigan will 1998). Long before children learn to read, emergent

literacy skills lay the foundation for later reading and writing. Parents can play a critical role helping children learn

how to recognize letters, combine letter sounds into words, and become aware that the printed word represents the

spoken word. Other skills such as left-to-right orientation (for English readers) and understanding a story narrative are

critical skills for prereaders (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Lessons from emergent literacy have been incorporated into

interventions called shared book reading where adults read to children. Parents who read aloud to their children at an

early age have children who score higher on language measures, suggesting the importance of shared book reading

on cognitive development (Duursma, 2014; Duursma & Pan, 2011). Thus, shared book reading has been incorporated

in Head Start and Early Head Start, where lessons about engaging fathers have recently been emerging.

Evidence from observational studies shows that fathers use more complex vocabulary than mothers (Rowe, Coker, & Pan, 2004; Malin

et al., 2012; Malin, Cabrera, & Rowe, 2014). Focusing on the role of fathers, Fagan and Iglesias (1999) studied the effect of a Head Start

intervention program that directly targeted the fathers of young children. The intervention, an adaptation of traditional Head Start parent

involvement activities, focused on fathers and father figures. The program components included classroom involvement, specialized

weekly father-focused programs, monthly father support groups, and father-child recreational activities. Participants were selected from

four sites that offered the intervention, with four matched comparison sites that did not. Because it was considered inappropriate to deny

services, fathers could choose to self-select into the intervention or to remain in their current Head Start program (Fagan & Iglesias, 1999).

Fathers in the comparison control group had Head Start services only. Fathers in both the treatment and comparison groups were further

divided into low, adequate, and high dosage groups, reflecting the level of their involvement (Fagan and Iglesias, 1999).

Results found that fathers in the treatment group with high levels of involvement made the greatest gains in the amount of time they

spent with their child, their accessibility to their child, and their support of learning (Fagan & Iglesias, 1999). Despite these promising

results, Fagan and Iglesias (1999) cautioned that engaging fathers in a specialized Head Start program was challenging. Work schedules

and commitments may make it difficult for many fathers to interact with their children during the day or become involved in classroom

or school activities or in evening self-help groups. These barriers may have affected the study population. Therefore, fathers who self-

selected into this intervention may not have been representative of the population of fathers in the four Head Start sites of this study.

Notably, 34.5 percent of the fathers in the intervention site were married, and 1.8 percent were remarried. Cohabitation was not reported.

Just over half (52 percent) of the fathers in the intervention sites were Black (Fagan & Iglesias, 1999).

Shared book reading has also been extensively incorporated in Early Head Start, but like most initiatives intended to improve well-being

among young children, Early Head Start was aimed at mothers. As a result, when Early Head Start began, practitioners were unprepared

to interact substantively with the men they encountered during home visits. Not surprisingly, many of these men were dismayed when

practitioners came into their homes and ignored them, while attending to the needs of mothers and children.

Aware of the tension that was emerging, researchers charged with evaluating the Early Head Start program sought funding to engage

some fathers in Early Head Start services. Ultimately, the Ford Foundation funded a special initiative, called Father Involvement with

Toddlers Study (FITS), in a fourteen of the seventeen sites involved in the national evaluation of Early Head Start, which was conducted

between 1996 and 1998. Fathers, mothers, and children were assessed at twenty-four, thirty-six, and sixty-nine months; however, only

mothers and children were assessed at the fourteen-month mark.

3 Shared Book Reading Using a hierarchical regression analysis with father and mother in-home interviews and standardized child assessment measures, Duursma

(2014) found that paternal book reading at twenty-four and thirty-six months was a significant predictor of the child’s language, cognitive

skills, and book knowledge, suggesting that interventions that target fathers, mothers, and young children can increase later child literacy.

Children get more when both parents participate in their language and literacy development.

Although all the father and father figures involved in the FITS sites were poor or associated with poor families, few of the fathers in FITS

were from visiting-parent unions. In particular, only 7 percent of the fathers in twelve of the fourteen Early Head Start sites studied by

Cabrera et al. (2008) were in visiting-parent unions, while 36 percent were married, 14 percent were cohabiting, and 43 percent were just

friends or in no relationship with the mother. Nevertheless, as Mincy, Pouncy, & Zilanawa, (2016) observed , father-child contact was not

much lower among children of fathers in visiting-parent unions than among children of fathers in residential unions. All (100 percent) of

married and cohabiting FITS fathers had contact with their children a few times a week. However, 82.9 percent of fathers in visiting-parent

unions also saw their children just as frequently. Gaps in the level of engagement in learning by resident and relationship status were also

quite small. Married fathers spent 3.5 times per month engaged in didactic activities with their children, while cohabiting fathers spent

almost 3.6 times per month in such activities. Both figures are disappointing because didactic activities (i.e., reading or telling stories,

playing together with toys for building things) promote children’s cognitive and language skills. That said, fathers in visiting-parent unions

spent 3.25 times per month engaged in these activities.

The independent and positive effects of such small levels of storybook reading by fathers in the FITS program raise the following question.

Why was it so difficult to recruit fathers with children who were born in visiting-parent unions into the FITS program? Would doing so have

been so much more difficult than the efforts, which have continued unabated, to recruit these disproportionately Black, nonresident fathers

in child-support enforcement programs over the last twenty years, with little effect on child-support payments? If we had devoted some

of the hundreds of millions of dollars it has cost to obtain small gains in child-support compliance to engage the fathers who paid a little

more in more effective shared-book reading programs, would we have made more progress in reducing the achievement gap between

Black children, especially boys, and other children?

Besides the benefits of frequent shared book reading for children’s cognitive development and language skills,

additional benefits derive from the way parents and children interact during shared book reading. Studies have

shown that low-income parents and their children occupy static roles during shared book reading, with the parent

as the storyteller while the child listens passively (Britto, Brooks-Gunn, & Griffin, 2006). Larger gains in cognitive and

language skills occur during dialogic reading, where parents and children alter these roles. Even before they can read

the books they share with adults, children tell the stories while parent listen. Parents can encourage the children to

describe objects in the story, expand on the story, and as the children get older, explain how events, characters, or

situations in the story relate to their own real or imagined experiences (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998).

Traditionally, interventions that have used this strategy overwhelmingly target mothers, but two recent initiatives extend this strategy to

fathers. Both use dialogic reading to convey information about parenting skills in a way that promotes a greater retention of the material

than parents might otherwise receive from brochures or videos. As a result, these two-generation interventions are intended to improve

parenting for adults and cognitive and language skills for children.

4 Dialogic Reading

MONEY AND MORE: MERGING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD AND SCHOOL READINESS MONEY AND MORE: MERGING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD AND SCHOOL READINESS

RISE for Boys and Men of Color 9 RISE for Boys and Men of Color 8

Chacko et al. (2018) used dialogic reading to convey behavioral parent training intended to improve the quality of father-child interactions.

Interestingly, this intervention was designed to provide a larger role for fathers to support one another in the acquisition of skills that would

benefit children. Recruitment efforts emphasized building a father’s shared-book reading skills and avoided any appeal related to overcoming

poor parenting skills. This asset-based approach, along with a stronger role for fathers in training one another, was designed to mitigate

some of the recruitment challenges experienced during previous interventions that have targeted fathers. Compared with other dialogic

reading programs, which typically devote fifteen to thirty minutes of training to parents, this intervention provided instructional, practice, and

feedback sessions on dialogic reading over a period of several weeks, making the training much more intensive than was usual. We also know

that fathers are more likely to engage in dialogic reading than mothers, even without training. For example, fathers more than mothers used

questions, labels, and recasts, and these practices predict higher levels in children’s language skills (Malin, Cabrera, & Rowe, 2014).

In a randomized controlled trial of the intervention, Chacko et al. (2018) argued that this increased dosage contributed to the larger effects of

the intervention on children’s cognitive and language skills than usually found in dialogic reading programs. In addition, fathers in the control

group did not receive the intervention, but their children received academic readiness programs as part of Head Start. Fathers and children

enrolled in the intervention achieved increases in both parenting skills and positive child behaviors in at-risk children, compared with fathers

and children in the control group who received regular Head Start services. Treatment-group fathers also had higher rates of participation and

homework completion than control-group fathers and were less likely to drop out of the program (Chacko et al., 2018). Although the program

operated in Head Start centers in New York City, most of the children and parents were from married, Hispanic couples.

A second application of dialogic reading and parenting training involving fathers is currently under way in a project called Baby Books 2. Its

predecessor, the Baby Books project, used dialogic reading to convey anticipatory guidance information to mothers about protecting their

infants from injuries, along with other information that first-time mothers often receive from their pediatricians through brochures and videos.

Among positive impacts on parenting and parenting stress, a rigorous evaluation of the Baby Books project showed that treatment-group

children experienced fewer preventable injuries and scored higher on receptive language tests than children in the control group born to

mothers who received no books or books with no anticipatory guidance information (Albarran & Reich, 2014). Baby Books 2 will provide

similar information to low-income, first-time mothers and fathers using specially designed picture books in which Black or Latino fathers and

mothers are pictured reading to children. To exploit the opportunity available while working with both parents on behalf of their children, the

books also include content on co-parenting skills. A randomized trial will estimate the impacts of this intervention on child health, language

skills, and parenting in families who are enrolled in three legs of the intervention, where 1) only mothers receive the picture books; 2) only

fathers receive the picture books; and 3) both parents receive picture books versus a control group in which parents receive books without

anticipatory guidance information. This innovative design is in the recruitment and implementation phases, so no data on the effects are

currently available. Although the intervention is serving children of Black and Latino families in Orange County, California, and Washington,

DC, only children with resident fathers will be enrolled in the intervention.

Despite the evidence that fathers make important contributions to children’s cognitive and language skills, interventions intended to

improve school readiness rarely include fathers. Though the situation is slowly improving, one major gap persists. Nonresident fathers

rarely participate in these shared or dialogic reading interventions because researchers anticipate difficulties securing reliable participation

by nonresident fathers in training or actual shared or dialogic reading sessions with their children, including those in which researchers

observe father-child interactions. As a result, we are learning little about helping the children most at risk for entering school unprepared.

These children are disproportionately Black and male because they experience nonresident fatherhood sooner than boys of other racial

and ethnic groups and they receive less sensitive parenting than their sisters.

5 Conclusion

Over the past twenty years local child-support enforcement agencies have reconfigured their services to reach many more nonresident

fathers who are unable to meet their formal child-support obligations. A key aspect of this reconfiguration is collaboration with community-

based responsible fatherhood programs that recruit nonresident fathers, help them understand and reduce their child-support obligations,

and provide them with the skills and experience they need to better meet those obligations (Martinson et al., 2007). While these

collaborations do not produce big gains in child-support payments, they do produce small increases in child-support payments, which

according to the study cited above, are positively associated with fathers’ engagement in learning activities. The collaborations also create

opportunities for community-based responsible fatherhood programs to engage with their children and families in nonpecuniary ways

(e.g., recreational activities and conflict resolution skills).

To increase the proportion of nonmarital children with child-support orders, the 1996 welfare reform legislation required states to establish

in-hospital paternity establishment programs. Along with the requirement that custodial parents receiving public assistance help child-

support enforcement agencies locate the fathers of their children, these programs dramatically increased the number of nonmarital

children with child-support orders. Because the fathers of these children had limited ability to pay, more orders meant more arrears, not

increases in child-support collections on behalf of these children.

By 2014, nonresident fathers in the mostly Black communities served by a Baltimore responsible fatherhood program called the Center for

Urban Families (CFUF) had accumulated $111 million in arrears. In response CFUF and the Baltimore Office of Child Support enforcement

formed a partnership to help unemployed and underemployed nonresident fathers meet their child-support obligations. The partnership

brings the amount that participating nonresident fathers are required to pay in child support into closer alignment with their ability to pay.

These lower child-support orders remain in effect, while fathers participate in CFUF’s workforce development services, which eventually

lead to jobs at wages that make their original child support orders more affordable. In exchange, fathers are expected to comply with their

often reduced child-support orders, but little more. Herein lies the opportunity. Even before reaching these employment and child-support

milestones, the partnership could offer to reduce state-owed arrears by 25 percent for fathers who consistently participated in employment

services and shared (or dialogic) reading sessions with their children. Such an expansion would allow community-based programs and

child-support enforcement agencies to engage fathers in pecuniary and nonpecuniary activities that go well beyond recreation in their

attempts to improve children’s well-being.

A variation on this theme could also be applied to low-income nonresident fathers who have not yet built up arrears. After paternity has

been established, but before a child-support order has been established, some local child-support offices reach out to nonresident fathers

who are at risk of defaulting on their orders. These outreach efforts are intended to ensure that nonresident fathers understand their child-

support obligations, receive subsistence orders where appropriate, and receive workforce services so they can meet their obligations in

the future. Again, fathers who received these considerations are expected to participate in workforce services and to comply with orders,

but they were not expected to contribute to their children in other ways. Another opportunity! Why not encourage them to regularly

participate in shared and dialogic reading interventions with their children, especially during the child’s first years when many unmarried

parents are still romantically involved?

By themselves, interventions that attempt to help unemployed and underemployed nonresident fathers to become better providers

through workforce and child-support intermediation services have had very small impacts on the amounts that such fathers actually pay

(U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011). Further, children who receive financial support that is well above the median

provided by nonresident fathers have cognitive skills and academic achievement not much higher than children who receive no support

at all (Mincy, Cabrera, De la Cruz Toledo, & Um, 2017). The approach suggested here would help nonresident fathers become better

providers and teachers. To extend evidence-based practice in responsive fatherhood and school readiness, this approach should be

tested in a well-designed research trial to determine whether the children of nonresident fathers who receive support in their provider and

teacher roles have higher cognitive skills and academic achievement than the children of nonresident fathers in control groups who receive

support only in their provider role and those who receive no support at all.

MONEY AND MORE: MERGING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD AND SCHOOL READINESS MONEY AND MORE: MERGING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD AND SCHOOL READINESS

RISE for Boys and Men of Color 11 RISE for Boys and Men of Color 10

ReferencesAlbarran, A. S., & Reich, S. M. (2014). Using Baby Books to Increase New Mothers’ Self-Efficacy and Improve Toddler Language Development. Infant and Child Development 23(4), 374–387.

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Brookings Institution (2015). Opportunity, Responsibility and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream. https://www.aei.org/wp-

content/uploads/2015/12/opportunity_responsibility_security_doar_strain_120315_FINAL.pdf.

Avellar, S., Dion, M. R., Clarkwest, A., Zaveri, H., Asheer, S., Borradaile, K., ... & Zukiewicz, M. (2011). Catalog of Research: Programs for Low-Income Fathers, (No. d17bbc7a248948009778bbd86a966d8f). Mathematica Policy Research. https://

ideas.repec.org/p/mpr/mprres/d17bbc7a248948009778bbd86a966d8f.html

Britto, P. R., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Griffin, T. M. (2006). “Maternal Reading and Teaching Patterns: Associations with School Readiness in Low-Income African American Families. Reading Research Quarterly 41(1), 68–89.

Brooks-Gunn, J., & Markman, L. B. (2005). The Contribution of Parenting to Ethnic and Racial Gaps in School Readiness. Future of Children 15(1), 139–168.

Cabrera, N. J., Mincy, R. M., and Um, H. (2017). “The Long-Reach of Fathers’ Earnings on Children’s Skills in Two-Parent Families.” Fragile Families Working Paper No. _________).

Cabrera, N. J., Ryan, R. M., Mitchell, S. J., Shannon, J. D., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (2008). “Low-Income, Nonresident Father Involvement with Their Toddlers: Variation by Fathers’ Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Family Psychology 22(4), 643.

Chacko, A., Fabiano, G. A., Doctoroff, G. L., & Fortson, B. (2018). “Engaging Fathers in Effective Parenting for Preschool Children Using Shared Book Reading: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology 47(1),

79–93.

Dion, M. R. (2005). Healthy Marriage Programs: Learning What Works. Future of Children 15(2), 139–156.

Duncan, G. J., Ziol-Guest, K. M., & Kalil, A. (2010). “Early-Childhood Poverty and Adult Attainment, Behavior, and Health.” Child Development 81(1), 306–325.

Duursma, A. (2014). “The Effects of Fathers’ and Mothers’ Reading to Their Children on Language Outcomes of Children Participating in Early Head Start in the United States.” Fathering: A Journal of Theory and Research about Men as Parents

12(3), 283–302.

Duursma, E., & Pan, Barbara, A. (2011). “Who’s Reading to Children in Low-Income Families? The Influence of Paternal, Maternal and Child Characteristics. Early Child Development and Care 181(9), 1163–1180.

Edin, K., Tach, L., & Mincy, R. (2009). “Claiming Fatherhood: Race and the Dynamics of Paternal Involvement among Unmarried Men. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621(1), 149–177.

Fagan, J., & Iglesias, A. (1999). “Father Involvement Program Effects on Fathers, Father Figures, and Their Head Start Children: A Quasi-Experimental Study. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 14(2), 243–269.

Iruka, I. U. (2017). “Predictors of Infant and Toddler Black Boys’ Early Learning: Seizing Opportunities and Minimizing Risks.” Infant Mental Health Journal 38(1), 128–142.

Malin, J. L., Cabrera, N. J., & Rowe, M. L. (2014). Low-Income Minority Mothers’ And Fathers’ Reading And Children's Interest: Longitudinal Contributions To Children's Receptive Vocabulary Skills. Early childhood research quarterly, 29(4),

425-432.

Malin, J. L., Karberg, E., Cabrera, N. J., Rowe, M., Cristaforo, T., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (2012). “Father–Toddler Communication in Low-Income Families: The Role of Paternal Education and Depressive Symptoms.” Family Science 3(3-4), 155–163.

Martinson, K., Trutko, J., Nightingale, D. S., Holcomb, P., & Barnow, B. (2007). The Implementation of the Partners for Fragile Families Demonstration Projects. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/

implementation-partners-fragile-families-demonstration-projects

Mincy, R. M., Cabrera, N. J., De la Cruz Toledo, E., and Um, H. (2018). The Long-Reach of Nonresident Fathers’ Financial Support on Children’s Skills in Fragile Families: Parental Investments, Family Processes, and Children’s Language Skills. Fragile

Families Working Paper No. ________).

Mincy, R. B., Jethwani, M., & Klempin, S. (2014). Failing Our Fathers: Confronting The Crisis Of Economically Vulnerable Nonresident Fathers. New York, Oxford University Press.

Mincy, R., Pouncy, H., & Zilanawala, A. (2016). Race, Romance and Nonresident Father Involvement Resilience: Differences by Types of Involvement. Fragile Families Working Paper No. WP16-05-FF). https://fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/sites/

fragilefamilies/files/wp16-05-ff.pdf.

Panter-Brick, C., Burgess, A., Eggerman, M., McAllister, F., Pruett, K., & Leckman, J. F. (2014). “Practitioner Review: Engaging Fathers—Recommendations for a Game Change in Parenting Interventions Based on a Systematic Review of the Global

Evidence.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 55(11), 1187–1212.

Rowe, M. L., Coker, D., & Pan, B. A. (2004). “A Comparison of Fathers’ and Mothers’ Talk to Toddlers in Low-Income Families.” Social Development 13(2), 278–291.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Child Support Fact Sheet Series No. 4. (2011). Promoting Child Well-Being and Family Self-Sufficiency: Economic Stability. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/

files/ocse/economic_stability.pdf.

Whitehurst, G. J., & Lonigan, C. J. (1998). “Child Development and Emergent Literacy.” Child Development 69(3), 848–872.

Wood, R. G., Moore, Q., Clarkwest, A., Killewald, A., & Monahan, S. (2012). The Long-Term Effects of Building Strong Families: A Relationship Skills Education Program for Unmarried Parents. OPRE Report 2012-28A. Washington, DC: Office of

Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (OPRE). https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/bsf_36_mo_impact_report.pdf.

RISE for Boys and Men of Color

www.risebmoc.org

RISE is a joint initiative co-led by Equal Measure and the

University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.