Research/Document Library

Matching Opportunities to Obligations: Lessons for Child Support Reform from the Parents' Fair Share Pilot Phase

The Parents' Fair Share Demonstration (PFS) is a multi-site test of programs that require noncustodial parents (usually fathers) of children on welfare to participate in employment-related and other services when they are unemployed and unable to meet their child support obligations. PFS is the first large-scale effort to extend to noncustodial parents the vision of mutual obligations that has guided recent welfare reform efforts. Under this "new social contract," parents both mothers and fathers are expected to support their own children and to take steps to become self-sufficient, and government assumes responsibility for providing employment and training services and other supports to help them do so. However, until recently, this reciprocal approach applied only to custodial parents on welfare (usually single mothers). For noncustodial parents, there was a one-way obligation: to pay child support. By creating new opportunities to match the existing obligations facing noncustodial parents, PFS seeks to increase their earnings and living standards, to translate these earnings into increased child support payments, and, ultimately, to both improve the well-being of their children and reduce public welfare spending. This report describes the first stage of the Parents' Fair Share Demonstration: an 18- to 24-month pilot phase designed to test the operational feasibility of the PFS approach, to assess whether a full-scale evaluation of its effectiveness is warranted, and to learn more about the target population. The PFS pilot phase was supported by a consortium of private foundations (the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Northwest Area Foundation) and public agencies (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Labor). It was coordinated by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), a nonprofit organization that develops and evaluates programs designed to build the self-sufficiency of economically disadvantaged people. An initial feasibility study was seen as critical because successful implementation of PFS demands profound institutional change and close linkages between agencies charged with collecting child support and those that provide employment and training and other services to the disadvantaged. These two kinds of agencies have fundamentally different missions and little history of collaboration. MDRC's overall conclusion, based on data collected during more than a year of pilot operations in nine states, is positive: Although the pilot programs confronted a range of implementation issues, the PFS approach has proven to be operationally feasible and has shown sufficient promise to warrant a rigorous test of its impacts and cost-effectiveness. Thus, while continuing its efforts to strengthen the programs, MDRC recommended a full-scale evaluation, based on a random assignment research design, in a subset of the pilot states. The evaluation is beginning spring 1994.

Available online

http://fatherhood.hhs.gov/

Author(s)

Dan Bloom and Kay Sherwood

Date

April 1994

Publisher

Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.