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OCSE Hispanic Forum

By: Frank Fajardo

On July 28 and 29, the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) convened its Fourth Annual National Hispanic Leadership Forum (Forum) in Washington, D.C., with representatives from state and local IV-D offices, national Hispanic/Latino organizations, and local community and faith-based organizations as well as representatives from other Administration for Children and Families programs. Commissioner Sherri Z. Heller provided program highlights and interacted with the participants on both days to obtain their views on both the successes of the child support enforcement system from the standpoint of the Hispanic/Latino community and the kinds of improvements that may be particularly helpful to Hispanic/Latino customers. Dr. Heller emphasized that her goal for the nation's child support program is for child support to be a reliable source of income for all families. To do this, the program needs to continue building on its successes relating to services to people with language and cultural differences. She told the participants that her experiences at the state level taught her that the best way to do this is to work closely with the kinds of organizations present at the Forum - those that have earned the trust and confidence of the communities that they serve.

The Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Dr. Wade Horn, hosted "A Conversation with the Assistant Secretary," in which he encouraged participants to exchange ideas on how to improve service delivery to Hispanic/Latino communities not only with respect to child support but also across ACF programs. Dr. Horn told the participants that his background as a child psychologist helps him to appreciate the importance of understanding the impact of language and cultural differences on providing meaningful and effective service to families. As a child psychologist, Dr. Horn learned that to have a positive impact on children's lives, human service professionals must work with both the community and the family. Through his emphasis on fostering partnerships with state and local governments as well as with community and faith-based organizations, Dr. Horn expects all ACF programs to be more responsive to the needs of each American family.

The heads of other ACF program offices, such as the Head Start, Child Care, Family and Youth Services and Children's Bureaus, the Office of Community Services, the Office of Family Assistance, and the Healthy Marriage Initiative, provided an "Update on the Administration's Initiatives and Possible Impact on the Hispanic/Latino Communities." These sessions provided a unique opportunity to exchange information and ideas about those programs, including possible funding opportunities, and for ACF program officials to get feedback on their programs' performance among Hispanic/Latino communities from the street-level.

Among the highlights of this year's Forum were presentations from a number of state child support agencies and other organizations as to recent projects aimed at improving child support service delivery to Hispanic/Latino populations.

In addition, each year, OCSE presents a progress report on recommendations from prior Forums. This year, the progress report included the early findings from the OCSE Survey of Best Practices on services to people with language and cultural differences. There were nine states surveyed (CA, FL, IL, MN, NM, NY, TX, WA, and WI). The report is expected to be finalized later this year.

The final half-day of the Forum was dedicated as an "Open Forum" session for participants to provide suggestions on how OCSE can assist state and local offices to improve outreach capacity and responsiveness to Hispanic/Latino communities for program initiatives and activities. The number of participants was limited to assure extensive interaction, with over 40 participants this year representing eleven state/local IV-D offices, ten National Latino/Hispanic Organizations, and nine local community and faith-based Organizations.

The National Latino/Hispanic Organizations included ASPIRA, MANA-National Latina Organization, SER-Jobs for Progress National, Inc., National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, National Council of La Raza (NCLR), National Organization for Advancement of Hispanics (NOAH), National League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Council of Latino Agencies, National Alliance for Hispanic Health, National Puerto Rican Coalition, and the National Community for Latino Leadership, (NCLL). The local community and faith-based organizations included the Committee for Hispanic Children & Families, New York, NY; Bienvenidos Family Services/National Latino Fatherhood & Family Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Arlington Community Action program, Arlington, VA; Texas Migrant Council, Laredo, TX; Latin American Youth Center, Washington, D.C.; National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, New York, NY; Public Strategies, Oklahoma City, OK; Mary's Center-Latino Women's Clinic, Washington, D.C.; and AYUDA-Clinica Legal Latina, Washington, D.C. In addition, the ACF Child Care Bureau supported the Forum by having staff and participation from the National Child Care Information Center, and from Child Care Aware (Consumer Education & Referral).

For more information about OCSE Hispanic Forums, please contact Frank Fajardo at OCSE (ffajardo@acf.hhs.gov).

Virginia Receives a Child Support Demonstration Grant from ACF

The state of Virginia was recently awarded a $990,000 grant by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to support a demonstration project to promote improvements in child support enforcement efforts.

The grant is awarded under the guidance of Section 1115 of the Social Security Act and requires the project be designed to improve the financial well-being of children or otherwise improve the operation of the child support enforcement program. Section 1115 of the Social Security Act authorizes states to conduct experimental, pilot or demonstration projects that are likely to assist in promoting the objectives of Title IV-D of the Social Security Act.

The project's main goals are to improve paternity establishment and increase financial support for children. In addition, it will attempt to promote stable family environments, improve couples' relationships, and reduce the potential for domestic violence. Project personnel will be required to screen participants for evidence of domestic violence and refer appropriate individuals for services.

"This project is part of a continuing effort to develop and test new strategies to support healthy marriage and parental relationships with the goals of improving the well-being of children, promoting paternity establishment, and making sure that children get both the emotional and the financial support that they need and deserve," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said.

Administration for Children and Families will conduct a comprehensive evaluation to assess the project's implementation and its impact on the families and children and on the operation of the Child Support Program. The four-year project, to be implemented in Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson, and York County, will leverage existing efforts in the area and be supplemented by private funding. This grant represents additional funding to the State and will not affect the amount of federal funds available to administer the child support program.

"With this project, we continue to add another dimension to the child support program" said Wade F. Horn, Ph.D., assistant secretary for children and families. "Children need all kinds of support, including the reassurance that comes from seeing their parents in a healthy relationship."

Excerpted from HHS News release dated July 14, 2003

Closing the Marriage Gap - Part II

By: Dr. Wade Horn

This is Part II of a two part series on healthy marriages highlighting "Closing the Marriage Gap," an article by Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Dr. Wade Horn which appeared in the June issue of Crisis Magazine. The article focuses on getting parents to see how a successful marriage benefits them as well as their children.

Three other programs with support in the literature are Couples Communication (CC), Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills (PAIRS), and Transitions to Parenthood. The CC format typically consists of four two-to three-hour sessions with small groups of married couples. A review of the literature on CC concluded that this intervention had a positive effect on relationship quality and that the positive impact is maintained in follow-ups one to three months later. A more recent meta-analysis of 16 studies on CC programs found moderate gains in relationship satisfaction and communication quality.

PAIRS is a psycho-educational course designed to enhance intimacy. The hallmark 120-hour skills-training program lasts four to five months. (Shorter programs are also available.) A study of 137 spouses who completed the PAIRS course found 76 percent of them reported significant gains in intimacy over the six- to eight-month follow-up period. Both husbands and wives were more satisfied with their marriages overall than before taking the course.

Transitions to Parenthood is a particularly promising approach targeting new parents. Because 30 to 60 percent of spouses report that their marriages are less satisfying after the birth of their first child, there's a need, as University of California-Berkeley psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan point out, for marriage and relationship intervention programs for expectant and new parents.

Becoming a Family, an early prototype of a parent support group, appears to be a powerful force in preventing divorce and increasing marital satisfaction. In a set of 72 couples expecting their first child, the Cowans randomly assigned 24 couples to a Becoming a Family intervention, 24 others were given both a pre-and post-baby assessment, and 24 more couples were assessed only post-baby. Eighteen months following birth, 12.5 percent of the non-program couples had divorced or separated, compared with none in the Becoming a Family group. Three-and-half years later, 16 percent of the non-program couples had separated or divorced, compared with just 4 percent of the Becoming a Family couples.

How do transition-to-parenthood programs work? The Cowans suggest that part of the answer is the "normalizing process" that takes place when couples in a group share the frustrations, joys, anxieties, and life changes that accompany a first birth. Couples with this kind of social support are less likely to define new relationship problems as evidence that their marriages are fundamentally defective and are more likely to assume that such experiences are a normal part of family life. In one feasibility study, 72 percent of pregnant women in an ethnically diverse, low-income sample recruited from an urban medical clinic expressed interest in taking part in such a program.

These marriage and parent education programs have concentrated mostly on interventions with individual couples. Other innovative, community-based strategies to improve marriages have not yet been rigorously evaluated and published in peer-reviewed journals, but preliminary evidence allows us to be cautiously hopeful that such civil-society and faith-based approaches may help strengthen marriages and reduce the number of children born to single mothers.

Marriage Savers, a nonprofit organization that aims to help local congregations support members of their own communities, has been a prominent advocate and originator of Community Marriage Policy (CMP). Under CMP, local clergy formally agree not to perform marriages without first requiring substantial marriage preparation. To help rebuild troubled marriages, they also promise to establish ongoing ministries such as stepfamily groups and marriage mentoring. The goal is to heighten community awareness of the problem of divorce, to prevent couples from "clergy shopping" to avoid premarital preparation, and to build effective marriage-saving services within communities of faith.

The Institute for Research and Evaluation is gathering data on CMP in the 160 American cities and counties where it exists, but a formal evaluation has not yet been released. Preliminary data indicate that several cities and counties that adopted CMP had notable declines in their divorce rates while others recorded no change, particularly if there was no follow-up training of mentor couples or ongoing staff.

First Things First (FTF), formed in 1997 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is another example of a civic marriage initiative that partners with community and religious organizations, foundations, government, corporations, schools, and individual leaders to achieve its family-oriented goals. FTF helped create a local Divorce Education and Parenting Plan pilot project, which the legislature has since expanded to include the entire state. FTF has also started an African-American Marriage Initiative in partnership with the Urban League and the Front Porch Alliance. Stephen Goldsmith, then-mayor of Indianapolis, founded the latter group in 1999 to help match churches and neighborhood groups with government resources and expertise.

Do these civic initiatives have an impact? More rigorous research and evaluation is certainly needed, but it's encouraging to note that between 1996 and 2000 the divorce rate in Hamilton County, Tennessee, dropped almost 17 percent. Since 1997, the number of unmarried teenagers having babies has dropped 21 percent (although the number of unmarried mothers as a whole unaccountably increased by 5 percent).

Evaluating community strategies is particularly challenging, given the multiplicity of variables. We need more research before we can isolate those components of government programs and policies most likely to increase the proportion of children growing up in healthy, intact families. At the same time, it's clear we know a lot more about how to design and implement successful marriage programs than we knew about how to prevent teen pregnancy when the government first launched those programs. Eventually, rigorous evaluations of such government-funded prevention programs identified what actually worked to reduce the number of teen pregnancies.

Effective programs share several common features, including this one: They send a clear message. What worked to help reduce the number of teenage pregnancies was talking with teens about how and why they should avoid premarital sex.

When it comes to marriage education, we start from a much higher base of knowledge about what works, but we certainly envision a similar process: launching demonstration projects based on current knowledge and evaluating these programs to find out what works best. And the message will be clear: A healthy marriage makes a big difference to both parents and children. There's every reason to believe that discussing strategies for sustaining such a marriage will have a positive impact.

And really, there's no downside to launching such projects. To date, a large body of literature shows that most young couples like and enjoy these programs. To take one example, in a 1995 national study by the Center for Marriage and the Family at Creighton University, which examined the impact of marriage preparation on 1,235 Catholic couples, 80 percent of those surveyed in the first four years of marriage agreed that the preparation had indeed been valuable. This result is especially interesting because the participants were not self-selected; marriage preparation in the Catholic Church is mandatory.

Moreover, many currently cohabiting but unmarried parents show a strong interest in establishing healthy marriages. According to a Fragile Families and Child Well-Being study, half of all unmarried urban mothers are living with the baby's father at the time of birth. Another one-third are romantically involved with their baby's father but not living with him. Two-thirds of unmarried new mothers agree that it's better for children if their parents are married. Seventy-three percent of them say there's at least a 50-50 chance they'll marry their baby's father; one-third indicate they almost certainly will.

Nor are all fathers of children born out of wedlock such unlikely marriage prospects as stereotypes suggest: 66 percent of urban unwed fathers have at least a high school diploma; 59 percent have household incomes above the poverty line; just 10 percent have a drug or alcohol problem.

Certainly many new unwed parents, the majority of whom fall at the low end of the income scale, are potential candidates for marriage programs. In a representative statewide survey, 72 percent of Oklahoma adults who received welfare, food stamps, or Medicaid said they would consider using marriage education services, compared with 64 percent of adults who never received such aid. Eighty-eight percent of aid recipients agreed that a statewide initiative to promote marriage and reduce divorce was a good idea, compared with 84 percent of Oklahoma adults who never received government aid. We don't know as much as we'd like about how to help at-risk couples create healthy marriages, but that must not stop us from taking action. The need is there, and it's time to close the marriage gap between rich and poor. People who care about the future of this society-about social equality, about fighting poverty, about the welfare of our children- cannot sit idly by as the marriage gap grows wider. We have enough solid empirical evidence to make a preemptive strike and begin launching marriage demonstration programs right now.

The poor want and deserve good, healthy marriages as much as the wealthy. A truly just society cannot let the powerful social and economic advantages of a good marriage become just another middle-class entitlement. Reprinted with permission from CRISIS (www.crisismagazine.com).

Keith Bassett Retires

Keith Bassett is retiring. We would like to wish him well in his new journey in life. Thank you Keith for the many years you contributed to the Office of Child Support Enforcement and especially for he outstanding job you did as Director of the Office of Audit.

Alaska Certified

The Alaska Child Support Enforcement Agency, Northern Support through Automated Resources (NSTAR), was certified as meeting the automation requirements of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Alaska is the twenty-second state to be PRWORA certified.

Florida Outreach Materials in Community Languages

Linguistic differences pose a real challenge for hospital staff who explain the voluntary acknowledgement of paternity opportunity. In Florida, many of the state's materials, including brochures and videos, are available in Spanish and English. However, the language needs of the growing Haitian community were not being met. Haitians were not able to understand the rights, responsibilities and benefits of acknowledgement because explanatory materials have not been available in their language. Moreover, a quick demographic analysis revealed that the majority of the Haitians in Florida were of child-bearing years. As a result, the brochures have been translated into Haitian Creole; the video is scheduled to be dubbed into Creole.

After the Creole translations were completed, the translator suggested that the materials be translated into French, too. After researching the language patterns of Haitians in Florida, the state learned that some Haitians are literate in Haitian Creole while others only read French. Plans are underway to translate the same brochures into French; it is not necessary to dub the video in French as all Haitians speak Creole.

For questions, please contact Lynne Holzapfel, Florida Department of Revenue, Child Support Enforcement, at 850-921-8413.