On August 22, 1996, Congress signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) which transformed our welfare system by replacing AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) with TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). The thrust behind this legislation was to get people off welfare and back into the workforce, particularly single mothers.
In the heels of that reform, in 2001 Congress began to provide limited financial support for the Healthy Marriage Initiative which was established with the intention of helping "couples who choose to get married gain greater access to marriage education services that will enable them to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage."
A few years later, this initiative had grown considerably and garnered substantially more support. Thus, in 2005, Wade Horn, then Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, spoke before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about the need to expand the programs Healthy Marriage Initiative on a massive scale alongside Responsible Fatherhood programs stating, "our proposal seeks to improve child well-being through programs aimed at encouraging responsible fatherhood and healthy marriages."
Already by 2005, Wade Horn was able to state that his agency, the Administration For Children and Families, was providing $200 million for programs aimed at promoting family formation and healthy marriage as well as $40 million for the support of responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage programs which he felt was necessary to stem the tide of fatherlessness and its destructive impact on children.
This decision to spend millions and millions of dollars to promote a particular lifestyle--marriage--represents one of the most extraordinary levels of social manipulation that the federal government has ever undertaken.
Two conservative think tanks--the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institute fully supported this ambitious effort. As representatives of the Heritage Foundation explained, "The erosion of marriage during the past four decades...lies at the heart of many of the social problems with which the government currently grapples." Further, the Heritage Foundation stated, "By fostering better life decisions and stronger relationship skills, marriage programs can increase child well-being and adult happiness and reduce child poverty and welfare dependence." (See "Backgrounder", March 26, 2004, by Robert E. Rector and Melissa G. Pardue). The initial budget supporters proposed for this program was $300 million per year.
At the same time that these Healthy Marriage programs were instituted throughout the country, the Federal government took steps to measure whether they led to the kinds of positive results which were greatly anticipated. Thus, in 2003, the government began the "Supporting Healthy Marriage Project" to conduct research on the success of these programs. These research efforts were headed by the New York City based Manpower Development Research Corporation (MDRC) and Abt Associates.
As a point of interest, according to USASpending.gov, from 2009 to 2012 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services paid $30 million to MDRC for their research on the Healthy Marriage Initiative, and that is only for one segment of the time they spent on this project. The actual report on their results came out in January 2014.
So, what were the results of the study?
Basically, the results indicated that the Healthy Marriage Initiative had no significant effects on the families throughout America despite the massive expenditure of resources that it represented. The complete text of the Study's key results appears below:
Key Findings
• SHM did not lead more couples to stay together.
• SHM produced a consistent pattern of sustained small positive effects on couples’ relation-ships. Compared with the control group at 30 months, the program group reported higher levels of marital happiness; lower levels of marital distress and infidelity; greater warmth, support, and positive communication; and less antagonistic and hostile behaviors in their interactions with their spouses. The program group also reported experiencing less psychological abuse than the control group. These impacts are similar to the impacts reported at 12 months. Reports of physical assault at 30 months were not prevalent and were not significantly affected by SHM.
• SHM reduced women’s feelings of sadness and anxiety, but it did not significantly affect the outcome for men at 30 months. While the impact for women is small, the improvement is of interest because parental distress is linked with less positive parenting and with increased be-havior problems for children.
• SHM had little effect on indicators of coparenting, parenting, or child well-being. Of the outcomes examined, only a few of the impact estimates are significant. Moreover, the magnitudes of these impacts are very small, and the results did not remain statistically significant after additional statistical tests were conducted to adjust for the number of outcomes examined.
Overall, SHM was well implemented, but it was fairly expensive to operate, and it did not achieve some of its central objectives –– increasing the likelihood that parents stayed together or measurably benefiting children living in such households. As policymakers consider possible future directions for programs that support marriage and relationships, it will be important to focus on how best to target services to those most likely to benefit, which aspects of SHM should be included in future tests, and which should be altered in an effort to bolster program impacts and reduce costs.
Despite these miserable results, the Department of Health and Human Services intends to continue these grants throughout the year 2014 and possibly through 2015 as well.
Why?
According to the information sheet on this subject, "ACF decided to continue the current grantees for an additional year in order to increase the consistency and stability in programs. The current grantees are making good progress toward achieving program goals and an additional year will enable them to increase service provision, including employment and career advancement. In addition, an additional one-year continuation grant would enhance The Parents and Children together (PACT) and Fatherhood Re-entry ("re-entry" is doublespeak for criminals who are being released from jail) research evaluations of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) programs currently underway by enabling more refined analysis and findings."
In other words, they intend to scramble through the pile of the unmitigated mess these programs represent and see if there is anything--anything that they can possibly find to rescue them from the judgment of their very own investigative team that the programs they created have failed miserably.
I was just checking to see how this may affect the State of Connecticut. From what I see there are no Healthy Marriage Grantees in the State of Connecticut for the year 2013. However, we do have one Responsible Fatherhood Grantee--Catholic Charities, Inc., of the Archdiocese of Hartford which received $800,000, and, from what I gather, has received a similar amount from the federal government on an annual basis for several years.
If anyone else has a comment on some of these numbers, I'd be interested in hearing it. This is not to say that other money isn't pouring into the State from other avenues.
Again, as I have commented in other blogs, what appears to be happening with the investment of millions of dollars in fatherhood programs from the federal government is the implementation of highly profitable custody switching schemes which has led to a striking rise in families headed by single fathers with sole custody of their children--hardly the result that these healthy marriage advocates were looking for!
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