Welfare reform for absent fathers

Neither presidential candidate said much about poverty during the recent election, but the issue remains pressing. Liberals favor a guaranteed income for poor families, but that evades the central problem of these families — the fact that most of them are female-headed. Washington elites have for too long accepted that the collapse of marriage is a fait accompli that cannot be reversed. But it can. The new Trump administration must take steps to restore the presence of fathers, which in turn requires that they work regularly, as few now do.

Fathers, not mothers, are the real center of the family problem. Welfare reform in the 1990s drove many mothers to work and also subsidized their wages, thus reducing poverty. But the mothers responded only because work was required as a condition of aid. Merely to offer them work incentives or support services had not succeeded.

Meanwhile, the fathers who had left these families were largely ignored. Their impact has become thoroughly destructive. Most absent fathers of poor children do not hold jobs, and many join the gangs that dominate poor areas. Vendettas among gangs explain most of the murders occurring in major cities. But the killings are usually seen just as a crime issue. In fact, the damage to the next generation matters more.

Children grow up expecting to work only if they see their parents doing so. Even if the mother works, that does not excuse a nonworking father. The message he gives is that fathers who exploit mothers can get through life without working seriously at all.

Fatherless children typically do poorly in school and then in the workplace, and no government program has proven able to offset this. The left must accept that there is no way that public benefits, however lavish, can make poor female-headed families viable on their own. We cannot just ignore the fathers, as feminists and liberal lobby groups would like to do. Daddies who stick with the family and work regularly are indispensable to children’s futures. Only intact families can defeat entrenched poverty.

But for fathers to play this role, we need, in effect, welfare reform for men. It may seem that absent fathers, unlike welfare mothers, cannot be made to work, because they usually receive no public benefit that could be conditioned on work. Most absent fathers, however, are required to pay child support to the mother. Typically, only fathers with regular jobs pay these judgments reliably — what they owe is deducted from their paychecks, just like taxes.

But getting low-income fathers to work entails something more. As with the mothers, voluntary methods have failed. Offering the men work incentives, and even subsidized jobs, causes few to go to work and stay there. However, under state law, absent fathers who persistently fail to pay support can be put in jail.

Child support has to develop mandatory work programs to make the work test credible to nonpaying men, just as employment programs in welfare made those mothers get serious about work. Child-support defaulters must get and retain a private job or be assigned a job by the program — or go to jail. That is a stronger sanction than mere loss of a benefit. In response, many more absent fathers would go to work — or admit that they are already working off the books.

Once he is working steadily and paying his judgment, an absent father should receive a wage subsidy more commensurate with what a working single mother receives, because he is now helping to support the family. He would also stand a much better chance of visiting his children or — better yet — reentering the family as the spouse and father he ought to be.

The federal government funds about two-thirds of child support operations at the state and local level. It therefore could require local child support agencies to promote and enforce work by absent fathers. Serious work programs would have to be implemented and evaluated over several years. Only then could we see absent fathers leaving the gangs and the streets for regular jobs — and their children doing better in school. Society’s gaping wound from family collapse would at last begin to heal.

Admittedly, to promote and enforce work would be a major change for the child-support system. Those agencies have focused mainly on maximizing the collections they make from absent fathers, chiefly by locating fathers who are already working regularly and establishing their obligation to pay. To rebuild the family, however, requires attending to low-income fathers. Getting them working would also increase child support collections and thus cover much of the cost.

Child support would also have to abandon its recent emphasis on voluntary methods. Child support leaders in Washington have recently been mostly well-meaning people who have tried to get fathers to cooperate by offering them various services and TLC. Those programs have utterly failed. They reflect the liberal conviction that all the poor need to function better is the sort of indulgent treatment they never got as children.

Actually, what poor mothers and fathers need most is clearer expectations about what they must do to gain fuller membership in the society. Giving them more of anything without expectations does not accomplish that.

Lawrence M. Mead is a professor of politics at New York University.