RECOMMENDATIONS

The following list of recommendations should not be considered exhaustive. Further and more detailed recommendations will likely emerge as more research is conducted on the problems of young fathers.

• Information on job training should be made more widely available. Group participants were eager for any information about job training opportunities, including on-the-job training, vocational education and internships, but rarely knew where such information could be obtained. A well-publicized statewide clearinghouse system should be established for young people seeking information on opportunities in their own city or town.

• Information about paternity, child support, custody, welfare benefits and related issues should be provided to every young father in the state upon the birth of his child. Though some outreach efforts exist, they are clearly inadequate to reach all young fathers. Personalized, systematic and universal distribution of information is probably the best way to ensure that all young men get the facts they need regarding their rights and obligations as parents.

• Opportunities for peer involvement and counseling should be enhanced. Because so few group participants had found opportunities to connect with other young fathers, many of the young men felt gratified by the focus group experience. One 17-year-old even asked the Alliance to arrange a second group simply to give him another opportunity to talk about his feelings - a strong endorsement of the notion that support groups be made more widely available, and in those places where young fathers are most likely to congregate: high school, community college, local youth centers, job-training programs and the Department of Youth Services.

• Parenting classes for fathers should be made available in every community. Though most of the participants said they had learned the fundamentals - diaper-changing, for example - by taking care of siblings or other relatives, three-quarters nonetheless agreed that young fathers should take parenting classes. None, however, knew where such classes might be available, and none had attended one.

• Gender-specific outreach programs for young fathers should be established. Young fathers have always been harder to reach than young mothers, and services for them must be both aggressive and specific to their particular issues and problems. Services designed for young mothers, therefore, cannot simply be expanded to include young fathers unless structural changes are made and unless workers are trained to address the needs of young men. Furthermore, outreach efforts should focus on fathers not merely as financial contributors to their children's lives, but as vital emotional contributors as well.

• Transportation problems must be addressed as part of any overall strategy for strengthening father-child relationships. Unless he owns a car, a non-custodial young father can easily be separated from his child. In fact, transportation problems seem to have a greater impact on fathers' relationships with their children, whose whereabouts they cannot usually control, than on their ability to get a job, the location of which they can more or less choose. The problem is particularly acute in cities with limited public transportation services, and is presumably worst of all for young fathers living in areas of the state unserved by transit systems altogether.

• Pregnancy prevention efforts should more aggressively target young men. The Alliance did not ask focus group participants about their sexual practices, but it was clear from the discussions that few if any fathers had taken an active role in planning their girlfriends' pregnancies. That alone is reason to look more closely at pregnancy prevention programs in the state, and to make a more serious effort to focus such programs on adolescent boys as well as girls.
  
  

  Introduction | The Project | Their Own Fathers | Becoming A Father | Life With Children | Family Conflict | Violence and the Children | In School | Money | The Law | Housing | Jobs and Dream Jobs | Improving the System | Findings | Recommendations