When Child Support Doesn’t Reach the Child
A new report examines child support “pass-through,” a policy that determines whether child support collected from a noncustodial parent actually reaches a family receiving TANF.
Federal law generally requires custodial parents receiving TANF to cooperate with the child support program and assign certain rights to those funds to the state. The state can then retain collections (sharing a portion with the federal government) to recover the cost of public assistance. The technical term is “cost recovery.”
The language sounds almost clinical. Cooperation. Assignment. Distribution. Cost recovery. Pass-through. But underneath those words is a fairly simple question: When a parent pays money intended to support a child, who should get it?
What Does Cohabitation Data Tell Us About Fathers and the Success Sequence?
The Success Sequence largely focuses on milestones — education, work, marriage, and children. But families live in the gray areas around those milestones. Dating becomes cohabitation. Cohabitation becomes marriage. Cohabitation sometimes becomes parenthood before marriage. Sometimes cohabitation ends. Sometimes marriage ends. Sometimes two people stop being romantic partners but remain parents for the rest of their lives. Sometimes another partner enters the family system.
The work of fatherhood often happens inside those transitions.
The Work Needs You, But It Can’t Consume You
Self-care isn’t limited to vacations, massages, fishing trips, or quiet weekends. Sometimes self-care means scheduling the examination, confronting the diagnosis, taking the medication, changing what you eat, speaking with a therapist, addressing grief, protecting your sleep, or admitting that your body has been asking for help.
And for seasoned leaders, self-care must also include succession. We must learn how to care for the person carrying the vision and prepare the vision to outlive them.
Leaders can’t rest if they leave every decision, relationship, and idea inside their heads. We can’t step away if no one else understands the vision well enough to carry it forward.
AI Is My Parents’ DOS: What Happens When Age Meets Technological Evolution
Some people are asking whether AI should continue developing, as though humanity still has a realistic choice between an AI world and a non-AI world. We don’t. The more useful questions are, What kind of AI world are we going to build? Who will benefit? Who may be harmed? And what responsibility do institutions have to help people adapt?
Here’s why these questions matter to everyone regardless of age and why we all have a responsibility to learn about the powerful technology.
The Walk Is Only the Beginning: Why the 2026 Million Fathers March Matters
The 2026 Million Fathers March isn’t asking fathers merely to appear for a single event. It’s asking schools and communities to open doors, and it’s asking fathers to keep walking through them.
Forty-two hosts have already registered. Fifteen states and 34 cities are already represented. Thousands of fathers and father figures are projected to participate, and there is still room for hundreds of schools, organizations, districts, churches, community groups, and families to become part of what September 18 can represent.
Is Forgiveness in Fatherhood and Family Dead?
We’re living through a time when public life seems increasingly organized around accusation. We attack, cancel, blame, expose, and condemn. Loyalty has become conditional, disagreement is often treated as betrayal, and people are sometimes reduced to the worst thing they’ve ever said or done.
That spirit doesn’t remain confined to politics or social media. It follows us home. And family has always been one of the hardest places to practice forgiveness.
The Success Pathway: A Model for Moving Forward From Wherever You Are
The Success Sequence and this alternative — the Success Pathway — don’t have to compete. One can focus on prevention. The other can focus on progression.
For a 16-year-old, we can say, “Think carefully about education, employment, relationships, and when you become a parent. These decisions matter.” And for a 36-year-old father whose life did not unfold in that order, we can say, “Your decisions still matter.”
That may be one of the most important messages family-strengthening programs can offer. Your life isn’t over because the sequence wasn’t followed.
Where Does the Success Sequence Leave Everyone Else?
The traditional Success Sequence is largely prospective. It tells someone standing at the beginning of adulthood: Here are decisions that may increase your likelihood of economic stability.
Fatherhood and family-strengthening work is often responsive. We meet people after some of those decisions have already been made. The question is no longer simply: “What sequence should you follow?” It becomes: “Given where you are today, what decisions can move you toward greater stability tomorrow?”
Success can’t simply be a reward for people who made every decision in the right order. It must also be something people can move toward from wherever they are.
AI Can Write a Legal Motion, But Can’t Guarantee a Father Gets to See His Child
Today, a father with a smartphone can ask an AI system to explain a child support order, translate legal language into plain English, organize a timeline, identify questions to ask an attorney, or produce something that looks remarkably like a legal motion. What once required hours of research, a knowledgeable advocate, or hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal assistance can sometimes appear on a screen in seconds.
That can sound like access to justice, but a fascinating new paper suggests we should be more careful about what we call access.
Passion Isn’t a Business Plan: What 36 Years in Nonprofits Taught Me About Serving
Over the years, Fathers Incorporated has operated through economic downturns, COVID-19, changing administrations, shifting federal priorities, fleeting philanthropic interests, the loss of key personnel, new technology, and evolving public conversations about fathers, families, race, gender, marriage, parenting, and social policy.
Our survival has never meant that we predicted every disruption. It meant that we built enough organizational muscle to adapt when disruption came.
That’s business. And business, in this context, isn’t a dirty word.
Maybe Fatherhood Should Feel Good, Too
We study dysfunction relentlessly. Conflict, absence, depression, arrears, poverty, trauma, violence, and disengagement all deserve our attention. But perhaps we should become equally curious about joy. What makes fathers feel alive?
Maybe flourishing should become something we measure. Maybe gratitude belongs in fatherhood programming. Maybe hope belongs in co-parenting education. Maybe one of the first questions we ask a father when he enters the room shouldn’t only be, “What problem brought you here?” Perhaps we should also ask him what is going right, what gave him joy this week, what his child did that made him smile. These questions won’t erase poverty, fix a court order, or eliminate conflict, but they do something just as necessary. They remind a man that his life is larger than the problem currently occupying it.
When Supporting a Father Means Making Room for Him to Lead
Mothers and grandmothers often carry a great deal of responsibility within families. They may step in to protect children, solve problems, provide stability, and make sure nothing is overlooked. Their involvement is usually rooted in love and concern. However, even well-intentioned support can become interference when it doesn’t leave room for a father to develop his own parenting identity.
Our first “& Co” participant began to recognize the ways she had inadvertently blocked her son from becoming the best father he could be.
Before Their Names Were Called, Their Fathers Had Already Shown Up
The NBA called 30 names in the first round. Yet before Commissioner Silver called any of them, fathers had been calling those young men capable. They’d called them disciplined. They’d called them back to the gym. They’d called them higher than their doubts. They’d called them toward futures that existed first in the imagination of someone who loved them.
The 2026 NBA Draft didn’t suddenly create positive images of Black fatherhood. Those fathers had been there all along, making sacrifices beyond the camera’s reach.
And for one night, the frame finally became wide enough for America to see them.
Why the Marriage Question Is Also a Fatherhood Question
Marriage and fatherhood can’t be treated as competing conversations. Marriage asks how men and women build a stable union. Responsible fatherhood asks how men remain accountable, nurturing, protective, emotionally present, and economically responsible toward their children.
When these commitments exist inside a healthy marriage, they reinforce one another. A man isn’t simply living with the mother of his children. He has made a public covenant to share the labor, sacrifice, responsibility, and future of family life.
Fatherhood Advocacy Isn’t About Winning Against Mothers. It’s About Refusing to Lose Children.
The future of the fatherhood movement must be disciplined, compassionate, research-informed, and child-centered. It must be brave enough to challenge courts, child support systems, child welfare agencies, legislatures, and even fatherhood programs themselves.
The measure of our fatherhood advocacy won’t be how loudly we defend fatherhood, but how effectively we build systems in which children no longer have to lose a parent for adults to feel that justice has been served.