New Fatherhood Initiative Leaves Some Dads in the Cold

"What's up, man?"

It's rush hour on Beverly Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Cars whiz past noisily as a man strolls into a Latino community center and extends a warm greeting to his companeros. A few more guys soon wander in and plunk themselves on chairs and couches that form a circle, helping themselves to iced tea and pretzels on a tray.

Nestled in a row of storefront shops and offices, the Calmecac Youth Center offers an array of services to the surrounding community, among them educating young Latinos on STDs and birth control. At this moment, however, the talk is not about preventing pregnancy but rather being a good father. The center is the site of a class on fatherhood for Mexican-American men of a variety of ages, and it offers a window into recent efforts to improve fathering in America.

New to the group, Bill shares a story about his ex-girlfriend not allowing him to see his newborn baby, even when his son was ill for two weeks. Bill is a huge bear of a man who tears up soon into recounting his struggles, prompting another man in the group to hurry over with a box of tissues. Once, Bill says, he was in his car when the mother of his son pulled up next to him and announced with gleeful vengeance that she would never let him see his child. "I miss him. I miss his cry, even when he wakes up in the middle of the night," Bill says, an ache in his voice.

It's hard for young men and women fighting over the children of a short-lived relationship to maintain respect for each other, for the sake of their kids, but respect is the key value that teacher Armando Lawrence tries to hammer home. Lawrence's group is called Con Los Padres, and its goal is to make life better for children by getting their fathers involved in their lives in an ongoing, reliable way. His class takes 16 weeks to complete, and most of the men come voluntarily to improve their standing in custody disputes, although some attend under court order.

In his classes, Lawrence focuses on personal dignity and encourages men to embrace the wisdom of their ancient forefathers, the pre-Columbian Toltecs in Mexico. Lawrence talks a lot about love and trust, but he doesn't talk as much about marriage and nuclear family. In this way, Con Los Padres may be increasingly out of step with the new wave of fatherhood programs recently funded by the Bush Administration.

No fathers left behind?

This fall, the Bush Administration awarded $42 million in grants to nearly 100 fatherhood initiatives around the nation, the first in a five-year funding effort. While the fatherhood funding is injecting new life into a long-neglected yet promising area of social policy, it could potentially leave many fathers, such as those in Con Los Padres, in the cold. That's because many of the men in Con Los Padres never married or have long since broken up with the mother(s) of their children; some have children from new relationships. Meanwhile, socially conservative policymakers in Congress and the White House are fixated on promoting marriage and traditional family life. (The parent organization of Con Los Padres, Bienvenidos Family Services, did not apply for Bush grant money, and Lawrence declined to explain why.)

The Administration's fatherhood initiative will test a variety of programs over the next five years, with grant recipients offering services in marriage education, parenting skills and, to a lesser degree, job training. But marriage education is a popular approach, leaving many family and policy experts concerned.

Vicki Turetsky, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), has long argued against fatherhood initiatives that mainly promote marriage. Instead, she believes, programs need to reach out to men who are no longer romantically involved with the mother(s) of their children, and thus for whom matrimony is not a solution