Healthy Families: Assessing the Role of Public Policies
An IRP Seminar Series

During the 2008–2009 academic year, leading scholars will visit IRP to consider a broad range of policy interventions to support healthy families and challenges in their design and evaluation as part of the Institute’s seminar series Healthy Families: Assessing the Role of Public Policies.

The Healthy Families series is motivated by the need to advance and inform our understanding of healthy families, identify effective policies that promote healthy families, and address the challenges facing children and adults in families under stress. Hence, IRP is pursuing an agenda designed to address outstanding issues central to supporting healthy families.

The series will include seminars on the way that poor job outcomes for low-educated, especially minority, men affects their marriage ability and partnership prospects; a summary of the evidence from a career academies experiment and its implications for marriage; the role of policy and fathers in complex families; healthy families and policies that promote good child outcomes; child support policies that support healthy families; and policies for fathers in complex families and fathers’ roles in at-risk families.

Thursdays, 12:15-1:30 p.m., 8417 Social Science Building

September 18, 2008

Improving Labor Market Outcomes and Transitions to Adulthood: Evidence from Career Academies
James Kemple, Director of the K-12 Education Policy Area, MDRC
[PowerPoint Presentation available in PDF format]

Monday, November 10, 2008

Vanishing Dreams: A 15 Year Reappraisal
Andrew Sum, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University

February 5, 2009

Please note: This seminar has been rescheduled for April 2, 2009
Fragile Fathers: The Meaning of Family for Low-Income Unmarried Urban Men
Kathryn Edin, Professor of Public Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School

February 12, 2009

Healthy Marriage: What Is it, and Why Does it Matter?"
Kristin Anderson Moore, Senior Scholar & Program Area Director, Child Trends

March 26, 2009

Is Child Support the Problem or Solution?
Maria Cancian, Professor of Public Affairs and Social Work, and IRP Affiliate, University of Wisconsin–Madison

April 2, 2009

Fragile Fathers: The Meaning of Family for Low-Income Unmarried Urban Men
Kathryn Edin, Professor of Public Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School

April 16, 2009

Family Instability and Child Outcomes
Sara McLanahan, William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University