The federal government invests about $150 million per year in Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programs, the latter of which aim to help fathers strengthen relationships with their children, romantic partners, or coparents; enhance their parenting skills; and improve their economic stability. Existing evidence documents mixed effects of fatherhood programs that vary widely across different studies and are modest on average. For that reason, there is interest in identifying which features of fatherhood programs—or core components—are most strongly associated with success. Doing so can help practitioners identify how best to strengthen fatherhood programs so that they yield larger positive benefits for fathers and their families.

This report summarizes findings from a meta-analysis that was conducted to identify core components of fatherhood programs. Although the components identified in the meta-analysis are intended to be tested in later trials, the components identified in this report might also be useful as targets for program-improvement efforts.

• Overall, fatherhood programs had small and statistically significant positive impacts on outcomes related to parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, father well-being, and economic stability.
   
• Programs that delivered content primarily in individual formats had larger impacts on all target outcome domains.
   
• Programs that included content focused on parenting knowledge and skills or the role of fathers and their responsibilities tended to have larger impacts on outcomes related to parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, and father well-being.
   
• Studies of programs that provided fathers with on-the-job training and job-related education or career guidance had larger impacts on fathers’ economic stability.
   
• Studies that reported implementation problems tended to have smaller impacts on economic stability than studies that did not report implementation problems.
   
• There were some contextual factors associated with variation in program impacts. For example, studies with more homogeneous samples in terms of race or ethnicity (regardless of the particular racial/ethnic group) tended to have larger impacts than studies with more heterogeneous groups.
   
• Randomized controlled trials tended to have smaller impacts than quasi-experimental designs on outcomes related to parenting knowledge and skills, father well-being, and healthy relationships with coparents, but had larger impacts than quasi-experimental designs on economic stability outcomes.