The Louisiana Paternity Establishment Program (LAPEP) is a program of the Department of Children and Family Services and provides paternity establishment outreach, education, training, guidance, assessment, and technical assistance to birthing hospitals, local registrars, child support enforcement offices, community partners and parents. The program's focus is to promote voluntary paternity to ensure that both parents have legal rights and children receive the financial and emotional support that all children need and deserve.

LAPEP was created by the state of Louisiana, in response to a federal mandate, to make it easier for parents to acknowledge paternity voluntarily using simple in-hospital processes at the time of birth. The program also provides unmarried parents and married or recently divorced parents where a third-party biological father is involved with information and resources for more complicated paternity issues.

In the past two decades, LAPEP has assisted the state of Louisiana through enhancing the hospital-based paternity program and has increased the number and quality of voluntary acknowledgments completed in Louisiana’s birthing facilities. In 2019, 55% of the state's children were born to unmarried parents and paternity was voluntarily established for 73.3% of those children. This paternity establishment is a 20% increase from 15 years ago. Establishing paternity not only benefits children emotionally and financially, it also improves the self-sufficiency of unwed mothers, which reduces public assistance costs. Paternity establishment helps the state of Louisiana meet its federal performance measures to earn maximum incentive funds that can be used for a variety of social programs and services.