Making Father Inclusive Practice happen...

This webpage is designed as an induction tool for staff involved in community health/welfare/counselling contexts and how their program/organisation can best involve fathers. Organisations and programs are encouraged to complete the whole FIP process to ensure best service delivery outcomes.

Cowan and Cowan (2009) identified four common issues in child protection research:

Despite recent interest in including fathers, research and services for families still primarily focus on mothers and children.
Children benefit when non-violent, non-abusive fathers play an active and positive role in their daily lives.
Family services should make greater efforts to include fathers in their intervention programs.
Interventions to improve parenting skills should include a focus on improving the quality of the relationship between parents (Cowan, 2009).

A meta-analysis of studies on attachment interventions designed to enhance positive parenting behaviours found that those that included fathers were, on average, more effective than those that involved mothers only. Including fathers in such interventions will be more effective if the unique value of father-child relationships is well understood and taken into account.

Unless there are contra-indicators of family violence, involvement of the fathers that surround the children’s lives will mainly have significant impacts for the mothers, children and men. Cowan’s (2005) research, using random allocation and a control group, indicates that involving fathers directly in family support, home visiting and couple programs resulted in the following:

Decreased post natal depression (Burgess, 2010)
Men were significantly more involved in the day to day care of their children (bathing, feeding, taking to the doctor, etc.) (Cowan, 2005)
Children experienced less behaviour problems and stress (Cowan, 2005)
Lower parenting stress (Cowan, 2005)
Lower personal adult distress (Cowan, 2005).

Significant forces that shape men's lives

There are many different forces that shape men's lives. These forces include level of income, experience of poverty, level of education, social determinants (conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age) community conflict, war and the impact of their own family's upbringing.

Practice experience indicates that men's lives:

Contain deep connections and desires for deeper relationships, even if they are less spoken about.
Are shaped by choices and consequences made throughout their life.
Often invest in outward focused expressions, rather than inward focused expressions.
Are best defined by generativity.

Watch the following segment and reflect on what connections are important in the lives of men you work with?

How can you build on discussions with men about these important connections, the choices and consequences they make and how generativity is expressed in their life?

1. Boy-man-father

Good boy good men;

More information about generativity.

What is generativity?

What makes generative fathering work?

What do fathers need?

Reflect on:

What is the purpose of your program?
What are the important micro-steps along the way that enable you to achieve your program's purpose?

Most fathers shy away from being in the spotlight when they are the primary focus of service delivery. An example of this is, play group programs appeal to a broader range of men when they are called a 'Kids and Dads playgroup' rather than 'Dads and Kids' Playgroup. This is due to their desire for a stronger connection with their child/ren is in the foreground of the title. While this may seem a small difference, language plays a significant difference in making good service delivery happen.

At the end of it, a range of programs with specific target groups is required to create strong families and communities.

Watch the following segment and reflect on how your program achieves its purpose.

2. Pre-natal class example

Separate programs or inclusive programs - including mothers as well as fathers?

There is currently a debate about if fathers' programs should be inclusive of partners or specifically only target the men.

Watch the following segment and reflect on the unspoken stories in men's lives:

Present at birth of the children
Voicing of their experience... expression of deep desires
Knowing how to have an impact on the key relationships in their life
Need for solo time with the children to develop their confidence

3. Separate-inclusive services

Father specific programs are often a step along the way to having programs for mothers and fathers. The specific focus of targeting men may enable them to develop their confidence in what is important for their family. Often with both parents together in the early stages of a group program, especially if underlying conflict already exists, one parent is more likely to dominate and one parent is likely to isolate their experience and understanding of what is happening in the family.

Also, many men do not know much about what other fathers experience, so providing some father specific programs, builds on this curiosity and the development of normalisation and proactive (rather than reactive) responses.

However at the end of the process, teamwork parenting needs to be the primary goal.

When is it good to have programs for all mothers and fathers and when do they need to be father specific?

What can services do?

Watch the following segment and reflect on:

The range of programs you use when working with men.
Importance of using gendered language rather than being gender neutral. An example of involving fathers in Primary Birth Visits, Lincolnshire, UK.
Complete the FIP Checklist. More information about the checklist.
Use the FIP logos on program advertising and your emails.
Review the free downloads section for useful tools.
Review the links page for useful tools.

4. What can services do?

Key messages for fathers

A key aspect is for practitioners to highlight to men the significance of the role they play in their family's life. Most men are not aware or trivialise this significance.