Why Fathers’ Parenting Time Matters: Lessons from the Research
Georgia, like much of the nation, has worked hard to build systems that compel fathers’ financial responsibility. Yet the research keeps telling us what families already know. When courts and agencies help fathers secure safe, structured parenting time, children gain stability, parents reduce conflict, and child support outcomes improve.
Parenting time is not a sentimental add-on to the “real” work of family court. It is the architecture that holds the whole structure up.
SB 404 Moves Georgia Forward But Leaves Too Many Dads Behind
SB 404 offers a stronger starting point for custody decisions. It may reduce conflict in some cases. It may create more predictable outcomes for some children. It may help shift the culture in family court toward expecting both parents to be involved.
However, it does not address legitimation — the structural barrier that keeps so many fathers from being able to participate in the custody process at all.
If we celebrate SB 404 without naming this gap, we risk creating a new narrative that sounds like justice while leaving an old injustice untouched.
What Active Fatherhood Teaches Boys and Girls About Masculinity
When fathers are engaged, boys are more likely to see nurturing as masculine, discipline as loving, and vulnerability as compatible with strength. Girls are more likely to see men as emotionally accessible and ethically grounded, not distant or transactional.
When boys lack healthy models of masculinity, the consequences ripple outward, affecting peer relationships, classroom dynamics, and future partnerships. When girls internalize distorted or limited images of men, that too shapes social cohesion and trust.
Fathers at the Center: I AM DAD PODCAST as a Blueprint for Healing, Hope, and Fatherhood
When we launched Season 4 of the I Am Dad Podcast, our goal wasn’t just to fill a playlist. It was to fill a gap in the national conversation, where the voices of fathers, particularly Black and Brown fathers, are too often missing. What emerged wasn’t just talk. It was truth-telling and testimony.
This past season, we welcomed an extraordinary lineup of guests who brought both expertise and vulnerability. From NFL legends to researchers, from trauma survivors to policy shapers, each conversation peeled back a layer of what it means to father in a society that makes that job harder than it needs to be.
Family Resource Centers, Fathers, and the Critical Work of Child Welfare
West Virginia has begun to reframe its approach to family support, using a powerful metaphor: catching families before they fall into the river rather than pulling them out downstream. That upstream vision naturally creates space for father engagement. It recognizes that family stabilization cannot occur while ignoring half of a child’s parental ecosystem.
2025 Was the Year Fatherhood Stopped Asking for Permission
Fatherhood is a movement stepping fully into its responsibility.
For more than two decades, Fathers Incorporated has operated from a simple truth: Fatherhood is not a private issue confined to households but a public good with societal consequences. In 2025, that belief was no longer aspirational. It was measurable.
Georgia Makes Fathers Pay Before Letting Them Parent: What the State’s Legitimation Report Finally Admits
The report is candid in naming Georgia’s legitimation process as confusing, burdensome, and demoralizing for many families. Recommendations such as streamlining uncontested cases, standardizing forms, encouraging mediation, expanding legitimation stations, and addressing judicial backlogs are pragmatic and actionable.
At the same time, the report has clear limitations. For example, it fails to create concrete pathways for reconciling biological and legal parenthood, collecting reliable data, and advancing awareness and education.
The Current Conversation on Mentorship for Boys Excludes Responsible Fatherhood
Any national conversation about boys and men that does not center fatherhood risks misdiagnosing the problem and misdirecting the response.
Framing mentorship as a corrective for father absence must be handled with care. When mentoring programs are positioned as replacements for fathers rather than complements to parental involvement, they unintentionally reinforce a deficit narrative.
This Father Should Never Have Needed a Lawyer: Baby Chance and Georgia’s Outdated Legitimation Laws
This case exposes what many fathers in Georgia already know. The legitimation process does not merely clarify parentage; it withholds parental rights until proven in court. It assumes absence instead of responsibility. It treats biological fatherhood as conditional rather than inherent.
The danger of that assumption becomes painfully clear when tragedy strikes.
How the 2024 Squatters Act Continues to Impact Fathers and Families in Georgia
Housing remains at the top of Georgia’s challenges, especially in Atlanta, where rents rise faster than wages and where fathers with limited income face shrinking options. The Squatters Act didn’t create this reality, but it did create new urgency.
The Force Still Moves: One Year Without Lawrence Wilbon
Lawrence Wilbon reminded us that love is a verb. Faith, he’d say, was something you walked out with your boots on the ground. And from lifting fathers to strengthening families, from building systems to planting seeds, Lawrence gave everything he had, without asking anything in return.
A Dad’s First Big Assignment: Supporting Mom Through Pregnancy, Delivery, and Postpartum
When fathers learn, plan, advocate, and rest with intention, moms recover better, babies thrive, and the whole house breathes easier.
Show up. Ask questions. Carry the load you can carry. Guard the rest and watch the signs. Put the helplines in your phone. And remember, your baby doesn’t need a perfect dad — your baby needs you, present and prepared.
The Top Five Traits of Successful Co-Parenting Relationships
Co-parenting is one of the most significant tests of maturity, love, and patience that two adults can undertake. It requires shifting the focus from what ended between the parents to what must continue for the child.
Over time, through thousands of conversations with fathers and families, we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. The five elements detailed here consistently stand out as markers of successful co-parenting relationships.
The Missing Conversation Between Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Public Health
For nearly two decades, we’ve worked to reframe fatherhood not as a social category separate from public and community health but as its foundation. When fathers thrive, families thrive, and when families thrive, entire neighborhoods stabilize.
We can’t separate men’s health from fatherhood any more than we can separate a heartbeat from a body. The emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness of men is a public health issue. It influences how children are raised, how relationships survive, and how communities heal.
A Responsible Fatherhood Field Response to the New Executive Order on Child Welfare
The “Fostering the Future for American Children and Families” Executive Order’s emphasis on improving data systems, accelerating permanency, and strengthening partnerships creates an opening to bring fathers and paternal kin out of the margins. This is strategic. When fathers are engaged early, when their families are considered as viable kinship placements, and when agencies have the training to do this well, children experience less trauma, fewer moves, and faster pathways to safety and permanency.