You Can’t Close the Minority Health Gap While Ignoring Fathers

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO,  Fathers Incorporated

Every April, National Minority Health Month invites the country to talk about health disparities, disease prevention, and what it will take to improve outcomes in communities carrying unequal burdens. 

This year, federal message focuses on preventing and reversing chronic disease and improving measurable health outcomes. This conversation is necessary, but if it never fully reaches fathers, then it never fully reaches families. The health gap will remain open as long as we keep treating men, especially Black and Brown fathers, as though they sit outside the circle of family health.

We must expand how we talk about minority health and address it beyond exam rooms, emergency departments, and public health campaigns. We need to consider minority health at home, too, and pay attention to:

• the blood pressure readings fathers ignore because he’s busy holding life together
• the untreated stress that becomes irritability, silence, distance, or collapse
• the depression that goes unnamed because too many men have been taught that endurance is the only acceptable language 

The Office of Minority Health (OMH) itself makes plain that many of the forces shaping health happen outside the health care system — through income, education, housing, food access, and more. 

This perspective should push us to see fathers not as a side issue, but as part of the frontline.

The numbers tell a sobering story. According to OMH, the average life expectancy at birth for Black Americans in 2023 was 74 years, but for Black males it was 70.3 years. In 2022, Black Americans were also 35% more likely than the overall U.S. population to die from major heart and blood vessel diseases and 78% more likely to die from diabetes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that high blood pressure remains more common among non-Hispanic Black adults than any other major racial or ethnic group, and that men have higher rates than women. 

Mental health belongs in this discussion, too. OMH says that in 2024, Black/African American adults were 36% less likely than U.S. adults overall to have received mental health treatment in the past year. This should disturb all of us. When suffering goes untreated, families often feel it before systems ever measure it. A man’s anxiety can become agitation in the home. His depression can become emotional absence. His exhaustion can erode patience, communication, and trust. 

We can’t keep asking fathers to be stable anchors in unstable waters while refusing to confront what those waters are doing to them.

Father Involvement and Minority Health 

And this is where the argument becomes larger than men alone. Father involvement has long been associated with positive child outcomes. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has noted that father involvement in early childhood is associated with positive developmental and psychological outcomes over time. CDC materials similarly note that increased father involvement is associated with positive outcomes for children and that fathers have a special opportunity to support the health and well-being of their children. 

If father presence matters, then father health matters. If we celebrate engaged fathers when children thrive, then we must also care whether those fathers are healthy enough to stay engaged.

This means we can’t reduce National Minority Health Month to broad calls for awareness. 

We need prevention strategies that go where fathers actually are. Barbershops. Churches. Job sites. Recreation centers. Fatherhood programs. Community colleges. Reentry spaces. Pediatric waiting rooms. We need health systems to stop treating men as difficult to reach and start admitting that many systems have simply failed to reach out them in ways that are trusted, culturally grounded, and consistent.

Given the federal emphasis on prevention and measurable outcomes, this is the moment to make fathers visible in the design, not just in the language.

We should also stop acting as though a father’s health is his burden alone to solve. When a man lacks insurance, transportation, flexible work hours, or a provider who understands his reality, it’s not a character flaw. It’s a systems problem. We need to understand how his stress is intensified by unstable employment, neighborhood violence, family court pressure, child support debt, housing insecurity, and the constant demand to perform strength while swallowing fear.

Minority health policy that does not account for those realities will always underperform, because it will always be treating symptoms while leaving conditions intact.

The consequences of ignoring this are indefensible. You can’t close the minority health gap while ignoring fathers. You can’t build healthier communities while overlooking the men whose health shapes the emotional and economic climate of so many homes. And you can’t say you are fighting for better outcomes for children while refusing to invest in the health of the people those children depend on. 

If we want stronger families, then fathers must be included in minority health — not as an afterthought but as part of its strategy, its urgency, and its promise.