When Navigating Social Commentary and Being of Service Collide

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

Some days I have to disconnect from the conversation to remember why I entered it. That may sound strange coming from someone whose work requires communication. I write, speak, host a podcast, post on social media, and lead an organization whose success depends, in part, on our ability to communicate ideas about responsible fatherhood, parenting, relationships, family well-being, policy, and culture. Being part of the public conversation isn’t separate from my work; it’s part of the work.

Still, I’m often troubled by what happens when the conversation becomes louder than the people we’re supposed to be serving.

Even while developing programming for fathers, reviewing fatherhood research, or thinking through a policy issue, I become aware of everything being said around me. Twitter. Instagram. Podcasts. Cable news. Blogs. Memes. Artificial intelligence. Political commentary. Fake accounts. Real people. People pretending to be real people. Friends. Strangers. Experts. And those who became experts in the hours between breakfast and lunch.

Everybody has an opinion. 

Of course, everybody has always had an opinion. That’s not new. What’s new is the machinery available to distribute those opinions, organize people around them, reward them, amplify them, monetize them, and sometimes transform them into what appears to be public consensus.

There was a time when most of us experienced public commentary through newspapers, radio broadcasts, the evening news, community meetings, or letters to the editor. You could disagree with Walter Cronkite from your living room, but Walter Cronkite couldn’t hear you. 

Today, disagreement has infrastructure.

You can find thousands of people who agree with almost anything. Once you find them, technology will help you find more of them. Algorithms learn what irritates us, excites us, frightens us, and affirms us. They learn what keeps our thumbs moving. And before long, what began as an opinion begins to feel like reality — simply because we encounter it repeatedly.

This concerns me because social commentary doesn’t stay on social media. It eventually shows up in our institutions, relationships, organizations, policies, workplaces, churches, schools, and homes. It shows up in the lives of children, in families, and in the work of people trying to serve them.

I’ve worked in responsible fatherhood for more than two decades. The language surrounding that work has changed many times. The fathers have changed. Programs have evolved. Research has expanded. Policy priorities have moved. Yet the fundamental work has remained remarkably consistent.

A father walks through our door carrying a set of circumstances. Maybe he needs employment. Maybe he’s struggling with child support. Maybe he’s trying to understand his legal relationship with his child. Maybe he and his child’s mother can’t communicate without conflict. Maybe he recently came home from incarceration. Maybe he’s worried about his mental health. Maybe he’s trying to understand how to support a pregnant partner. Maybe child welfare has entered his family’s life.

He doesn’t arrive as a social media topic. He arrives as a man. Usually, there’s a child somewhere in the middle of whatever brought him to us. That’s the constant. The public framing around him, however, can change dramatically.

I’ve watched responsible fatherhood move through waves of attention around incarcerated fathers and reentry, child support, economic mobility, maternal health, paternity, child welfare, foster care, shared parenting, and family structure. Many of those conversations are necessary. 

Some have led to meaningful innovation, but the danger comes when organizations chase the conversation rather than follow people’s needs. When the trending issue becomes the program. When the popular terminology becomes the strategy. When the current argument becomes the lens through which we suddenly interpret every family. When the work begins bending toward the narrative rather than the narrative bending toward what we’re learning from the work. That’s backwards.

One lesson I’ve learned from working with fathers is that human beings stubbornly refuse to fit into the categories we construct for them:

• A man may be angry about child support while simultaneously acknowledging that he hasn’t handled every responsibility well. 
• A mother may be frustrated with her child’s father while still wanting him to have a healthy relationship with their child. 
• A father may live somewhere else and remain deeply involved, while another may live inside the home and be emotionally unavailable. 
• A father can be hurt and still accountable. 
• A system can have legitimate responsibilities and still produce harmful consequences.

Families are complicated because people are complicated. Social commentary rarely rewards that kind of complexity. Complexity doesn’t travel as fast as outrage, and nuance doesn’t perform particularly well in arguments when everyone’s already chosen a side.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been cautious when someone tells me they want to play “devil’s advocate.” I understand the expression and the intellectual purpose behind challenging an argument. But I also recognize how easily we can become addicted to opposition itself. Some people are no longer challenging ideas to understand them better. They’re challenging ideas because combat has become the point.

Everything must have an opposing camp. Every thought requires a counterthought. Every good deed must immediately be interrogated for what it failed to accomplish. Someone announces what they’re trying to build, and almost immediately someone else responds by explaining how they should build it differently.

Sometimes that criticism is useful. Sometimes it’s simply commentary. There’s a difference between telling someone how the work should be done and accepting responsibility for doing the work. That distinction matters to me more as I get older.

The early part of my life was shaped by watching people do things. People organized neighborhoods, ran community programs, coached children, served food, opened churches, built organizations, mentored boys, and helped families. They protested when protest was required and then went back into communities afterward. Communication was connected to action.

Today, our technology creates the sensation of action — without requiring much action at all. A repost can feel like organizing. A comment can feel like advocacy. An argument can feel like leadership. A viral post can create the appearance that something fundamental has shifted in society when, somewhere away from the phone screen, a father is still trying to figure out how to see his child.

The distance between social commentary and personal reality is where I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable.

I recently picked up a devotional book I’d purchased after seeing it promoted online. (The irony of discovering it through the very ecosystem I’m wrestling with isn’t lost on me.) The devotional’s September 5 reading was about enemies. In one passage, it pointed toward Romans 12 and the instruction that if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they’re thirsty, give them something to drink. And then came language that stayed with me: Conquer evil by doing good.

I kept coming back to the doing. Someone could reasonably argue that speaking positively is doing good. Writing something thoughtful can be doing good. Challenging an injustice publicly can certainly contribute to good. But when I think about doing, I think about something more physical and personal: hand to hand, heart to heart, face to face.

I think about the staff member sitting with a father trying to make sense of paperwork he doesn’t understand. I think about the father who keeps coming to class after working all day. I think about the mother trying to figure out whether she can trust the man she’s raising a child with. I think about the case manager making another phone call. I think about the person who doesn’t have enough followers for an algorithm to consider them influential but whose work has changed hundreds of lives.

That’s doing. And doing changes the person doing the work.

You can’t serve people very long without having some of your certainty stripped away. Working closely with families teaches you that slogans are inadequate. 

The father who tells you his story may complicate an opinion you expressed confidently three weeks earlier. The mother sitting across from you may help you understand why a situation you described as simple is anything but simple. A policy that looks perfectly logical on paper can create an entirely different experience when you watch someone navigate it.

Real work makes you humble because people refuse to behave like talking points.

Social commentary, on the other hand, rewards certainty. It rewards people who “know” immediately who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s to blame, what should happen, and what everyone else ought to do about it. The person doing the work often has fewer easy answers. That isn’t a weakness. Sometimes uncertainty is evidence that you’ve been paying attention.

This is where those of us who lead organizations, serve communities, conduct research, develop policy, teach, preach, write, advocate, or organize have to establish some internal settlement about who gets to direct our work. We should listen to the public conversation, understand cultural shifts, pay attention to emerging research, hear criticism, and remain open to changing our minds. But we can’t allow our social consciousness to be rewritten every morning by whatever happened to cross our screen the night before.

The work must have deeper roots.

In responsible fatherhood, my anchor remains relatively simple: How do we increase fathers’ capacity to contribute safely, consistently, responsibly, and meaningfully to their children’s lives? The strategies may change. Research may sharpen our understanding. Policy may open new opportunities. New language may help us see old problems differently. But the people remain the reason.

There’s another challenge here that I’ve had to acknowledge personally. I’m not outside of this environment. I’m affected by it, too. I can wake up in the middle of the night, pick up my phone, scroll through a few posts, and unknowingly carry somebody else’s anger into the next morning. I can read enough commentary about fathers, men, families, race, politics, marriage, child support, parenting, or relationships that I begin responding mentally to arguments nobody in front of me has actually made.

That’s dangerous because the fathers and families I encounter deserve to meet me, not an accumulation of whatever has frustrated me online. The people we serve shouldn’t have to carry the emotional residue of our digital timelines.

That may be one of the disciplines leadership now requires. We have to know the difference between staying informed and becoming consumed, between listening and absorbing, and between participating in public discourse and allowing public discourse to distort our view of actual people.

Social commentary is commentary about what we believe we see happening in society. Personal reality is what happens when you sit across from a human being and hear what happened to them. The two sometimes overlap, but they’re not the same.

My forthcoming work, including my paper examining the language surrounding “fatherless,” continues to force me into this tension. Words matter. Definitions matter. And narratives matter because they eventually shape institutions, funding priorities, research questions, public perceptions, and policy. 

That’s why the mission of changing a narrative can’t simply be winning another argument. The purpose must be improving what people experience.

I’m still working through how to live in this environment, and I suspect many people who do community work are, too. Maybe the answer isn’t withdrawing from public discourse entirely. Silence can leave important spaces uncontested. The challenge is learning to participate without letting the commentary become our compass.

Our compass has to remain the people: the father sitting across from us, the mother trying to make a difficult family decision, the child whose future is being shaped by adults they didn’t choose and systems they didn’t design, and the family trying to become something healthier than what circumstances handed them.

Perhaps conquering what’s broken around us really does begin there. Not with publishing the perfect post, winning the argument, or defeating the other side, but with doing good — and then getting up tomorrow and doing it again.