Month: October 2026
Fatherhood Has Evolved. Our Systems Must Evolve With It.
In front of a room full of fathers, practitioners, government representatives, community organizations, and family-serving professionals, I leaned into discomfort and told them I’m tired of attending fatherhood relaunches.
I’ve watched committed leaders build initiatives, create momentum, develop relationships, and begin changing institutional culture, only to see the work fade when leadership changes, funding disappears, or priorities shift. Then, five or 10 years later, everybody comes back into another ballroom and “rediscovers” the importance of fathers.
Fathers Belong in Child Welfare Prevention Before Birth
Through a change to the Child Welfare Policy Manual, ACF recognizes expectant mothers and fathers as candidates for foster care prevention, including mental health care, substance use services, and parenting support.
I welcome the explicit inclusion of expectant fathers. Naming fathers in this announcement acknowledges that their well-being and readiness belong in the conversation about a child’s safety.
When Child Welfare Looks for Family, Does It Look for Dad’s Side?
When we overlook a father, we can overlook a child’s connection to grandparents, siblings, cousins, and other people whose care may matter enormously. Those relationships deserve careful assessment, especially when a child’s safety and stability are at stake.
How Federal Child Welfare Policies and Georgia’s Legitimation Law Impact Paternal Rights
Georgia’s diligent-search policy specifically includes noncustodial parents and both maternal and paternal relatives. It requires child welfare to implement these search efforts before initial foster care placement and documentation in Georgia SHINES.
Georgia should report how often fathers are identified and successfully contacted, how many need help resolving paternity or legitimation, whether they receive legal assistance, and how long those steps take. When a safe father is prepared to care for his child, the state should be able to explain how it assessed him, what assistance it provided, and why it reached its decision.
The Work Beneath the Surface: What We Heard at Our Fatherhood Program Graduation
What made these conversations at our Dad & Company graduation compelling wasn’t the difficulty of the experiences being described. It was the willingness of the people in the room to acknowledge that growth begins when we accept responsibility for how we respond.
The patience a father learns today may become the patience his child extends to someone decades from now. The emotional maturity demonstrated during a difficult parenting exchange may eventually become the model that child carries into adulthood.
Atlanta’s Paid Parental Leave Expansion Makes Fathers Visible
For much of our history, public systems have encountered Dad through child support enforcement, family court, custody disputes, incarceration, employment problems, or conflict with a co-parent. Far less often do systems meet him at the beginning, when he stands beside a crib, trying to figure out how to become the father his child needs.
Atlanta’s new policy doesn’t resolve every challenge working parents face. But it does place fathers inside the definition of caregiving rather than outside of it.
Co-Parenting Through Breast Cancer: How Fathers Can Show Up
A mother receives a breast cancer diagnosis. But the school bus still comes in the morning. Homework still needs to be checked. Children still need dinner, clean clothes, and someone to listen to how their day went. Life doesn’t pause because she needs treatment.
For parents who are no longer together, that reality raises an important question: How do we show up for each other when the relationship has changed, but the responsibility of parenting remains?
Does Philanthropy Have the Attention Span to Focus on Boys AND Men, Including Fathers?
A 15-year-old boy who needs a mentor, academic support, exposure to careers, and protection from justice-system involvement has a very different set of needs from a 38-year-old father trying to maintain employment, manage child support, repair a damaged co-parenting relationship, secure parenting time, address his mental health, find housing, and remain emotionally present for his children.
Funding adult men requires looking toward different outcomes. We should be asking whether men are becoming more economically stable, healthier, less socially isolated, better equipped to navigate institutions, more capable of sustaining healthy relationships, and, where they are fathers, more dependable, nurturing, responsible, and engaged parents.
What We Honor, Grows: Why Fathers Need Appreciation, Too
For years, conversations about fatherhood have understandably focused on getting fathers to step up. Stay. Provide. Engage. Participate. Parent. These expectations matter, but perhaps the next phase of the conversation also needs to ask, What happens when fathers do those things?
Do we notice? Do we acknowledge them? Do we encourage them? Do our children hear us affirm the good their fathers bring into their lives? Maybe sometimes fathers need somebody to notice what they are doing, instead of another conversation about what they aren’t doing.
The Census Can Count Households But Struggles to See Fathers
The Census Bureau has demonstrated that complicated family relationships can be measured when we decide they are worth measuring.
But America has spent decades making enormous policy decisions about fathers while too often measuring fathers indirectly through mothers, households, child support cases, marriage records, birth certificates, or children’s primary addresses. These data sources are valuable. But none, standing alone, constitutes a full measure of fatherhood.
We don’t believe there’s a shortage of fathers in the data; we believe there’s a shortage of questions capable of describing them.