Category: Fatherhood Work
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.
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.
Thirty Years After Welfare Reform (PRWORA), America Still Hasn’t Decided What It Believes About Fathers
Thirty years after PRWORA, the responsible fatherhood field has matured far beyond its original policy frame. The work is no longer simply about helping men pay child support. It’s about helping fathers become emotionally steady, legally informed, economically stable, relationally healthier, and more consistently connected to their children.
It’s about strengthening the whole family system without erasing mothers, ignoring safety, or romanticizing father involvement where harm is present. It’s about establishing the conditions for fathers to contribute to child well-being in financial, emotional, social, educational, and protective ways.
Unfortunately, our funding systems haven’t fully caught up to that truth.
When Navigating Social Commentary and Being of Service Collide
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.
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.
When Child Support Doesn’t Reach the Child
A new report examines child support “pass-through,” a policy that determines whether child support collected from a noncustodial parent actually reaches a family receiving TANF.
Federal law generally requires custodial parents receiving TANF to cooperate with the child support program and assign certain rights to those funds to the state. The state can then retain collections (sharing a portion with the federal government) to recover the cost of public assistance. The technical term is “cost recovery.”
The language sounds almost clinical. Cooperation. Assignment. Distribution. Cost recovery. Pass-through. But underneath those words is a fairly simple question: When a parent pays money intended to support a child, who should get it?
What Does Cohabitation Data Tell Us About Fathers and the Success Sequence?
The Success Sequence largely focuses on milestones — education, work, marriage, and children. But families live in the gray areas around those milestones. Dating becomes cohabitation. Cohabitation becomes marriage. Cohabitation sometimes becomes parenthood before marriage. Sometimes cohabitation ends. Sometimes marriage ends. Sometimes two people stop being romantic partners but remain parents for the rest of their lives. Sometimes another partner enters the family system.
The work of fatherhood often happens inside those transitions.
Where Does the Success Sequence Leave Everyone Else?
The traditional Success Sequence is largely prospective. It tells someone standing at the beginning of adulthood: Here are decisions that may increase your likelihood of economic stability.
Fatherhood and family-strengthening work is often responsive. We meet people after some of those decisions have already been made. The question is no longer simply: “What sequence should you follow?” It becomes: “Given where you are today, what decisions can move you toward greater stability tomorrow?”
Success can’t simply be a reward for people who made every decision in the right order. It must also be something people can move toward from wherever they are.
AI Can Write a Legal Motion, But Can’t Guarantee a Father Gets to See His Child
Today, a father with a smartphone can ask an AI system to explain a child support order, translate legal language into plain English, organize a timeline, identify questions to ask an attorney, or produce something that looks remarkably like a legal motion. What once required hours of research, a knowledgeable advocate, or hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal assistance can sometimes appear on a screen in seconds.
That can sound like access to justice, but a fascinating new paper suggests we should be more careful about what we call access.
Passion Isn’t a Business Plan: What 36 Years in Nonprofits Taught Me About Serving
Over the years, Fathers Incorporated has operated through economic downturns, COVID-19, changing administrations, shifting federal priorities, fleeting philanthropic interests, the loss of key personnel, new technology, and evolving public conversations about fathers, families, race, gender, marriage, parenting, and social policy.
Our survival has never meant that we predicted every disruption. It meant that we built enough organizational muscle to adapt when disruption came.
That’s business. And business, in this context, isn’t a dirty word.
Maybe Fatherhood Should Feel Good, Too
We study dysfunction relentlessly. Conflict, absence, depression, arrears, poverty, trauma, violence, and disengagement all deserve our attention. But perhaps we should become equally curious about joy. What makes fathers feel alive?
Maybe flourishing should become something we measure. Maybe gratitude belongs in fatherhood programming. Maybe hope belongs in co-parenting education. Maybe one of the first questions we ask a father when he enters the room shouldn’t only be, “What problem brought you here?” Perhaps we should also ask him what is going right, what gave him joy this week, what his child did that made him smile. These questions won’t erase poverty, fix a court order, or eliminate conflict, but they do something just as necessary. They remind a man that his life is larger than the problem currently occupying it.
Why the Marriage Question Is Also a Fatherhood Question
Marriage and fatherhood can’t be treated as competing conversations. Marriage asks how men and women build a stable union. Responsible fatherhood asks how men remain accountable, nurturing, protective, emotionally present, and economically responsible toward their children.
When these commitments exist inside a healthy marriage, they reinforce one another. A man isn’t simply living with the mother of his children. He has made a public covenant to share the labor, sacrifice, responsibility, and future of family life.
Fatherhood Advocacy Isn’t About Winning Against Mothers. It’s About Refusing to Lose Children.
The future of the fatherhood movement must be disciplined, compassionate, research-informed, and child-centered. It must be brave enough to challenge courts, child support systems, child welfare agencies, legislatures, and even fatherhood programs themselves.
The measure of our fatherhood advocacy won’t be how loudly we defend fatherhood, but how effectively we build systems in which children no longer have to lose a parent for adults to feel that justice has been served.
The Moments Matter: When Co-Parenting Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
The inaugural Dad & Company class helped us move this idea from paper into practice, and participants came even before we had outcomes to show them. They trusted a vision while we were still learning how to fully explain it. That’s why I told them they weren’t simply the first graduates. They were the first standard.
History remembers firsts because firsts become reference points. They establish direction. They create tradition. They shape identity. Being first, however, isn’t only an honor. It’s a responsibility.
Family Synergy Begins When Fathers Stop Being Treated as Optional
We regularly use the language of family while designing research, programs, clinics, schools, and policies exclusively around the mother-child relationship. The father is then added as an outreach strategy, a special population, or optional participant. We invite him into a structure that was never designed with him in mind. Then, when he doesn’t immediately feel that he belongs, we describe him as difficult to engage.
The work ahead isn’t simply to place more fathers inside existing family programs. It’s to reconsider the architecture of those programs.