Tag: child welfare
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.
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.
Children Don’t Need Perfect Fathers. They Need Present Ones.
Making a difference to children must also mean making a difference to the fathers who love them. When we support fathers, we support children. When we help fathers navigate child support, employment, legitimation, parenting time, conflict, mental health, and co-parenting, we’re not simply serving men. We’re strengthening the circle around the child. We’re making it more possible for a child to be loved, guided, protected, and known by both parents.
The Fatherhood Dividend: What Happens When Fathers Are Included
When fathers are included, children gain. When children gain, families strengthen. When families strengthen, communities rise.
That’s the “fatherhood dividend” America can no longer afford to overlook.
It’s the measurable, human return that comes when fathers are recognized not as secondary parents but as essential contributors to child development, family stability, and community well-being.
A Passport Policy Won’t Fix Child Support’s Poverty Problem
The question isn’t whether child support should be paid. It should.
The better question is whether our policies are designed to produce payment, presence, and child well-being or debt, disconnection, and punishment.
This isn’t an argument against child support. It is an argument for a smarter child support system.
Fatherhood Is a Protective Factor, But Only When Safety Leads
Children have to be the anchor. Not adult pride. Not program numbers. Not public relations. Not whether dad feels validated or mom feels vindicated. The child’s well-being is the outcome. If the child is not safe, a healthy family cannot exist. But when the child is safe and there is a father who can be engaged responsibly, supported properly, and held accountable consistently, then fatherhood can become one of the strongest protective factors in that child’s life.
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.
The Maze of Fatherhood: Why Georgia Must Reform Legitimation Now
In Georgia, a child born to unmarried parents is not automatically granted the legal right to both parents. While this may come as a surprise to many, to the thousands of fathers served by Fathers Incorporated, it’s a harsh and often heartbreaking reality.
Child Support Awareness Month: A Look at How Child Support is Evolving (Webinar)
Wednesday, August 17, 2016 12:30 – 02:00 PM EDT August is Child Support Awareness Month. Register Here State and local child support offices are scheduling special events […]
National Foster Care Month Promotes Positive Connections Between Fathers and Their Children
The 2016 theme for the Children’s Bureau’s National Foster Care Month is “Honoring, Uniting, and Celebrating Families.” This year’s theme highlights the important benefits to children and […]
Serving and Engaging Fathers in Home Visiting Programs | Administration for Children and Families
Serving and Engaging Fathers in Home Visiting Programs | Administration for Children and Families