Tag: Fatherhood
Georgia Makes Fathers Pay Before Letting Them Parent: What the State’s Legitimation Report Finally Admits
The report is candid in naming Georgia’s legitimation process as confusing, burdensome, and demoralizing for many families. Recommendations such as streamlining uncontested cases, standardizing forms, encouraging mediation, expanding legitimation stations, and addressing judicial backlogs are pragmatic and actionable.
At the same time, the report has clear limitations. For example, it fails to create concrete pathways for reconciling biological and legal parenthood, collecting reliable data, and advancing awareness and education.
The Current Conversation on Mentorship for Boys Excludes Responsible Fatherhood
Any national conversation about boys and men that does not center fatherhood risks misdiagnosing the problem and misdirecting the response.
Framing mentorship as a corrective for father absence must be handled with care. When mentoring programs are positioned as replacements for fathers rather than complements to parental involvement, they unintentionally reinforce a deficit narrative.
This Father Should Never Have Needed a Lawyer: Baby Chance and Georgia’s Outdated Legitimation Laws
This case exposes what many fathers in Georgia already know. The legitimation process does not merely clarify parentage; it withholds parental rights until proven in court. It assumes absence instead of responsibility. It treats biological fatherhood as conditional rather than inherent.
The danger of that assumption becomes painfully clear when tragedy strikes.
How the 2024 Squatters Act Continues to Impact Fathers and Families in Georgia
Housing remains at the top of Georgia’s challenges, especially in Atlanta, where rents rise faster than wages and where fathers with limited income face shrinking options. The Squatters Act didn’t create this reality, but it did create new urgency.
The Force Still Moves: One Year Without Lawrence Wilbon
Lawrence Wilbon reminded us that love is a verb. Faith, he’d say, was something you walked out with your boots on the ground. And from lifting fathers to strengthening families, from building systems to planting seeds, Lawrence gave everything he had, without asking anything in return.
A Dad’s First Big Assignment: Supporting Mom Through Pregnancy, Delivery, and Postpartum
When fathers learn, plan, advocate, and rest with intention, moms recover better, babies thrive, and the whole house breathes easier.
Show up. Ask questions. Carry the load you can carry. Guard the rest and watch the signs. Put the helplines in your phone. And remember, your baby doesn’t need a perfect dad — your baby needs you, present and prepared.
The Top Five Traits of Successful Co-Parenting Relationships
Co-parenting is one of the most significant tests of maturity, love, and patience that two adults can undertake. It requires shifting the focus from what ended between the parents to what must continue for the child.
Over time, through thousands of conversations with fathers and families, we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. The five elements detailed here consistently stand out as markers of successful co-parenting relationships.
The Missing Conversation Between Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Public Health
For nearly two decades, we’ve worked to reframe fatherhood not as a social category separate from public and community health but as its foundation. When fathers thrive, families thrive, and when families thrive, entire neighborhoods stabilize.
We can’t separate men’s health from fatherhood any more than we can separate a heartbeat from a body. The emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness of men is a public health issue. It influences how children are raised, how relationships survive, and how communities heal.
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.
Our Stories, Our Strength: Honoring Family Narratives
Inspired by Family Stories Month, I’ll start where I am. I’ll tell my children what I know, what I’ve learned, and what I still hope to understand. I will remember the past and author the present — not just by celebrating what we’ve inherited, but by creating what we want to leave behind.
Our stories are our strength. Our storytelling is our legacy. And our legacy begins today.
Reclaiming the Narrative of Black Fatherhood
What we need now isn’t another study, stereotype, or headline. We need space for honest conversations across generations, households, and experiences. We need to celebrate the fathers doing the work and support the ones who are still fighting to get there.
We need to reclaim our narrative not as a rebuttal, but as a declaration. Black fatherhood has never needed saving. It has only needed witnessing.
Viral Cardi–Offset–Diggs Story Shines a Spotlight on Georgia’s Legitimation Law
Right now, millions of people are debating this on social media, learning the word “legitimation” in the same breath they’re laughing at Offset’s deleted “My kid lol” post. But there’s nothing funny about the weight this law carries for fathers who do not have a press team or a lawyer on speed dial.
The Cardi-Offset-Diggs uproar may fade from the timeline in a few days, but the lesson it exposes cannot. Georgia’s legitimation laws deserve scrutiny, public awareness, and modernization.
Taking Care of Your Mental Health: An Open Letter to Young Fathers
New fatherhood is a rollercoaster, and it’s okay if some days feel like you’re clenching the safety bar with both hands. Your mental health isn’t separate from this ride; it is the seatbelt that keeps you in the car.
If your mood feels stuck — anger that won’t cool down, sadness that won’t lift, anxiety that pins you to the mattress — talk to someone. Just as we practice for a trade or a sport, counseling helps us develop mental and emotional skills for partnerships, parenting, and work.
Traditional and Cultural Adoptions: Critical Differences — and the Need for Both
Adoption, in its truest sense, has never been about legality alone. In many communities, it has always been about love, obligation, and survival. Long before there were state agencies or social service departments, there was a cultural system — neighbors taking in children after tragedy, grandparents raising grandchildren, aunts and uncles becoming stand-in parents when life took unexpected turns.
To truly understand adoption in America, and to strengthen the systems that govern it, we must hold space for both traditional and cultural adoption.
The Oneness of Co-Parenting
Here’s the truth I want every father and mother to hear: Your child doesn’t care about who was right. They don’t measure your love by how much you win the argument but by how well you work together for their well-being. They remember the tone of your voice when you speak about their other parent. They remember if they felt safe enough to love you both without guilt.
The oneness of co-parenting asks us to evolve — to put aside the “me” and embrace the “we.” It’s an act of maturity, faith, and courage. It requires both parents to look beyond themselves and see the divine assignment they share. You are co-creators of a life. And that life deserves wholeness, not division.