Tag: fatherhood programs
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.
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.
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.
The Success Pathway: A Model for Moving Forward From Wherever You Are
The Success Sequence and this alternative — the Success Pathway — don’t have to compete. One can focus on prevention. The other can focus on progression.
For a 16-year-old, we can say, “Think carefully about education, employment, relationships, and when you become a parent. These decisions matter.” And for a 36-year-old father whose life did not unfold in that order, we can say, “Your decisions still matter.”
That may be one of the most important messages family-strengthening programs can offer. Your life isn’t over because the sequence wasn’t followed.
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.
When Supporting a Father Means Making Room for Him to Lead
Mothers and grandmothers often carry a great deal of responsibility within families. They may step in to protect children, solve problems, provide stability, and make sure nothing is overlooked. Their involvement is usually rooted in love and concern. However, even well-intentioned support can become interference when it doesn’t leave room for a father to develop his own parenting identity.
Our first “& Co” participant began to recognize the ways she had inadvertently blocked her son from becoming the best father he could be.
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.
In Search of James Evans
John Amos, the actor who gave James Evans his force and dignity, objected to the direction of Good Times. He believed the show’s increasing emphasis on J.J. Evans and buffoonish comedy was reducing a complicated Black family to a collection of familiar stereotypes.
Lost and Found: What Fathers Teach Us About Separation, Systems, and the Search for Home
There’s a reason airports have Lost and Found departments. They exist because everyone understands that in the rush of travel, transition, pressure, and fatigue, people misplace things that matter. Families need this same kind of place.
A place where fathers can come back and say, “I lost my way, but I am looking.” A place where mothers can say, “I am tired, but I want peace for my child.” A place where children aren’t asked to carry adult conflict in their small hands. A place where systems do more than process the loss and actually help people find what’s still possible.
Maybe that’s the work now. To keep looking. To keep listening. To keep asking where fathers have been lost in our policies, where children have been lost in our conflicts, where mothers have been lost in the exhaustion of carrying too much alone, and where families might still be found if we refuse to walk away too soon.
Let Fathers Have the Day
Father’s Day has always carried more than celebration. For some, it is joy. For others, it is grief. For many, it is a complicated holiday wrapped in memory, absence, anger, disappointment, healing, and hope.
We Declare June National Fatherhood Month
It is about the father who is living in the home and the father who is fighting to stay connected from outside the home. It is about the father who has custody and the father who is trying to understand his rights. It is about the father who is married, unmarried, divorced, separated, widowed, young, aging, healing, returning home, starting over, or finally finding his voice. It is about the father who is celebrated and the father who has never heard anyone say, “We see you.”
New York Is Building More Than a Fatherhood Committee
Success is not just more fatherhood programs. Success is creating conditions where fathers, families, children, and communities thrive.
Responsible Fatherhood Isn’t Sustainable When Funded Like a Side Project
Across this country, we say we want fathers to be more engaged. We say children need their fathers. We say family stability matters. We say responsible fatherhood is connected to child well-being, school readiness, emotional security, economic mobility, public safety, child support compliance, maternal health, and healthy co-parenting.
But too often, we fund fatherhood as though it only belongs to one agency, one grant category, one department, or one short-term initiative.
That’s the contradiction we must confront.
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.