Tag: fatherhood programs
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.
Black Fathers Are Blocked, Not Missing: What Fulton County Teaches America About Father Engagement
Our study asks a question that the responsible fatherhood and human services fields sometimes avoid because it’s inconvenient: If we say fathers matter, why are so many systems designed as if they don’t?
Those that truly want to engage fathers must adopt a simple discipline: Stop confusing outcomes with intent. If a father is not consistently present, ask what has been blocking him before you make assumptions or lean on stereotypes.
Your Child Sees Everything: The Co-Parenting Truth Most Parents Avoid
We’ve been in the living rooms, courtrooms, classrooms, and parking lots, and on the late-night phone calls where parents are attempting something that seems straightforward but feels impossible. We’ve watched smart, hardworking people lose their footing because the topic is their child. And when the topic is the child, the stakes don’t feel theoretical. They feel like survival.
This is why the “co” in co-parenting matters more than most people realize.
America’s Wake-Up Call: What 172 Fathers Just Told Us About Solving the Family Stability Crisis
This is the moment to treat fatherhood as a national, not niche, strategy. A father’s presence is a protective factor, not a slogan. A father’s stability is both personal triumph and public good. A father’s ability to co-parent peacefully is bigger than a relationship win; it’s child development work.
America can keep debating fatherhood like a moral argument, or we can finally treat it like what it is: a practical, urgent, solvable challenge that requires real investment.
What Atlanta’s Young Black Fathers Say When We Finally Listen
The purpose of the study is both practical and corrective. Practically, the team set out to learn which supports exist for fathers in NPU-V and which supports are missing, so service delivery can match real needs. Correctively, the paper pushes back on a long tradition of policy and public narrative that treats fathers as an afterthought in “family strengthening,” even while research keeps reaffirming that fathers are a protective factor in child development.