Tag: featured
How Federal Child Welfare Policies and Georgia’s Legitimation Law Impact Paternal Rights
Georgia’s diligent-search policy specifically includes noncustodial parents and both maternal and paternal relatives. It requires child welfare to implement these search efforts before initial foster care placement and documentation in Georgia SHINES.
Georgia should report how often fathers are identified and successfully contacted, how many need help resolving paternity or legitimation, whether they receive legal assistance, and how long those steps take. When a safe father is prepared to care for his child, the state should be able to explain how it assessed him, what assistance it provided, and why it reached its decision.
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.
Atlanta’s Paid Parental Leave Expansion Makes Fathers Visible
For much of our history, public systems have encountered Dad through child support enforcement, family court, custody disputes, incarceration, employment problems, or conflict with a co-parent. Far less often do systems meet him at the beginning, when he stands beside a crib, trying to figure out how to become the father his child needs.
Atlanta’s new policy doesn’t resolve every challenge working parents face. But it does place fathers inside the definition of caregiving rather than outside of it.
Co-Parenting Through Breast Cancer: How Fathers Can Show Up
A mother receives a breast cancer diagnosis. But the school bus still comes in the morning. Homework still needs to be checked. Children still need dinner, clean clothes, and someone to listen to how their day went. Life doesn’t pause because she needs treatment.
For parents who are no longer together, that reality raises an important question: How do we show up for each other when the relationship has changed, but the responsibility of parenting remains?
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.
What We Honor, Grows: Why Fathers Need Appreciation, Too
For years, conversations about fatherhood have understandably focused on getting fathers to step up. Stay. Provide. Engage. Participate. Parent. These expectations matter, but perhaps the next phase of the conversation also needs to ask, What happens when fathers do those things?
Do we notice? Do we acknowledge them? Do we encourage them? Do our children hear us affirm the good their fathers bring into their lives? Maybe sometimes fathers need somebody to notice what they are doing, instead of another conversation about what they aren’t doing.
The Census Can Count Households But Struggles to See Fathers
The Census Bureau has demonstrated that complicated family relationships can be measured when we decide they are worth measuring.
But America has spent decades making enormous policy decisions about fathers while too often measuring fathers indirectly through mothers, households, child support cases, marriage records, birth certificates, or children’s primary addresses. These data sources are valuable. But none, standing alone, constitutes a full measure of fatherhood.
We don’t believe there’s a shortage of fathers in the data; we believe there’s a shortage of questions capable of describing them.
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.
5 Ways Co-Parents Can Build Hope in Their Children
Some of us were raised to keep family business in the house. Some were taught to pray about it and keep going. And sometimes, when a child is talking about being depressed, overwhelmed, or not wanting to be here, we think they’re being dramatic or looking for attention.
But silence isn’t safety. Our children need to know they can tell us the truth. Even the hard truth. Even the uncomfortable truth. Even the truth that scares us. Our children need to know there’s nothing they can say that will make us stop loving them, listening to them, or helping them.
Healthy co-parenting is crucial to instilling this comfort and confidence.
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.
The Work Needs You, But It Can’t Consume You
Self-care isn’t limited to vacations, massages, fishing trips, or quiet weekends. Sometimes self-care means scheduling the examination, confronting the diagnosis, taking the medication, changing what you eat, speaking with a therapist, addressing grief, protecting your sleep, or admitting that your body has been asking for help.
And for seasoned leaders, self-care must also include succession. We must learn how to care for the person carrying the vision and prepare the vision to outlive them.
Leaders can’t rest if they leave every decision, relationship, and idea inside their heads. We can’t step away if no one else understands the vision well enough to carry it forward.
AI Is My Parents’ DOS: What Happens When Age Meets Technological Evolution
Some people are asking whether AI should continue developing, as though humanity still has a realistic choice between an AI world and a non-AI world. We don’t. The more useful questions are, What kind of AI world are we going to build? Who will benefit? Who may be harmed? And what responsibility do institutions have to help people adapt?
Here’s why these questions matter to everyone regardless of age and why we all have a responsibility to learn about the powerful technology.
The Walk Is Only the Beginning: Why the 2026 Million Fathers March Matters
The 2026 Million Fathers March isn’t asking fathers merely to appear for a single event. It’s asking schools and communities to open doors, and it’s asking fathers to keep walking through them.
Forty-two hosts have already registered. Fifteen states and 34 cities are already represented. Thousands of fathers and father figures are projected to participate, and there is still room for hundreds of schools, organizations, districts, churches, community groups, and families to become part of what September 18 can represent.