Tag: marriage

Why the Marriage Question Is Also a Fatherhood Question

Marriage and fatherhood can’t be treated as competing conversations. Marriage asks how men and women build a stable union. Responsible fatherhood asks how men remain accountable, nurturing, protective, emotionally present, and economically responsible toward their children.

When these commitments exist inside a healthy marriage, they reinforce one another. A man isn’t simply living with the mother of his children. He has made a public covenant to share the labor, sacrifice, responsibility, and future of family life.

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.

Census Data on Unmarried Births Excludes Fathers

A child born outside of marriage isn’t automatically a child born outside of fatherhood. A mother giving birth while unmarried doesn’t mean the father is absent, unwilling, irresponsible, or irrelevant. It simply means the parents weren’t married at the time of birth. 

A child isn’t fatherless when the parents are unmarried. A child isn’t fatherless when the father lives in another home. A child isn’t fatherless when the parents are no longer romantically connected. Father absence is real, the pain of abandonment is real, and the consequences of disengagement are real. However, we can’t keep confusing living arrangements with love, legal status with commitment, or marital status with fatherhood.

Parents and two children sitting on a couch looking at the camera and smiling

Gentle Warriors Academy Receives $6.5M Grant to Strengthen Fathers, Families, and Communities in Georgia

The grant award expands GWA’s ability to equip fathers, couples, and co-parents with the skills, coaching, and support that build resilient families — improving child well-being, enhancing relationship health, and advancing long-term household stability.

When Co-Parenting Works: Building Families Beyond Brokenness

Co-parenting isn’t about liking each other. It’s about loving the child more than you dislike the past, and that requires something deeper than shared custody or court agreements. It requires humility, maturity, and a commitment to partnership even when the marriage (or the relationship) didn’t survive.

Does Black Love Matter to Black Men?

For many of us, the holidays are a time to be close to significant others and romantic partners. Whether we are getting cozy by a fire or meeting under the mistletoe, there is just something about the days getting shorter and the weather getting colder that makes many of us long for intimacy and companionship.