Home visits provide a unique opportunity to assess parents’ child-rearing skills and to provide targeted services to assist responsible adults in growing healthy families. If you are a home visitor, you are probably already aware of some of the barriers that you must confront when attempting to achieve these goals. Often one of those barriers is the reluctance of fathers and men in families to recognize the importance of their participation in home visits. This tends to be true across a wide range of cultures, income levels, and educational backgrounds. In order to engage fathers and men…
During the last five years we have had the privilege of partnering with selected Parents as Teachers (PAT) sites through the Office of Family Assistance Promoting Responsible Fatherhood Grant to enhance father involvement. We learned many lessons as partner sites provided group meetings in urban, rural, and military communities that spanned a range of demographics. Our PAT sites experienced a wide array of successes and challenges, sometimes unique to their community. These experiences provide the foundation for this summary of lessons learned.
red dot icon
Journal Article The current study investigated how fathering behaviors (acceptance, rejection, monitoring, consistent discipline, and involvement) are related to preadolescent adjustment in Mexican American and European American stepfamilies and intact families. Cross-sectional data from 393 7th graders, their schoolteachers, and parents were used to examine links between different dimensions of fathering and adolescent outcomes. Following an ecological multivariate model, family SES, marital satisfaction, and mothers' parenting were included as controls. In all contexts, fathering had significant effects…
Brief
Low-skilled men, especially minorities, typically work at low levels and provide little support for their children. Conservatives blame this on government willingness to support families, which frees the fathers from responsibility, while liberals say that men are denied work by racial bias or the economy--either a lack of jobs or low wages, which depress the incentive to work. The evidence for all these theories is weak. Thus, changing program benefits or incentives is unlikely to solve the men's work problem. More promising is the idea of linking assistance with administrative requirements…
red dot icon
Journal Article Urban, African American fathers have been a difficult population for social workers and other helping professionals to effectively serve. This article, based on interviews with front-line African American service professionals at a father-focused program, who also participated in writing this article, provides information about and suggestions for working with young fathers. Providing father-friendly service, joining with fathers, holding them accountable for their behavior, and addressing their relationship with their child and the mother of their child through couples work are suggested…
red dot icon
Journal Article Although scholars and policy makers herald the promotive influence of fathers' parenting involvement, limited research has carefully delineated effects of fathers' parenting on low-income children's development and whether early contributions from fathers confer long-term protective effects. Using data from the Three-City Study (N = 261), analyses assessed whether fathers' parenting practices during early childhood showed long-term links with low-income children's cognitive skills through middle childhood. Results found that fathers' warm and stimulating parenting predicted enhanced reading…
Brief
New York launched a pilot employment program to help parents behind in their child support in four communities between 2006 and 2009. The program was part of the state's Strengthening Families Through Stronger Fathers Initiative. Our evaluation found that the program's combination of employment assistance, case management, and other support services substantially increased the earnings and child support payments of disadvantaged parents who were not meeting their child support obligations.
This fact sheet profiles the Parents as Teachers program, an evidence-based home visiting approach that builds strong families and promotes positive parent-child interaction so children are healthy, safe, and ready to learn. Findings from a 2004 study on the benefits and costs of prevention and early intervention programs are shared and indicate Parents as Teachers had the largest benefit per dollar of cost ($1.23) of all reviewed pre-kindergarten education programs for children up to age 3. Goals of the Parent as Teachers program are explained and include: enhance parent knowledge of child…
red dot icon
Journal Article Much is known about how having a teenage mother influences children's outcomes, but the relationship between teenage fatherhood and children's health and development is less well documented. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, the authors investigated how teenage fathers matter for children. They expected teenage fathers' influence on children to differ from adult fathers' in three domains: the household context, the father' mother relationship, and the father-child relationship. Teenage fathers were less often married and more often cohabiting or nonresident, and their…
red dot icon
Journal Article We investigated how mothers' and fathers' depressed mood and father-child and mother-child relationship predicted preschool children's problem behavior. The sample was 11,286 continuously intact, two-parent biological families of the United Kingdom's Millennium Cohort Study. We found that mother-child relationship and maternal depressed mood had larger effects on children's problem behavior than father-child relationship and paternal depressed mood. The effect of paternal depressed mood was completely mediated by quality of father-child relationship. There were significant moderator effects…
