The Children's Commission of Queensland in Australia is working with the Queensland Government's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Board to strengthen Indigenous families affected by the incarceration of a father. Indigenous people are imprisoned at a rate that is 13 times that of the non-Indigenous population. Many of the incarcerated men are fathers with children who experience the grief of parental separation, financial difficulties, and social stigma from the community. Recognizing that attempts to support Indigenous people must be designed in the context of cultural…
This Australian pilot program seeks to promote cooperative post-separation parenting, through education and communications training, to reduce reliance on family courts in resolving conflicts involving the terms of court orders. Most parents using the courts for such conflicts are non-residents and while such cases represented a small number of the overall caseload, they take up a disproportionate amount of court time and resources. The Anglicare program uses the term cooperative parenting rather than co-parenting or joint parenting to describe positive post-separation parenting by both…
The commissioner of the first independent commission on children in Australia, established in Queensland in 1996, presents an overview of the agency's child and family welfare efforts and describes a new program to encourage support for fathers. The aim of the Focus on Fathering Project is to increase understanding about the importance of fathers in children's lives and to promote fathering education and support programs. The program takes a multidisciplinary approach to the problems of fatherless children and high-risk families, with a strong educational aspect and a research component to…
This paper discusses some of the key issues facing fathers in Australia, including changing concepts about the role of the fathers and the potential impact of these changes on children. Recent fathering studies in Australia and the United States are discussed, as are statistics showing 19.3 percent of Australian families with children under age 15 are headed by a single woman compared to 1.9 headed by a father. The authors argue the concept of social fatherhood, including all responsibilities and activities fathers are expected to perform, has more influence on children than biological…
An examination of data from several large surveys of Australian families and child support records suggests unwed noncustodial fathers are significantly less involved as parents to their children than are divorced fathers without custody. Although almost one-third of children in Australia are born out of wedlock, no longitudinal survey data is available on characteristics of unwed noncustodial Australian fathers, or their role in their children's lives. As a result, any social policy directed at children of unwed parents must be developed without a baseline for future comparison studies, the…
Research indicates certain qualities of the parental relationship can serve as a benchmark for the degree of involvement of unwed fathers and their children. This paper explores characteristics of parental relationships and unwed paternal involvement, as well as other causal factors that can affect the role of unwed fathers in their children's lives. The authors examined data in the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, a large longitudinal study of parental relationships, involvement, and child well-being and development. A total of 3,600 children born to unmarried parents in 20 large…
The children of incarcerated men are at high risk for poverty, community violence, poor school performance, gang participation, and delinquency. However, incarceration presents many challenges to parent-child relationships, including loss of income and ability to provide financial support, restrictive visitation policies, transportation for families, and literacy skills. States have a vested interest in strengthening families as a strategy for preventing the future criminal involvement of children at risk and for motivating men to succeed when they are released from prison. Innovative…
This fact sheet discusses the transition men make as they accept becoming a father and their unique development as fathers during the first two years of fatherhood. Topics include The Father's Self-concept and Self-esteem, Mother/Father Roles and Communication, Parenting Attitudes and Stress, Father's Changing Relationship with His Parents, and Support and Stress in the Community.
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Journal Article A cohort study was conducted to examine the association between father involvement and child neglect. Participants were recruited from an inner-city pediatric primary care clinic and a clinic for children at risk for human immunodeficiency virus infection in a teaching hospital. Child neglect was measured via home observation, a videotaped mother-child interaction, and child protective services reports. A father or father figures was identified for 27 percent of the 244 five-year-old children participating in the study. Rates of neglect ranged between 11 percent and 30 percent. Father absence…
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Journal Article The twentieth century has been characterized by four important social trends that have fundamentally changed the social cultural context in which children develop: women's increased labor force participation, increased absence of nonresidential fathers in the lives of their children, increased involvement of fathers in intact families, and increased cultural diversity in the U.S.. In this essay, we discuss how these trends are changing the nature of father involvement and family life, and in turn affecting children's and fathers' developmental trajectories. We end with an eye toward the…
