Project Fatherhood

A group of former gang members come together to help one another answer the question “How can I be a good father when I’ve never had one?” In 2010, former gang leader turned community activist Big Mike Cummings asked UCLA gang expert Jorja Leap to co-lead a group of men struggling to be better fathers in Watts, South Los Angeles, a neighborhood long burdened with a legacy of racialized poverty, violence, and incarceration. These men, black and brown, from late adolescence to middle age, are trying to heal themselves and their community, and above all to build their identities as fathers. Each week, they come together to help one another answer the question “How can I be a good father when I’ve never had one?” Project Fatherhood follows the lives of the men as they struggle with the pain of their own losses, the chronic pressures of poverty and unemployment, and the unquenchable desire to do better and provide more for the next generation. Although the group begins as a forum for them to discuss issues relating to their roles as parents, it slowly grows to mean much more: it becomes a place where they can share jokes and traumatic experiences, joys and sorrows. As the men repair their own lives and gain confidence, the group also becomes a place for them to plan and carry out activities to help the Watts community grow as well as thrive. By immersing herself in the lived experiences of those working to overcome their circumstances, Leap not only dramatically illustrates the realities of fathers trying to do the right thing, but she also paints a larger sociological portrait of how institutional injustices become manifest in the lives of ordinary people. At a time in which racial justice seems more elusive than ever—stymied by the generational cycles of mass incarceration and the cradle-to-prison pipeline—the group’s development over time demonstrates real-life movement toward solutions as the men help one another make their families and their community stronger.

This book presents state-of-the-art findings of research on fatherhood programs, funded by the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN), which advance knowledge and practice in the fathering field. New Research on Parenting Programs for Low-Income Fathers includes research on how to engage mothers to support father–child contact and to successfully employ social media and online technology for practice. It offers findings on how to increase paternal engagement and parenting skills and to include fathers in policies and programs for children and families. It discusses the importance of providing staff training and resources to practitioners who work directly with fathers. Chapters also provide summaries of key implications for evidence-based practice and future directions for research that encourage effective fatherhood practice. This book is an excellent resource for therapists, social workers, fatherhood educators, fatherhood practitioners, researchers, and policy makers on how to inspire positive father engagement with children and healthy coparenting relationships.

This vital addition to Springer’s ‘Educating the Young Child’ series addresses gaps in the literature on father involvement in the lives of young children, a topic with a fast-rising profile in today’s world of female breadwinners and single-parent households. While the significant body of theoretical understanding and empirical data accumulated in recent decades has done much to characterize the fluidity of evolving notions of fatherhood, the impact of this understanding on policy and legal frameworks has been uneven at an international level. In a field where groups of fathers were until recently marginalized in research, this book adopts a refreshingly inclusive attitude, aiming to motivate researchers to capture the nuanced practices of fathers in minority groups such as those who are homeless, gay, imprisoned, raising a disabled child, or from ethnically distinct backgrounds, including Mexican- and African-American and indigenous fathers. The volume includes chapters highlighting the unique challenges and possibilities of father involvement in their children’s early years of development. Contributing authors have integrated theories, research, policies, and programs on father involvement so as to attract readers with diverse interest and expertise, and material from selected countries in Asia, Australia, and Africa, as well as North America, evinces the international scope of their analysis. Their often interdisciplinary analyses draw, too, on historical and cultural legacies, even as they project a vision of the future in which fathers’ involvement in their young children’s lives develops alongside the changing political, economic and educational landscapes around the world.

After decades of focusing on the mother's role in parenting, family studies researchers have turned their attention to the role of the father in parenting and family development. The results shed new light on childhood development and question conventional wisdom by showing that beyond providing the more traditional economic support of the family, fathers do indeed matter when it comes to raising a child. Stemming from a series of workshops and publications sponsored by the Family and Child Well-Being Network, under the federal fatherhood initiative of the National Institute of Child Health and Development, this comprehensive volume focuses on ways of measuring the efficacy of father involvement in different scenarios, using different methods of assessment and different populations. In the process, new research strategies and new parental paradigms have been formulated to include paternal involvement. Moreover, this volume contains articles from a variety of influences while addressing the task of finding the missing pieces of the fatherhood construct that would work for new age, as well as traditional and minority fathers. The scope of this discussion offers topics of interest to basic researchers, as well as public policy analysts.

Studies the effects that jail time and parole have on the relationships between young fathers and their children, with research revealing how the prison structure and its programs help fathers stay in touch with sons and daughters.

This aim of this open access book is to launch an international, cross-disciplinary conversation on fatherhood engagement. By integrating perspective from three sectors -- Health, Social Policy, and Work in Organizations -- the book offers a novel perspective on the benefits of engaged fatherhood for men, for families, and for gender equality. The chapters are crafted to engaged broad audiences, including policy makers and organizational leaders, healthcare practitioners and fellow scholars, as well as families and their loved ones.

American fathers are a highly diverse group, but the breadwinning, live-in, biological dad prevails as the fatherhood ideal. Consequently, policymakers continue to emphasize marriage and residency over initiatives that might help foster healthy father-child relationships and creative co-parenting regardless of marital or residential status. In Nurturing Dads, William Marsiglio and Kevin Roy explore the ways new initiatives can address the social, cultural, and economic challenges men face in contemporary families and foster more meaningful engagement between many different kinds of fathers and their children. What makes a good father? The firsthand accounts in Nurturing Dads show that the answer to this question varies widely and in ways that counter the mainstream "provide and reside" model of fatherhood. Marsiglio and Roy document the personal experiences of more than 300 men from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and diverse settings, including fathers-to-be, young adult fathers, middle-class dads, stepfathers, men with multiple children in separate families, and fathers in correctional facilities. They find that most dads express the desire to have strong, close relationships with their children and to develop the nurturing skills to maintain these bonds. But they also find that disadvantaged fathers, including young dads and those in constrained financial and personal circumstances, confront myriad structural obstacles, such as poverty, inadequate education, and poor job opportunities. Nurturing Dads asserts that society should help fathers become more committed and attentive caregivers and that federal and state agencies, work sites, grassroots advocacy groups, and the media all have roles to play. Recent efforts to introduce state-initiated paternity leave should be coupled with social programs that encourage fathers to develop unconditional commitments to children, to co-parent with mothers, to establish partnerships with their children's other caregivers, and to develop parenting skills and resources before becoming fathers via activities like volunteering and mentoring kids. Ultimately, Marsiglio and Roy argue, such combined strategies would not only change the policy landscape to promote engaged fathering but also change the cultural landscape to view nurturance as a fundamental aspect of good fathering. Care is a human experience—not just a woman's responsibility—and this core idea behind Nurturing Dads holds important implications for how society supports its families and defines manhood. The book promotes the progressive notion that fathers should provide more than financial support and, in the process, bring about a better start in life for their children. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology