The Academy sees fathers as equal partners in parenting. In April 2008, we held an event with the Fatherhood Institute, which asked what's the best way to support fathers and make sure they are fully involved in parenting?
A report of that discussion is featured below and can also be downloaded as a PDF.
Fathers – what stops them engaging with parenting services?
The overwhelming message of the event was that fathers are still not routinely included in parenting support, despite Every Parent Matters stating that they should be, 'irrespective of the degree of involvement that fathers have in the care of their children'. Speakers agreed that engagement with fathers is patchy and dependent on resources, individual enthusiasm or whether the father happens to present himself – it's very much a discretionary approach, according to one speaker, and particularly bad where fathers are difficult or separated from the family, and for teenage fathers.
According to the different contributors there is a combination of factors as to why this is so.
a. Government recognises the importance of involving fathers, but hasn't got as far as setting out expectations of what this would mean in practice, and how it would be measured. At present there are no consequences for commissioners and services that do not involve fathers in their parenting services. 'It's a good thing to engage with fathers, that's where we are in policy, but it doesn't matter if you don't – there is no questioning of the standards of your service if you don't do it.'
b. The focus of most parent support is still the mother-child relationship, rather than from the point of view of the child and what he or she might need. This can lead to fathers being seen as superfluous, or even as troublesome. It matters more to many services what the mother feels about including the father than whether including him will benefit the child.
c. A lack of direction to service providers at a local level – most local authority parenting strategies do little more than mention fathers. Very few show how they will move from awareness to putting into practice services that are more father friendly – even one with 40 mentions of fathers in the narrative (the average was 4-6), had almost nothing about implementation. 'It's about establishing political correctness rather than doing anything about it,' commented one speaker. 'There's no sense of how these wonderful programmes would be delivered differently because we're thinking about fathers differently,' said another.
d. Services do not present themselves well to fathers, and one of the great problems for both central and local policy-making is that they just don't know what needs doing to make services more father-inclusive: 'What would we need to do in order to bring about that really radical transformation of how services in local authorities are commissioned and delivered, how referrals are made and parents are approached? It's hard to know where to start.'
e. Services do not address fathers directly – though they are now offered to 'parents' rather than just 'mothers', fathers still don't feel included. Fathers from other communities feel even less included, as services tend to focus on a Eurocentric model of family life. There's a lack of knowledge about the specific experiences and needs of fathers, which is compounded by a predominantly female workforce and the feminised environment of many parenting services – there's a sense that they are run by women for women.
f. Even if we want to design good services for fathers, there is as yet no way of measuring how they engage with services: 'We really need to know to what extent fathers are being approached, are turning up to appointments, are dropping out early or not. This sort of measurement system is crucial to know whether anything we do makes a difference.'
g. The same goes for parenting programmes, which may be unwittingly excluding fathers. 'It's time to carry out a thorough audit on how the major programmes cater to fathers and how they accommodate fathers in their theory and design.'
Recommendations
So, what can be done to improve the engagement of fathers in parenting services? Participants had many suggestions for improving the present situation.
1. Cultural change in both policy-making and service delivery: to start to look at the world from the child’s perspective, whatever the relationship between the father and the mother (while, of course, recognising the sensitivity of certain circumstances): 'Can the mother or father set a condition of the services? We think not. We think ultimately the child's right is what needs to be defended.'
2. A policy framework and monitoring and evaluation procedures that make including fathers central to the success indicators of any service. Policy-makers need to give commissioners and service providers clear guidance as to what they should be doing vis a vis fathers – the feeling around the table was they would do more if they knew what they should be doing. But equally, there needs to be a lot more monitoring of the extent to which services engage fathers, even without compulsion: 'People in local authorities who are commissioning and delivering services should be doing it because they understand the fundamental importance of engaging fathers and delivering outcomes for children and young people.'
3. A strategy for engaging fathers: 'We don't have enough evidence to say that one way of involving fathers works better than another, but what research we do have suggests that having some sort a strategy for including fathers is what is important.' Programmes and services need to be gender aware and view fathers as core clients, rather than extra, or incidental.
4. Robust pathways. In practice that means having what one contributor called 'robust pathways into all relevant services for men that are as clear and straightforward as possible.' Parenting professionals need to think about registration, referral and outreach and how they can bring fathers and services together and whether those services are accessible to fathers – for instance if a home-visiting service is offered, is open when men are likely to be at home?
5. Consideration about what makes services accessible for men. Are they the same services as are open to women, the same services but separate from women, or are they completely different services, more along the Dads and Lads line than the 'just sitting around chatting model'? There also needs to be an acknowledgement that mothering and fathering are not the same: 'Mothers and father contribute differently to the relationship with the child so we have move on from just talking about parenting.'
6. Research into what good father-inclusive interventions look like. We should be getting the views of fathers as to what they need and find helpful and acceptable. Where parents' views are already being collected, finding out what fathers as opposed to mothers think is easily done and crucial for making sure their views count.
7. Father-focused recruitment and workforce development: 'All staff working in children’s services need to be recruited on the assumption that they will be working with fathers.' Professional training and in-service training should also take account of fathers so that staff and managers know what is expected of them in relation to fathers. Practitioners need their skills and their confidence building in their work with fathers.
Next steps
The Academy sees fathers as equal partners in parenting and will be working with training organisations, commissioners and practitioners to ensure that fathers are central to the work they do. 'We will ensure that training curriculums include work with fathers, and the National Occupational Standards explicitly address the question of how well they serve the needs of fathers and their children.' The Academy is also looking at measures by which programmes that are included on the Commissioning Toolkit of Parenting Programmes can be interrogated for their father-inclusiveness.
As a result of the action points raised at this event, we will be working more closely with the Fatherhood Institute to promote the engagement with fathers in all aspects of parenting services, helping to influence commissioners, programme developers and frontline staff so that fathers are given the recognition they need to take their rightful place in the upbringing of their children.
To tell us your views of how fathers are involved in parenting services, please e-mail us.