Fathers have substantial impact on child development, well-being, and family functioning, yet parenting interventions rarely target men or make a dedicated effort to include them, according to research conducted by scientists at Yale and the Fatherhood Institute in London.
The team’s review of 199 global publications that presented evidence on father participation and impact in parenting interventions shows that insufficient attention is given to reporting father participation and impact. Their findings were published in the July 1 edition of The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
“Despite robust evidence of fathers’ impact on children and mothers, engaging with fathers is one of the least well-explored and articulated aspects of parenting interventions,” says Catherine Panter-Brick, professor of anthropology, health, and global affairs at Yale and co-author of the study. “It is therefore critical to evaluate implicit and explicit biases manifested in current approaches to research, intervention, and policy.”
The researchers’ results show that an overhaul of program design and delivery is required to obtain the necessary good-quality data on father and couple participation and impact.
The researchers suggest that in both research and community-based practice, a game change in this field would consist in engaging unequivocally with co-parents – rather than including just mothers and explicitly or implicitly marginalizing fathers and other co-parents, as in the bulk of parenting interventions implemented to date. The team recommends a guide to develop best practices for building the evidence base of co-parenting interventions.
Other authors of the study include Mark Eggerman, research scientist at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale; Drs. Kyle Pruett and James F. Leckman at the Yale Child Study Center; and Adrienne Burgess and Fiona McAllister at the Fatherhood Institute, London, United Kingdom.
Read the full journal article here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.12280/abstract.