A Fatherhood Forum held on 1 May in Invercargill drew more than 60 attendees from non-profit and governmental agencies. The event was organised by the Families Commission and hosted by Our Way Southland, a collaboration of the four Southland-based Councils.
Southland is making father support a priority in their upcoming parenting strategy. Attendees reported that they found the presentations ‘inspiring’ and ‘incredible’. Presenters were Families Commission-sponsored speakers Harald Breiding-Buss (Father & Child, Christchurch) and David Mitchell/Philip Chapman (CM Research, Nelson) as well as Environment Southland’s Aaron Fox. It is planned to make the presentations available through the Our Way Southland website.

Engaging Dads Better

Engaging dads has become a hot topic amongst providers of family services, with more and more considering this a key issue for the quality of their services.
Harald Breiding-Buss writes that in order to involve dads in the right way, service agencies need to involve them for the right reasons.

When you ask people about why they think engaging dads is important for people who work with families, the answer you usually get is along the lines of: because dads are good for kids, or: because parenting has become too female-focused.

There is a much more compelling reason, however: dads spend a lot of time with their children alone. Some children are completely dependent on their fathers, like the babies in our Dependent on Dad study, while others may see little of their dad, but almost all of them would have some times where there is only dad, even if it is only because mum has gone out shopping.

Another intriguing aspect of the Dependent on Dad study was that sometimes it was exactly the men with the troubled backgrounds who would end up sole-caring for their children—fathers that a midwife or similar person may well have ’written off’ in her mind. The message from this is: you simply cannot know how the child you are visiting today is being cared for tomorrow. By not including dads, children are in danger of becoming disconnected from important social services, because their fathers are.

So while it is very important to reach out to solo dads, it is even more important to reach out to all dads, exactly because any one of them may become a solo dad in the future.

Much has been said and written about the failure of our family organisations to effectively include fathers, but our study indicates that, in fact, there isn’t
anything wrong with how a given service is delivered. Not one of the dads we interviewed complained about being looked after by a female, for example, and more often than not the more intensive support services were given a 10 out of 10 by those dads who were actually enrolled in them. The only difficulty is actually getting enrolled.

This is where it is so crucial that a father has been engaged while he was either still together with the mother, or already separated but not yet the full carer of the child. This not only increases the likelihood that the father will actively seek support in the future, but it gives him a foundation in parenting and, importantly, some tools for coping with the stress issues that single parents face more than the partnered kind. Too often family workers assume that only the ‘primary caregivers’ have to deal with these.

Fathers’ and men’s groups have long advocated to have male staff dealing with male clients, but there is no hard evidence that this actually makes any difference.

What is needed is organisations who can successfully role model cooperation between men and women. All organisations providing family work should have a mix of competent male and female staff, and neither sex should work exclusively only with their own. As long as male workers are employed to work only with males there will be a ‘problem’ stigma attached to male parenting, and females will continue to be viewed as the only sex actually competent in parenting issues.
But even if such a mix of male and female frontline workers is not achievable in the short term, organisations can make a big difference for families if they promote their service to both parents. The key phrase here is: Expectation, Expectation, Expectation.

While written promotional material, web sites etc about a service is important, the scene for a service’s involvement is set on that very first personal contact. This is where a family worker has the choice of asking for an appointment with both parents, or only one of them.

This initial approach is very important. Let’s say a midwife phones a family to make an appointment for a Well Child health check, and the baby’s mother answers the phone. The midwife can now make an appointment with her and say that it would be good if her partner would also be present. Or she could, from the start, ask what time would suit both of them (and, of course, baby).

The expectation created with the first scenario is: this is a service for mum and baby, where dad is also allowed to be. The second scenario creates a different expectation: it conveys that this is a service for the family. The midwife coveys that she expects to find both Mum and Dad at the appointment, and that it is up to the couple to decide otherwise, whereas in the first scenario Dad’s attendance is optional.

The same thing also works for families where there are other significant people that should be included, such as the mother’s mother or other people from either parents’ whanau. However, involving other people should never be at the expense of involving the father. Fathers and mothers are generally the only legal guardians when a child is born, and have unique responsibilities as well as rights under both national and international law. When things go ‘wrong’ with the mother, the father is more likely than any other family or whanau member (including the mother’s mother) to take over primary responsibility for the care of his children.

Where parents do not live together, and the child lives mainly with the mother, it can get tricky for a family service. To err on the side of caution the father should be involved and informed. Under the Guardianship Act, both parents have the right to full access to any information there is about the child. Services should be proactive in giving non-resident fathers this information and not wait for him to put in an official request under the Privacy Act.

The most common reason why this so often does not happen is because the mother of the child does not want it to happen. Sometimes this is out of fear that such information would give the father ‘ammunition’ in a current disagreement about day-to-day care. This creates a loyalty conflict with a family worker: to work effectively with this mother and establish a relationship of Trust would require to work with her and only her. But to meet the legal rights of the child and its likely present and future needs, the father should be given information about the service and the child.

Many family workers have been solo mothers themselves and therefore may identify strongly with the situation of the mother. This, of course, can lead to the worker being perceived as ‘siding’ with the mother and the father getting the impression that he is facing a battlefront over the mere issue of maintaining a relationship with his child.

Again, expectations are the key. When a first child is born it is rare even for separated parents to start fighting about the care of the baby immediately. This is a window of opportunity, and involving both parents in the service at this point in time sends a very strong signal of an expectation for cooperation.
When a child is a bit older and the damage has already been done (i.e. an expectation has been created of the mother being in sole charge of the child) this becomes much more difficult, and at times a family worker really has no choice but to work with only one parent in order to make any positive difference in the child’s life.

However the service’s management needs to try to mitigate such situations as much as possible to protect the child’s rights. If, for example, a family worker has strong negative opinions about one of the parents, or disagrees with applying the law or organisational policies in a specific case, there are management tools to resolve this: supervision is not the least important of them. It is also important that the organisation allows non-resident parents to complain so that it is able to gauge whether it has a problem with its internal culture.

The good news is that over the last few years I have noticed more and more discussions about these nitty-gritty issues of father involvement pop up within organisations. Research on this is still far and few between, and what is needed are some good pilot studies accompanied by sound external evaluation that try out alternative ways of working with families so that both parents are included by default.

Next: Supporting Breastfeeding

The New Black: Teen Dads

Social policymakers have started to go all gooey about teenage fathers, but there is more to it than funding a bit of help to get their lives straightened out. Teen fatherhood is about improving outcomes for babies and preventing future unplanned early pregnancies, writes Harald Breiding-Buss

Teen dads are the new black

Our Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett, has a heart for teen parents – and that includes teen dads. Within a national budget that aims to change the way social services are funded, $20m over four years has been set aside specifically for teen parents, and within this about $750,000 is ring fenced for teen dads – probably the first-ever father-specific amount written into a government budget.

Father & Child started looking into what kind of people teenage fathers are about ten years ago, and our own research gave us some surprising results. Amongst other things, we came across a number of dads under 20 who had sole care of their child – a group that even today is treated as non-existent as we commonly associate teen parenthood with young solo mothers.

One such young solo father found himself unable to even get an IRD number for his son, because he was not registered as the father on his son’s birth certificate, and therefore had no legal status as a parent. Missing dads on birth certificates is epidemic for babies born to teen mothers: a whopping 20% of those babies have fathers that are, at least officially, unknown. Other countries, such as the UK, have legislated in recent years to require authorities to ask about the father for every birth, and only allow to leave his name and details blank in exceptional circumstances.
Less than 10% of births are to mothers under 20. While that proportion is high by international standards, it is very low historically. Having your first baby in your late 20s or even 30s is a fairly new phenomenon, and as birth ages increased people started to look down on young parents. It doesn’t help public perception that, unlike back in the days of our grandparents, almost none of those young parents are in a stable relationship with each other.

Over half the babies born to a teen mother have a father over 20, and for about a third the father is also a teenager. That makes about 2,500 teen fathers we know about, and of those about one in five have babies born to a mum who is over 20. Getting involved with older women is not so uncommon for young men, and several of the teen dads we worked with at Father & Child had partners (or ex-partners) in their late twenties or even thirties.

Statistics aside, the public perception of teen dads is not good. They may have become sexy with the political establishment, but in the public eye they generally fail to be good dads, and not the least part of this is that they don’t have a proper job.

The stereotype is that the main ‘issue’ consists of young men these days not wanting to take responsibility, i.e. get married (or something like that), settle down with a job and so on – everything we still associate with a good, responsible father.

However, there is little sign that young mums are in any hurry to take on the young men as permanent partners and create a household with them. Even the most responsible young man needs the cooperation of the mother to be a good dad by whatever standard. However there is no-one telling a young mother that her baby needs a father. There are good options now for a teen mum to continue her education while having fulltime on-site childcare and pursue a career if she wants, but no assistance whatsoever for a young dad to become established. As young mums get help with parenting, career and social issues, there is no niche left for a young dad. And so the key to better dads for those babies lies with mum.

It doesn’t help that a teen mum is most likely the child of a solo mother herself and has not experienced a healthy relationship with her own father. In fact some large international studies show that it is that lack of a father especially during early childhood which put a young woman most at risk of an early pregnancy, ahead of any other social factors. Her own ideas of what a father should be or do may be modelled on Hollywood men more than real ones, and as such is pretty impossible to live up to.

There is no doubt that more father involvement would be good for those babies. Research into the benefits of father involvement has piled up over the last 20 or so years. The common thread is that for a child to reap the benefits of father involvement there has to be a close relationship, and the father has to be responsive, playful and caring. The father’s prowess as an income earner is less important, and the benefits of having a father all but disappear if that father is never at home and never gets close to his children.

A father is also not easily replaced by a step-father. New Zealand research shows that children view the parenting efforts of a step-parent completely different to those of a natural parent. When the tough decisions have to be made, children naturally assume that their biological parents still care about them and have their interests at heart. The same thing from a step-parent is viewed as coercion and power play. While step-parents are often great and much needed role models, this relationship is of a different nature to that between biological parents and their children, regardless of who provides more ‘stability’. For better or worse, a father or mother are not replaceable.

That more attention is put on teenage fathers has to be a good thing, but what we really need is a paradigm shift. We need to instil young parents with a sense of teamwork; that raising this baby is a job they do together, whether they live together or not.

Josh’s Story

Josh (17), like most parents, soon learned that babies have a schedule all of their own. Kaizah was born by Caesarean on February 2 this year.

“We were confident of our preparations,” says Josh, but they had some issues with their midwife. “She saw me as just a teenage kid.” She told him it wasn’t necessary for him to attend the midwife appointments, but he went anyway.

“We were both scared, but happy,” Josh says of he and partner Latoya (19). “The scan was awesome… seeing his face in 3D and smiling” made Josh feel like crying.

When Latoya went in for the Caesarean Josh was understandably “really worried.” When Kaizah came out Josh was “able to stand up and see…then I saw the blood and sat down again; it brought a tear to my eye.”

“It’s been up and down,” says Teena, Josh’s mother. But Josh has been quite excited about milestones throughout the pregnancy. He reads and sings to Kaizah at night.

“You can’t do it by yourself,” Josh says. “Don’t push help away. Take it.”

With regard to he and Latoya being teenage parents, Josh says it has been difficult. His friends have not been too supportive, but they have their own lives. “I don’t go out as much.”

“We’ll get there,” he says of his relationship with Latoya. “We need to be patient.”

“I have something to work towards, and for,” Josh says. “I have a kid now.”

Deputy Prime Minister Bill English told an audience of 50 ‘Key Thinkers’ at a forum in Wellington yesterday that he wants people involved in social community initiatives to ‘run down our doors’ with new ideas. He and Social Welfare minister Paula Bennett said that the government is committed to social services that strengthen communities and empower community champions. Bennett promised the audience a lively debate through the remainder of the year on social policy approaches.
The forum was organised by the Families Commission, and tried to gather the thinking of the 50 invited people in six working groups. Disappointingly, there was almost no talk about better involvement of males as a key factor in positive outcomes for children, perhaps because only one fathers ‘champion’ was invited (Father&Child’s Harald Breiding-Buss).
Bennett appeared vaguely disappointed with what she overheard from discussions at the workgroup tables, saying that perhaps the thinking could have gone further.
More details about the forum can be found here: http://www.nzfamilies.org.nz/50-key-thinkers/main

The government has positioned the Families Commission as a ‘centre of excellence for knowledge about families and whanau’. Providing ‘advice on effective, accessible, and appropriately targeted services’ is one of the Commissions key future roles.
The Commission is inviting 50 ‘key thinkers’ from outside government to a forum in May to develop a ‘knowledge base’ about family service delivery.
The Families Commission is best known for its controversial campaigns on male-initiated family violence (the ‘White Ribbon’ and ‘It’s Not OK’ campaigns), which have been rejected by some of New Zealand’s top family researchers. The Commission’s key role in the past has been to fund family-related research, and in 2009 it commissioned a large study on male views on fatherhood.
It campaigned for the introduction of paid parental leave for fathers in late 2009 to a frosty response from the government.

The Ministry of Social Development has produced a new resource called ‘Supporting Teen Fathers’ aimed at those working with young dads. It was developed in consultation with local researchers and practitioners, including Father & Child. The resource covers conceptualisation of a service through to delivery and evaluation. Order from MSD, ph (04) 916 3300, or contact Father & Child.

Dan Brown, a young father being supported by the Father & Child Trust, was interviewed on TV3 about the new “In Your Hands” DVD produced by Great Fathers.

Daniel Brown TV3 13th July 2010

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A Father & Child survey of 124 dads attending the Waitakere City Toddler Day Out this year, found that a majority felt their needs as a dad are well catered for in Waitakere City.

However, only half said that they’d had face-to-face contact with a Well Child Health provider, such as Plunket. Home-based Well Child Health services are available to all babies and their parents.

More than three quarters of dads felt Waitakere supported early parenting and families well, but only 57% thought new dads were well supported. Even fewer thought the city did well for separated or solo dads.

Fathers with an only child under one felt especially frustrated with a lack of inclusion, and rated support for families much higher than support for dads. They were clearly appreciative of what is being done to keep baby healthy and put families on track, but about half of these dads appeared to have been effectively kept out of the loop by the agencies involved.

It seems that although family service providers may be more aware of fathers and their important contribution to child development, they still do not make enough effort to meet with them and engage them.

There were some signs that this had improved over recent years. A father with a child under one was almost twice as likely to report having had face-to-face contact with a Well Child Health provider than a father with a child aged three or over.

The survey highlighted the importance of that face-to-face contact. Fathers who had such contact with some of the leading agencies generally felt much better supported than their peers who had not, and seem to have generally better access to information.

Dads who engaged with Playcentres stood out as being significantly happier with their support as a dad, and 73% of them said they feel encouraged to participate in their child’s early education.

Perhaps surprisingly, separated fathers felt better supported than those living with the mother of the child. Only 30% thought they were not supported as new dads, 10% felt families are not supported, 11% thought there are not enough fun events for dads and kids and only 9% thought there is not enough information about early parenting – the lowest rates for any group analysed.

Of the partnered fathers, 44% felt unsupported as new dads, 21% felt families are not supported, 33% would like more fun events and 26% could do with more early parenting information.

Survey conducted by Father and Child Trust at Violence Free Waitakere’s Toddler Day Out, in collaboration with Geoff Bridgeman and with support from Glen Jones.

Full report here (pdf)

Recent research shows that dads need to be more included in family services says Families Commissioner Gregory Fortuin. (more…)

A new study by Nelson researchers David Mitchell and Philip Chapman on experiences of separated non-resident fathers found that research participants were either unaware of existing services or considered them unfriendly towards men.
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