Fathers play a critical role in communities and families, and numerous studies have documented easily overlooked facts about today’s fathers. This research includes, for example, findings from the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, as well as longitudinal analyses of officially recorded and self-reported abuse and neglect.
Investigations have found that active father involvement is associated with a wide range of positive outcomes for children, co-parents, families, and communities. Some of the verdicts are as follows:
- Children with encaged fathers do better in school, are less likely to do drugs, wait longer to have sex, and are less likely to be sexually abused.
- Men who are engaged in family life are more likely to have a job and more likely to pay taxes.
- Boys with a father in their lives tend to develop better social skills and empathy than boys without a father in their lives.
- Daughters who are raised by single fathers are just as well adjusted and happy as daughters raised by single mothers.
- Men who are engaged in family life report lower rates of depression.
- Children who don’t live with or have regular contact with their biological fathers are, on average, at least two to three times more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience educational, health, emotional, and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior.
- Men experience the same range of complex emotions as women do.
- Children whose fathers participate in school activities – including teacher conferences – tend to do better in school.Fathers who spent time alone with their children performing routine childcare at least two times a week raised children who were the most compassionate adults.
- Men who are engaged in family life live longer.
- Fathers generally have as much impact as (or more impact than) mothers do in the following areas of their daughters’ lives: achieving academic and career success, creating a loving trusting, relationship with a man, dealing well with people in authority, being self-confident and self-reliant, being willing to try new things and to accept challenges, maintaining good mental health, and expressing anger comfortably and appropriately.
- Teenagers who feel close to their fathers in adolescence go on to have better marriages.
The University of Oklahoma, through the University Outreach Center for Public Management “Forge Your Trail” fatherhood program, is one organization that is acting on these findings. Additional details about Forge Your Trail (and the help it can provide to parents in moving toward catching their child support payments up and improving relationships with their children) can be found via the links below:
Child Support Services Customers’ Resources List
Forge Your Trail – Forge Your Trail
The Forge Your Trail program also offers a free fatherhood class called “On My Shoulders” (OMS). This is a strengths-based, experiential curriculum designed to give fathers from a variety of backgrounds effective tools for being strong, effective fathers. Although it is not a “parenting” class, the course emphasizes relationship skills, self-awareness, emotions, mindful choices, and being valued in the world as a man and as a father.
OMS focuses on core relationship values such as commitment, respect, and healthy attachment. It also focuses on workable practical skills that make for effective parenting and effective relationships in general.
Because social science research lends strong support to the idea that improved functioning in one part of life spills over into other areas, fathers who work through the OMS material should see real benefits in many areas of their lives. More information about OMS is available thru e-mail at ForgeYourTrail@ou.edu. It is also possible to sign up directly at https://fyt.oucpm.org/classes/.