Session: Parenting Together: Fathering in the Context of Family (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Background and Purpose: Fathers and fathering have been related to a host of child wellbeing indicators ranging from behavioral health to schools readiness. This body of work has started to address, and rebalance, what has been a historical focus on mothers and the mother-child relationship. Although the field has advanced in its attention to men and their contributions to families, research has often focused on fathers’ presence or absence in families rather than examining mothers’ and fathers’ rich contributions to their families in the context of complex relationships.

Fathers’ contributions to their children appear to be both distinct from that of mothers and also consistently related to quality and nature of the mother-father relationship. The mother-father relationship continues to be one of the strongest predictors of father involvement over time. Fathers influence their children both directly through their own behaviors, but also indirectly through mothers’ behaviors. For example, father support is linked to breastfeeding initiation. One of the next major advances in the field of fathering research is to consider these complex parenting relationships in the family context. This symposium includes a collection of four papers that represent some of the advances of the field of fatherhood through the examination of fathers’ parenting relationships with mothers and their impacts on one another and their children using a diverse set of methodologies and samples.

Methods and Results: The first paper expands the mother-father parenting dyad by acknowledging the complex co-parenting relationships of low-income, non-resident fathers, which may include multiple partners and extended family members. This study uses family systems theory and survey methodology to describe how the relationship between co-parenting network size and father-child closeness varies by race and how cooperation among co-parents relates to fathers’ sense of parenting efficacy. The second paper more closely examines the effect that nonresident fathers may have on mothers’ educational attainment, and ultimately child wellbeing using a longitudinal study design. This work helps to more clearly elucidate the indirect pathways through which fathers may influence child wellbeing through their relationship with mothers. Using qualitative data, the third paper examines the experiences of fathers and mothers whose adolescent children have attempted suicide. This work identifies important differences in the ways that fathers and mothers may need to be engaged and supported by service providers in the context of this unique family trauma. The last paper measures the enduring impact fathers and mothers may have on adult children. Using social network analysis, this paper captures the relationship between paternal as well as maternal warmth and the positive social supports of women in recovery.

Implications: Taken together, these papers make important contributions to the field of father research by considering more carefully and explicitly the impacts parents have on one another and their children. The results describe the pathways through which fathering may influence child and family wellbeing and have implications for the way fathers and mothers might be engaged together in services to the benefit of their families.