Session: Mental Health Mechanisms Linking Fathers to Child Outcomes (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Involved fathers have positive effects for families and children. Involved fathers positively influence their children from infancy to adolescence and beyond. In short, an involved father is a crucial element of positive social, psychological, and cognitive development for children. Despite mounting evidence that involved fathers are good for children and families, research on father involvement remains in its infancy. Importantly, factors addressing mental health have been largely ignored. The papers in this symposium help expand our understanding of the psychosocial predictors of father involvement, not only by addressing various mental health and psychosocial factors associated with father involvement, but also by considering mechanisms that link these issues to involvement and child outcomes. Together, these papers not only contribute to the research literature, but also have clear micro, mezzo, and macro practice implications for work with fathers, children, and families.

Methods

Notably, all four papers utilize national data and rigorous quantitative methodologies to address their questions. The first paper uses OLS regression and new national data to address the moderating effect of masculine norm adherence on the association between depression and four measures of father involvement. The second paper, using national data, leverages structural equation modeling to understand how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and depression are associated with both warm and abusive parenting practices in fathers. The third paper used the Fragile Families data to link several predictors of father involvement, including perceptions of parenting, depression, and corporal punishment to father involvement. The final paper used the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being to consider how paternal characteristics, including violence and mental health status, were associated with four types of maltreatment: physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect.

Results

The four papers, woven together, tell an important and significant story about mental health, abuse, father involvement, and child outcomes. The first paper considers the gendered response to depression as a significant and strong predictor of paternal involvement. The second paper builds on this by focusing on a potentially important predictor of father involvement and depression, adverse childhood experiences. This paper finds that ACEs, working through depression, has a significant effect on abusive parenting practices and decreased warmth. The third paper, building on the second, shows that factors like depression and corporal punishment may work through how men see themselves as parents. The final paper, building on the prior three, considers how all of these characteristics, and sociodemographics, contribute to the maltreatment of children. This paper shows that several factors, such as domestic violence, significantly contribute to child maltreatment.

Implications

These projects represent significant steps forward in the fatherhood literature. Collectively, they acknowledge issues that fathers bring into their parenting and how they impact children. Furthermore, the results lend themselves to more research and interventions that focus on risk factors, prevention, and strengthening family relationships. These papers represent a broader research agenda moving this area of research beyond the description of father engagement barriers toward empirically supported engagement strategies.