Session: Fathering in Context: The Experience of Fathering across Service Systems (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Research about fatherhood continues to expand and to identify challenges for fathering in today's landscape of social, family, and organizational contexts. Motivated fathers, wanting to be involved in caregiving, face particularly challenging obstacles when they are economically disadvantaged or part of vulnerable populations, and when social, family, or organizational contexts are stacked against their involvement. This symposium explores fathering within the context of diverse service and family systems, focusing on critical junctures of fathering and barriers fathers face in those settings or life transitions. This group of papers contributes to a growing literature on motivated and engageable fathers who face barriers to father involvement due to complex social or structural factors. The papers bring multiple perspectives and mixed methods to inform social work research and practice aimed at engaging fathers and improving child and family outcomes. Of particular interest in this symposium are the varying perspectives from which data have been collected (fathers, mothers, and service providers), and the service systems in which fathering is evaluated (criminal justice, public housing, and human services).

The first paper uses data gathered from 15 semi-structured interviews with fathers recently released from prison (and mothers partnered with such fathers), to examine parenting during the reentry process. The paper uses grounded theory to frame discussions around the context of parenting after prison, factors that influence father-child relations, and resources to support father-family engagement. The second paper uses retrospective data from a cross-sectional survey of 109 black mothers in public housing. The study uses quantitative methods to examine offspring contact with birth fathers, and qualitative interviews to support the descriptive analysis. The third paper uses a cross-sectional snowball sample of 900 home visitors across the US to examine fathers in home visiting programs, worker attitudes and behaviors toward fathers, and how organizational factors influence father engagement.

Results from the first paper indicate that fathers are negatively affected by the disruption in their parenting role while incarcerated and work diligently to compensate for their disconnectedness once released from prison. Despite these efforts, significant economic and relationship difficulties pose barriers to the renewal of father-child engagement after incarceration. The second paper identified early maternal contact with her own father as a key link to her own child's father's contact and beliefs in the father's role. Mother's life experiences with her own father related to later life parenting inclusion of their child's father. The final paper found a significant amount of influence from worker attitudes in both worker behaviors and father engagement in services. It also noted variations in behaviors toward fathers compared to mothers in services, but little variation between home visiting models.

Implications Together the papers illustrate the importance of bringing diverse perspectives and multiple methods to describe the evolving knowledge around fathering and the complicated intersection of fathers across various service systems. Future work should continue to expand on these perspectives, challenge service sectors to identify barriers and successes in practices, and invite parents to share their perspectives about resources needed to promote positive father involvement.