It’s All about Love: An Evaluation of the Evidenced Informed Fatherhood Program

Black fathers with histories of incarceration and trauma have multiple stressors that interfere with their ability to navigate life in the community, parent their children, and develop self-parenting skills that promote healthy regulation of their emotions. Origins of these stressors are connected to racism, masculine stereotypes, and histories of trauma. Improving these skills has potential to put fathers in control of their response to life distress instead of feeling controlled by life distress. There have been limited interventions that focus on fathers with incarceration histories that examine intervention at the intrapersonal level as a means of reducing recidivism and improving long-term outcomes for these men. Therefore, this study sought to examine the Evidenced Informed Fatherhood Program's efficacy as defined by recidivism rates, parental engagement, life distress, emotional regulation, and basic needs attainment. The sample for this study consisted of 551 fathers (N=551), the majority of who are Black (n = 534) drawn from administrative data from Father's Uplift. Analyses evaluated the program's effectiveness by examining change in scores at three time points - baseline entry into the program, 3 months and 6 months post-entry. Baseline findings indicated that about 95% of all participants needed assistance with basic needs including obtaining housing, employment, and bank accounts. Results showed a statistically significant and dramatic decrease in life distress scores and an equally dramatic increase in emotional regulation scores. Parenting time was shown to initially increase but returned to baseline at 6 months. Participants had a 4% recidivism rate at 12 months: 75% lower than the recidivism rate for Suffolk County and 90% lower than the federal recidivism rate for the same time period. Findings indicate that EIFP is effective in helping Black fathers gain self-parenting skills, address the trauma they experience as Black men in a racialized society, and reduce recidivism among this population. Longer-term study of the trajectory of parental engagement is warranted to better understand how fathers with incarceration histories, who have been considered "absent", find meaningful pathways into their children's lives.