Parental Warmth of Non-Offending Fathers Raising Children in the U.S. Child Welfare System: Associations with Children's Socioemotional Development

Background and Purpose: Fathers who become involved with the child welfare system are often examined through a deficit lens, given their child maltreatment perpetration status. However, some fathers are non-offenders of child maltreatment and responsible for rearing children with child welfare system involvement. These fathers are often “invisible” to social work researchers and child welfare practitioners. Thus, the current cross-sectional study aimed to assess paternal warmth as a positive dimension of non-offending fathers’ parenting and examine the links with children’s socioemotional development. Informed by the developmental ecological systems framework for investigating father-child relationships (Volling & Cabrera, 2019), the current study addressed the research questions: (1) What does paternal warmth look like for non-offending men across father types (e.g., biological fathers; step-, foster, adoptive fathers; male relatives)? (2) To what extent is paternal warmth associated with children’s socioemotional development? We hypothesized that paternal warmth would look similarly across father types and that paternal warmth would be associated lower levels of externalizing and internalizing problems and higher levels of social competence.

This study aligns well with the 2025 Society for Social Work and Research Conference theme of “Strengthening Social Impact through Collaborative Research,” given that the study was the outcome of a robust interdisciplinary collaborative partnership, representing the fields of social work, psychology, education, and human development.

Methods: Data were from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being-Second Cohort (NSCAW-II). The analytic sample included families in which fathers were non-offenders of the index child maltreatment and primarily responsible for caring for a focal child ages 0-9 years (N=192). Paternal warmth was assessed using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment. Children’s internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms were assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist. Social competence was assessed using the Social Skills Rating System. Analysis of variance and multivariable ordinary least squares regression were used.

Results: Descriptive results showed that fathers were from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds (50% with a high school education only; median income of $37,500) and racially diverse (48% white, 21% Black, 21% Latinx/Hispanic, and 19% other). Paternal warmth was high (M=4.74, SD=0.49, range: 1.67-5) and did not differ by father type, F(2, 188) = 0.13, p = .879. Multivariable regression model results showed that paternal warmth was associated with lower levels of children's externalizing symptoms (b = -0.20, SE = .09, 95% CI [-0.38, -0.01], p = .037) and higher levels of children’s social competence (b = 0.30, SE = .09, 95% CI [0.11, 0.49], p = .002)

Conclusion and Implications: These findings suggest that non-offending fathers caring for children involved in the child welfare system demonstrated high levels of warmth despite multiple disadvantages and that such fathering was associated with beneficial socioemotional outcomes for children. Our findings support calls for the child welfare system to be more welcoming to fathers. Moreover, they suggest the critical need for a multidisciplinary team of practitioners (e.g., social workers, educators, psychologists) to provide father-inclusive services to support the positive fathering of men raising children in the context of child welfare system involvement.