Session: Fathers in Focus: Reframing Fatherhood in Social Work through Diverse Perspectives and Challenges (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

Our knowledge about the experiences and outcomes of fathers continues to grow, however, there is still much that remains unexplored. Current fatherhood research emphasizes the importance of their role, yet the unique nuances of that role, particularly in diverse social work settings require additional attention. By leveraging our collaborations with other disciplines including psychology, education, public health, and human development, this symposium highlights how using multiple perspectives helps fathers to strengthen their relationships with their children across various settings. Collectively, these papers showcase tough issues fathers are facing today including being underrepresented in social work texts and child welfare settings. Additionally, our symposium reaffirms the necessity of father involvement in contemporary families.

Our first paper, "From Margins to Center: A Content Analysis on the Balance of Paternal Representations in Human Behavior in the Social Environment (HBSE) Textbooks" offers a content analysis examining the prevalence of father-related and mother-related terms in current social work HBSE literature. The authors found a strong preference for using mother-related terms which if left unattended could influence social work students' perceptions and understandings of paternal roles in family dynamics and human development. Our second paper, "Household family type in child protective services (CPS): Single dads need attention, too" shifts the focus to single fathers involved in a CPS investigation and whether their single parent status influences re-report to CPS. The results found that single fathers do experience different risks of re-report that are distinct from single mothers and partnered couples, which in turn, begs for different prevention-based approaches. Our third paper, "Parental Warmth of Non-Offending Fathers Raising Children in the U.S. Child Welfare System: Associations with Children's Socioemotional Development" uncovers an 'invisible' population of fathers - non-offending and responsible for caring for their child-welfare involved children. The authors found despite multiple disadvantages these fathers demonstrated high levels of warmth that were associated with beneficial socioemotional outcomes for children. These findings suggest the continued need for child welfare systems to be more open to fathers and to recognize, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the need for tailored approaches for these families. Our fourth paper, "Profiles of Father Involvement among Unmarried Black Fathers and Child Social-Emotional Functioning" uses a latent profile analysis to examine the patterns of father involvement among unmarried Black fathers with low income and how different father involvement patterns are associated with preschoolers' social-emotional functioning. The results found that most fathers were highly involved despite having low income and structural barriers. The findings emphasize the strength and resilience of Black fathers as well as the need to prioritize these fathers and their children through targeted efforts and services.

The papers selected provide new and innovative findings that answer new questions about a population of important caregivers in need of distinct intervention approaches. We believe these findings will spark critical discussions within the symposium as well as help to build future research collaborations focused on improving social worker policies and practices tailored to fathers.