July/August 2017Vol. 18, No. 5Reviewing 15 Years of Father Involvement Initiatives
Since 2001, the National Family Preservation Network (NFPN) has worked to incorporate father involvement into every aspect of child welfare policies, programs, and practice. NFPN's report, Integrating and Sustaining Father Involvement, reviews research and findings on father involvement from the past 15 years, from practitioner studies focused on the importance of staff training to government-funded initiatives, such as Parents and Children Together.
The report also highlights programs such as Supporting Fatherhood Involvement, which is an implementation model that provides father-friendly assessments of agency policies as well as training on how to integrate fathers into agency programs and case planning.
To close the report, NFPN provides a comprehensive list of recommendations to make father involvement a concerted nationwide effort, including the following:
- Develop a collaborative approach.
- Explore ways to include father involvement in current nationwide initiatives, especially those involving cross-systems.
- Advocate to include funding for father involvement in new funding sources.
- Develop new tools, resources, and training on father involvement that incorporate the female perspective.
- Develop culturally competent practice guidelines for father involvement.
- Develop models for best practice that are scalable and sustainable.
- Focus on research outcomes, such as child well-being.
- Develop explicit standards on father involvement for college and university degrees in social work and related programs, agency accreditation, licensure for practitioners, performance reviews, case practice models, child placement, government-funded contracts, and the Child and Family Services Reviews.
The full report, Integrating and Sustaining Father Involvement, is available at http://www.nfpn.org/Portals/0/Documents/father-involvement-Report.pdf (273 KB).
More information about NFPN is available at http://nfpn.org/.