Federally funded Responsible Fatherhood programs work with fathers to promote healthy relationships and marriages, strengthen parenting practices, and help fathers attain economic stability. For programs to improve fathers’ outcomes, they need to be able to recruit fathers, engage them in services, and keep them actively participating in program activities. However, social service programs often struggle to engage participants in their services. The Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs (SIRF) study was aimed at addressing this difficulty with fatherhood programs. This brief summarizes how cycles of 10 fatherhood programs participating in SIRF were designed and implemented, and provides an overview of the study’s overall findings.

Recognizing fathers’ importance to their families, as well as the difficulties that many fathers with low incomes face supporting their children, the federal government has supported responsible fatherhood (RF) programs for more than a decade. Many questions, however, remain about how to best serve fathers and their families. To identify current gaps in the knowledge base for Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programming, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) undertook the Fatherhood, Relationships, and Marriage — Illuminating the Next Generation of Research (FRAMING Research) project. The project convened a series of technical work groups to discuss issues related to research on RF programs. This brief describes the third work group session’s meeting discussion, which focused on fostering trust among fathers who participate in RF programs and recruiting and retaining young fathers in services.

Almost 16% of men in the U.S. report having a mental health problem, yet only around half receive treatment. This crisis in care has far-reaching consequences for the entire family, as fathers with mental health issues tend to have lower-quality co-parenting relationships and children who struggle to regulate their emotions and behaviors. The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse will host a webinar on March 8, 2023 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. ET about the mental health needs of fathers and practices and resources to help address them. By attending the webinar, participants will learn:

• The impact of paternal mental health on parenting, children, and relationships
• How the COVID-19 pandemic has opened the door to more discussion about the importance of mental health and treating mental health issues
• Barriers to treatment and ways to overcome them
• Where fathers can access work- and community-based mental health services

Father-inclusive practice requires recognition of the diversity of fathers and families. The Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison will host a webinar on March 1, 2023 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. CT which will focus on strategies to effectively serve Black fathers and Latino fathers in father-specific services and alongside mothers in services for children and families. The webinar will address ways to align services with the cultural values and practices of client fathers and families, and ways to promote a culture of inclusion that recognizes fathers’ multiple intersecting identities. It will also explore how practitioners’ own multiple intersecting identities influence work with fathers, and offer tips for facilitating groups for fathers, including for female facilitators.

The vastly altered societal context since March 2020 has created an opportunity for responsible fatherhood programs to partner with systems such as child welfare, child support, criminal justice, public assistance, workforce development, and others in innovative ways that could lead to program sustainability that the fatherhood field has not seen before. In this National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse information brief, Dr. Andrew Freeberg, Director of Family Stability for Goodwill-Easter Seals Minnesota, draws on his 20 years of experience overseeing the organization’s FATHER Project to provide a case study of leadership, innovation, and sustainability. In the brief, he also shares strategies that other leaders of fatherhood programs might employ.

Responsible Fatherhood (RF) grantees seek to help fathers be the parent, provider, and partner they want to be. Evaluations can help grantees improve services and better support families by examining what is working well and what is not. In the 2015 RF grantee cohort funded by the Office of Family Assistance, 40 RF grantees served fathers or couples in the community or fathers reentering the community after incarceration. Fifteen of those grantees conducted local evaluations, and this brief highlights selected results from these local evaluations. The brief was developed as part of the Building Usage, Improvement, and Learning with Data in Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Programs project.

This information brief draws from research on the impacts of parental incarceration on children and families. It also offers suggestions on ways that fatherhood programs can work in partnership with correctional agencies and schools or other community service providers to provide support for incarcerated fathers, their children, and their families. A set of resources is included at the end of the brief.

More than 3,000 Family Resource Centers (FRCs) in 36 states and the District of Columbia work with more than 2 million people annually, and because they have emerged organically without dedicated federal funding, they are often described as "America’s best kept secret." FRCs work with families in a strengths-based, multi-generational, family-centered approach to enhance parenting skills, foster the healthy development and well-being of children, youth, and families, prevent child abuse, increase school readiness, connect families to resources, develop parent and community leadership, engage males and fathers, support healthy marital and couples relationships, and promote family economic success.

The National Family Support Network will hold a webinar on December 14, 2022 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ET and will address the following three questions:

• What are FRCs and how are they networked across the country?
• What does research show about the positive outcomes FRCs have achieved for children and families?
• Why are so many public and private funders at the state, county, city, and community levels choosing to invest in FRCs?

Nearly 20 million children (almost 1 in 4) live in a home without a resident father. These children are more likely to have social-emotional adjustment problems and failing grades at school, and to become involved in the juvenile justice system. To address the problems that arise from fathers’ physical or psychological absence from children’s lives, the U.S. Congress authorized in 2006 the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) initiative, allocating $150 million per year to two separate programs: Healthy Marriage (HM) programs to strengthen married and unmarried couple relationships; and Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs to increase the active engagement of non-residential and residential fathers as parents, partners, and economic providers. While almost all RF programs offer group programs attended and led by men, with a focus on parenting and men’s mental health, this brief presents evidence which shows that fatherhood programs that include both parenting partners and expand the curriculum to cover multiple domains of family functioning not only increase father involvement and collaboration between parents, but also reduce harsh parenting and support children’s development. The brief also illustrates evidence to support a greater integration of RF and HM programs, the use of expanded curricula that cover multiple aspects of family life, and where more attention is to be paid when assessing the impact of these programs on parents and children.