Over the last couple of weeks I've spoken about working with fathers at a couple of practitioner conferences, presenting findings of my survey of what kind of work is going on in the UK. What's struck me more than anything is that whilst the importance of working with fathers is probably more widely recognised than it was a couple of decades ago, all of the same challenges remain.
It's about seventeen years since I moved from working as a probation officer to an academic post and at that point I started researching gender issues in family work. In probation, almost all of the clients were men. In family support services, the opposite is true and that is still the same now as it was in the mid-1990s.
At these recent conferences on engaging parents, organised by Children in Wales, I was struck by how novel the idea of working with fathers still seems. Most practitioners, in their everyday family support work, still spend the bulk of their client contact time working with mothers. Fathers are just a very small part of that everyday reality. And recruiting them to services is thought to be very hard work.
More positively, there seemed to be a real appetite for making a change and getting more fathers involved with parenting programmes and so on. Conference attenders were very positive about the issues raised by me and by Andy Senior and Angela Bourge who were presenting the work done recently in Cardiff Children's Services. People want to change establish practices. But there was a general recognition that it's not going to be easy and there is a long way to go to bring fathers into the mainstream of family services.
It's about seventeen years since I moved from working as a probation officer to an academic post and at that point I started researching gender issues in family work. In probation, almost all of the clients were men. In family support services, the opposite is true and that is still the same now as it was in the mid-1990s.
At these recent conferences on engaging parents, organised by Children in Wales, I was struck by how novel the idea of working with fathers still seems. Most practitioners, in their everyday family support work, still spend the bulk of their client contact time working with mothers. Fathers are just a very small part of that everyday reality. And recruiting them to services is thought to be very hard work.
More positively, there seemed to be a real appetite for making a change and getting more fathers involved with parenting programmes and so on. Conference attenders were very positive about the issues raised by me and by Andy Senior and Angela Bourge who were presenting the work done recently in Cardiff Children's Services. People want to change establish practices. But there was a general recognition that it's not going to be easy and there is a long way to go to bring fathers into the mainstream of family services.