The practitioner survey I did last Autumn is now (at last) analysed and written up. You can read the full report or a one-page summary. In this blog I’ll mention some of the most interesting findings.
The raw numbers of fathers being worked with are predictably quite small. The median annual number of fathers across all services was 10. The range of responses was wide, though, and a few services – especially universal ones – are working with lots more fathers. The biggest number, not including a couple of responses which referred to the whole UK (!) or to all the services in one county, was 600 men attending monthly groups in libraries to support fathers reading to their babies. Most of these 600 are the same men attending each time, though.
The survey covered services for both parents as well as those just for fathers. Of the services for both parents, the median proportion of fathers was 30%. I think that proportion is pretty good compared with the traditional scenario of services being almost exclusively attended by mothers. Of course these are probably practitioners with an active interest in fathers, hence they’ve completed the survey, so it’s not typical of all family services.
Structured parent training programmes and practical activities were the most common service. There was no specific intervention for fathers only that was widely used across the country and most of those being used seemed to be one-off local services devised by committed practitioners. The most common named interventions were evidence-based parenting programmes aimed at both parents (i.e. Triple P and Incredible Years).
The responses to statements about why work with fathers (ideology) and what helps them (theory) were always going to be the most interesting ones. What they show is that overt gender politics play a small part – that is, the strong statements about feminism and men’s rights were the least popular. Most popular for ideology and theory were mainstream goals of parenting support and education – improving father-child attachment, helping fathers learn techniques to manage children’s behaviour and new ways of thinking about problems.
A word of caution about the results…. I had responses from only 53% of local authorities, so there are more services out there that didn’t take part as I mentioned in a previous blog. Numbers could be difficult to work out because some were for just one intervention (e.g. one support group) and others were for whole centres or a county-wide service. Also, the ideology and theory statements are not validated, so are really only a pilot. But we do know more than we did before about what kind of work is going on in practice, so that should be of some use.
The raw numbers of fathers being worked with are predictably quite small. The median annual number of fathers across all services was 10. The range of responses was wide, though, and a few services – especially universal ones – are working with lots more fathers. The biggest number, not including a couple of responses which referred to the whole UK (!) or to all the services in one county, was 600 men attending monthly groups in libraries to support fathers reading to their babies. Most of these 600 are the same men attending each time, though.
The survey covered services for both parents as well as those just for fathers. Of the services for both parents, the median proportion of fathers was 30%. I think that proportion is pretty good compared with the traditional scenario of services being almost exclusively attended by mothers. Of course these are probably practitioners with an active interest in fathers, hence they’ve completed the survey, so it’s not typical of all family services.
Structured parent training programmes and practical activities were the most common service. There was no specific intervention for fathers only that was widely used across the country and most of those being used seemed to be one-off local services devised by committed practitioners. The most common named interventions were evidence-based parenting programmes aimed at both parents (i.e. Triple P and Incredible Years).
The responses to statements about why work with fathers (ideology) and what helps them (theory) were always going to be the most interesting ones. What they show is that overt gender politics play a small part – that is, the strong statements about feminism and men’s rights were the least popular. Most popular for ideology and theory were mainstream goals of parenting support and education – improving father-child attachment, helping fathers learn techniques to manage children’s behaviour and new ways of thinking about problems.
A word of caution about the results…. I had responses from only 53% of local authorities, so there are more services out there that didn’t take part as I mentioned in a previous blog. Numbers could be difficult to work out because some were for just one intervention (e.g. one support group) and others were for whole centres or a county-wide service. Also, the ideology and theory statements are not validated, so are really only a pilot. But we do know more than we did before about what kind of work is going on in practice, so that should be of some use.