One other little plug. The research on the Family Link Islamic Values course for Muslim fathers, previously mentioned in this blog, is now published in Child: Care, Health and Development - open access paper here.
It being Fathers' Day has guilt-tripped me into writing the first blog piece in quite a while. Shameful negligence on my part. What I've been meaning to write about for some time now was the excellent day I spent on 31 March in Manchester with a bunch of other people from social work and beyond who are researching work with fathers. Here's most of us as snapped and tweeted by Harry Ferguson https://twitter.com/Harr_Ferguson/status/583007313902075904. It was a great day, with evidence reviews on young offenders as fathers and interventions for separated fathers, great qualitative research on fathers and child protection, recruiting fathers to parenting programmes and fathers' experience of the Family Nurse Partnership. There was also a quantitative evaluation of Caring Dads. I know it's late to be writing about this event now, but please check out the presentations which are all available on the CASCADE website.
One other little plug. The research on the Family Link Islamic Values course for Muslim fathers, previously mentioned in this blog, is now published in Child: Care, Health and Development - open access paper here.
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I have written previously about the Fatherhood Institute's project to improve father engagement in child safeguarding. A journal article I wrote about this has just been published. It describes the systemic approach to the issue that was attempted and also notes some of the difficulties in practice of implementing every element of the project. For example there were practical difficulties with e-learning packages and the local authorities were experiencing multiple pressures in a climate of austerity. The published paper is here, for those with access to the journal. A freely accessible pre-print version - i.e. the paper before it went through the peer review process and was subsequently revised - can be found here.
Fathers are, of course, not all the same. That doesn't really need to be said. But as with any social category, sometimes people slip into talking as if fathers necessarily have interests and experiences in common. There are lots of different kinds of diversity to keep in mind when planning services, including family forms, class backgrounds and ethnic and cultural differences. As well as what suits individual fathers' personal style. Some will respond well to conventional men's interests, such as football, but not all will, and pretty much any approach we can think of will suit some fathers better than others.
One example of where an organisation has tried to respond to social diversity is the Family Links Islamic Values course. This is an adaptation of an existing programme whose origins are in the United States, in the work of Stephen Bavolek. It was already up and running in many parts of England and Wales, when a family support worker called Arifa Naeem, a Muslim woman who had run the programme and believed in its potential to help parents, decided to adapt it for Muslim parents. I carried out a small-scale process evaluation of the course for fathers, just to describe the approach and what the fathers thought about it. They were very positive indeed about it. The next step will be to get some evidence on outcomes for parents and children. It's an interesting example, because most attempts at 'cultural adaptation' only consider ethnicity and language, whereas this is a version of the programme specifically for a (multi-ethnic) religious group. It's not the only attempt to develop an Islamically-appropriate parenting programme. Approachable parenting was developed specifically for Muslim parents, rather than being an adaptation of an existing secular programme as with Family Links. I wrote in a previous blog about the question of whether working with fathers is the same as working with mothers (answer: YES and NO). The study which prompted those thoughts was a process evaluation of Mellow Dads, an intensive weekly group for fathers with fairly high levels of need (and risk) which was adapted from a programme originally designed for mothers. Well the report on that process evaluation is now available in another part of this website (under 'Study 3). I hope people find it useful.
I recently spoke at a conference organised by Mellow Parenting. Preparing that talk and attending their workshop on engaging fathers made me think about this question - is working with fathers different from working with mothers? Alan McMaster and Stewart McLean who led the afternoon workshop took the view that engaging fathers is just good whole family work. I absolutely agree and this could be a mantra for training on this issue. Respectful and empathetic communication is of course not a specific requirement for working with men. It is simply good practice in work with people. The same could be said for most of the skills and qualities what practitioners need to successfully engage men.
However, I think there are some particular features of work with fathers which practitioners need to be prepared for. I have recently done a process evaluation of Mellow Dads, which is a fairly intensive group intervention provided by Mellow Parenting. This group programme is designed for fathers with high levels of need and in practice many are referred by child protection services. The programme is based on improving parental attachment to children. One thing that has struck me in doing the evaluation is the extra effort needed to keep the group running. Considerable work was put in by facilitators, both before the group began and in-between sessions, just to get the men to the group. And then there were several events which clashed with group sessions, meaning the men had to miss some of the programme. These events might also crop up for mothers but they are perhaps less likely to. The clashes included attendance at criminal court (where men are more likely than women to be suspects) and appointments with other services which were not necessarily aware or supportive of the men’s attendance at a parenting group, perhaps again because this is simply not familiar territory, unlike a mother attending a parenting course. Also, the group activities which involved more personal disclosures could be challenging. This is not surprising, as men’s socialisation does not typically involve sharing sensitive personal information with friends, whereas women’s friendships often do involve emotional bonding and the sharing of intimate experiences. I don't mean that men cannot talk on a personal level and in fact in the Mellow Dads group the facilitators were very skilled at encouraging them to talk. But we should reasonably expect this might be more difficult to achieve in a group of men than in a group of women. This is not gender stereotyping. It is simply acknowledging social reality. So, in short, my answer to the question above has to be 'yes and no'. 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. 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. Last week I was in London for a roundtable event organised by the Fatherhood Institute (FI) and the Family Rights Group (FRG). This was to discuss the issue of engaging fathers in child safeguarding. The main event was the launching of the report on these two organisations’ joint project to improve practice with fathers in children’s social care. Several influential individuals attended, including David Lammy MP, who is Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood.
There have been just a few previous projects tackling this issue – at least these are the ones I know of because they have been published or I have heard them presented at conferences. Diana English and colleagues evaluated a pilot project in the US. The core of the project was training for practitioners, with video demonstration of techniques and written case examples. Pre-post testing suggested some gains in father engagement as evidenced by agency self-assessment and case file review. I then lead a project in 2010-11 to develop and deliver an evidence-based training course to social workers. Central to the course was an introduction to motivational interviewing skills. We found an improvement in workers’ self-efficacy following the course and – according to social workers’ self-report – a large increase in the proportion of non-residential fathers they were working with. There was, however, no change in the rate of engagement of men who were putting children at risk. Another example is the impressive work of Gavin Swann in Islington. Gavin is a senior manager with a strong commitment to improving work with fathers. He has instigated a number of measures, with support from the highest level within the authority. These have included a co-operative inquiry where staff meet regularly to discuss their progress on the issue, with encouragement for the sharing of the emotional difficulties encountered (and connections to workers’ own biographies). Routine record-keeping has been improved with regard to fathers. It is also important to note the work of the FRG’s Fathers Matter action research projects since the mid-2000s which have prepared the ground for the recent FRG/FI project. The greatest strength of the recent FI/FRG project has been its attempt to work systemically at various different levels of organisations involved with child protection. So there was work with Area Safeguarding Boards, which have representation from all key local organisations. There was face-to-face training of a range of professionals. E-learning was also developed, although it proved more difficult to implement. There was an audit of files in children’s social care departments. The project was evaluated by Pat Smail from Focus Consultancy and colleagues. The evaluation found evidence of improved practitioner self-efficacy in most (not all) areas following training and positive comments about the project’s impact from qualitative research with Area Safeguarding Board members and practitioners. The evaluation also found that some entrenched practices are difficult to shift. Local authorities are complex bureaucracies with competing priorities. Improving routing record-keeping is a slow and difficult process. But the project represents some progress and there is a follow-up initiative involving several European countries. I am really very grateful to everyone who took part in my survey for practitioners working with families back in October. I've just randomly selected the winner of the prize draw (£100 worth of books on working with fathers). I can't reveal their identity as the survey is anonymous but they know who they are. I was very glad of people giving up their precious time to fill in the on-line questionnaire. There were 223 responses from just over 50% of local authorities in the UK. The results look very interesting but I'm not ready to share them yet - need to do a load of work on analysing the data first. It will be a couple of months...... (sorry).
I thought I would share some brief thoughts on the politics of work with fathers. I had a couple of direct approaches from people who felt the questionnaire didn't reflect their approach and was 'biased' against 'non-feminist' approaches to work with men. I did pilot the questionnaire with people who have sound knowledge of this field of practice. It seems as though I should have piloted it a bit more widely to try not to alienate anyone, as I did want to capture a wide range of different ideologies and models of working. I knew there would be competing approaches. What this experience tells me, though, is that it is not possible to be neutral in this field. I tried to give people room to express a range of views, so I included a statement about fathers' rights that respondents had to rank in order, so if you disagreed you could rank it bottom. I also included a statement about doing the work in order to prevent men's abuse of women and children - again the response could be to rank it bottom if you disagreed. But two people who emailed me implied that in only mentioning men's abuse of women and not also women's abuse of men I was effectively skewing the questionnaire towards a pro-feminist perspective. I guess they may be right and you cannot sit on the fence here. People who are firmly in either a men's rights or a pro-feminist camp are not likely to see eye to eye. And it may ultimately be difficult in a politically contested field to construct a questionnaire which doesn't put someone's nose out of joint. I know this is not the same issue, but when I did a survey of programmes working with violent men a few years back I came across very strong feelings between proponents of different approaches (see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2311.00122/abstract). One agency told me they would be seen by certain other projects as 'men bashers'. Another said they would seen by rivals as 'letting men off the hook'. It may be that these same tensions around in work with fathers. If so, maybe that's a shame, as I'd like to think there is a lot of common ground. When I analyse the survey data I will find out if there is common ground and if so what characterises it. I have just launched a survey to try and find out what kind of work with fathers is going on in the UK. This is part of my research fellowship funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
There has been considerable interest in recent years in getting fathers involved with child welfare services that have historically interacted with mothers. Interventions now seem to include advice, support and parenting courses for fathers, amongst other things. What we don't really know is how much of this work is going on and what kinds of approaches are used. So, for example, are the interventions for fathers similar to or different from those being used with mothers? Are fathers being recruited to parenting programmes alongside mothers or are dedicated fathers' projects being set up? Are men being engaged in group activity or worked with individually? What ideas or theories underpin the work? What is the main motivation for the intervention - for example is it primarily about making mothers' lives easier or promoting fathers' rights or something else? How do projects recuit fathers? What is known about the effectiveness of services? If you work with fathers, please fill it the survey questionnaire. If you know someone who does, please pass on this link: http://stwnsh.com/fathers. All who complete the survey can enter a prize draw for £100 worth of books on working with fathers. Thank you! |
AuthorJonathan Scourfield, professor of social work at Cardiff University Archives
June 2015
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