– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension Wisconsin 4-H. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Alvin Thomas. He’s a professor in the School of Human Ecology here. He was born on the island nation of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean and went to high school there. Then he went to Morehouse College in Atlanta to study psychology.
He got his master’s and PhD at the University of Michigan, both in psychology. And he stayed in Michigan to get a postdoc in psychiatry. He came to UW-Madison in 2019. Tonight, he’s gonna speak with us about raising up fatherhood and raising resilient children. Would you please join me in welcoming Alvin Thomas to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?

– Thank you very much, Tom, for having me. I wanna thank PBS Wisconsin and University Place for this opportunity to share some of my work in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The challenges facing parents, children, and families in Wisconsin, the United States, and across the world are always before us. We need only click onto our phones or television sets to see the significant struggles that people just like you and I are faced with daily. One path to addressing many of our societal problems is strengthening the family, that critical building block of any country, culture, people, or society. Today, I will share with you some thoughts and conclusions from our research under the title Raising Up Fatherhood, Raising Resilient Children.

I have a few objectives for this discussion. First, I will highlight the challenges to positive youth development. Second, we will explore the concept of resilience and challenge our thinking about resilience. Then I will help us raise recognition of parents as resilience enablers and fathers as an untapped resource in the enabling of resilience. And finally, I will spotlight the benefits of engaging fathers in various social spaces, including in families. But first, let me tell you a little bit about myself. Let me tell you about my Iliad, my personal journey to Madison and this career. I started as a teacher on a small Caribbean island, Saint Lucia. About 238 square miles of tropical paradise, year-round sunshine, beautiful beaches, and all food is organic. Yes, I know.

What am I doing here in Madison? With a population of about 180,000 people. I taught elementary school, middle school, and high school for about nine years. And I saw during those experiences, many of my students struggling under the burden of significant social, financial, and mental health issues. I also saw familial and neighborhood conditions kind of intertwining with significant social upheaval to undermine the development of many of my students. I watched, with limited resources, while the potential of many of these students remained undiscovered. And often, it felt like I was fistfighting the wind. And still, I would do everything I could to support my students’ positive development. Out of this seeming futility came my desire to do more. I studied psychology at Morehouse College and deepened my interest in strengthening the Black family. During this time in Atlanta, I pulled together a reading program in collaboration with a local church.

One of the church mothers had noticed reading difficulties among the children of her congregants and decided that addressing this lapse could only help the children move forward, achieving their full potential, especially in school settings. I also spent lots of my time in Ashland, Wisconsin, the Northwoods, working at summer camps and after-school programs run by a lifelong educator, Anne Whiting. As a coach and educator, she represented a pivotal resource for many children and families. And that resonated with my own interest in supporting and building children and families, especially those experiencing significant challenges. These programs provided spaces that validated learning and provided an appropriate atmosphere for children to just be children and explore and build social relationships with positive adults and peers. Years later, I harnessed this desire to do more for my students and completed doctoral and post-doctoral studies in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan. During this time, I deepened my interest in Black families and fatherhood. I still remember my early advocacy during my days as a clinical intern and psychiatry fellow, encouraging practices that welcomed fathers in therapy and other clinical spaces. I spent time taking an interest in those clinical services and pulling them outside of university settings and into community spaces that were more easily accessible by the communities that we wanted to reach. Fast forward a few more years, and on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, I joined the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after having trained clinical psychologists for about three years.

The experiences during that time convinced me that if we were going to appropriately address the issues affecting children and families, we would have to deal with the family as a full system. And that would mean engaging fathers in our processes. When I moved to Madison, I brought with me the Thomas Resilient Youth Lab, an incubator of research on risk and resilience among Black families, the mental health of Black men and boys, and the celebration and validation of Black fathers. Almost immediately, the work of supporting the mental health of Black men and boys became front and center as the pandemic picked up steam and racial tensions spiked in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Most persons had watched the murder multiple times or had heard about it. At the same time, they were also watching friends and family members fall ill and many dying. This compounding of trauma and negative events left lots of families ravaged, but Black families were double hit as they were more likely to contract COVID and die or be seriously affected by the short and long-term consequences because of preexisting medical conditions, but largely because of preexisting disparities and unequal access to resources like education, and jobs, and healthcare, and mobility, and other social resources. I wrote about the effects on Black men and boys in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But also partnered with community organizations, like Rebalanced-Life Wellness Association, and hosted a Black male support group on Facebook, which welcomed all contributors, though the discussions were often specific to the emotion and mental health needs of Black men and boys. The initiative was very well-received by men and their supporters across the United States, in the Caribbean, and even in Europe.

We were aware of the significant risks faced by Black men and boys, but also aware in general of the many challenges that children face throughout their development. And for many of the men and spouses and supporters who listened in on our conversations and the input from the guests who are leaders in communities, these discussions prove powerful and useful. So, today, we’re discussing Raising Up Fatherhood, Raising Resilient Children. And as we discuss this, I want you to keep in mind that young teacher from Saint Lucia who decided to do more for his students, recalling always the struggles that he saw among them. From your own experiences, and maybe from those of others, you could probably identify some hurdle, some condition, or situation, or environment that represented an unnecessary difficulty for you growing up, or situation that would make it difficult for a young person to reach their full potential. One category of challenges is called ACEs. ACEs stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. And they represent kinds of adversity that children face in their home environment. These are often but not always experienced as traumatic. But the experience always redirects significant energy and effort away from a child’s positive development.

And there are three general types of ACEs or adverse childhood experiences. That’s abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. Abuse includes inappropriate physical, emotional, and sexual interactions with a child. Neglect can be physical or emotional. And household dysfunction includes experiences like the mental illness of any member of the family, but especially the primary caregivers, incarceration of a relative, intimate partner violence, substance abuse, and divorce or separation. These adverse childhood experiences are pretty widespread among children in the United States. According to a 2018 report on trends among children, about 45% of children have experienced at least one of these adverse childhood experiences. Parental separation and economic hardship are the most common ACEs, regardless of race and ethnicity, though children of different races and ethnicities do not experience ACEs equally. National percentages of children experiencing at least one ACE reveal highest percentages among Black children, 61%, and Hispanic children, 51%. This high prevalence of ACEs among Black and Hispanic children requires the application of more coping mechanisms, more resources, more support, more scaffolding.

But often, these resources are in short supply because of disproportional access and outdated policies. In 2019, among a sample of 144,000 adults across 25 states in the U. S. , 61% of these adults reported experiencing at least one adverse childhood experience. Nearly one in six or about 16% of adults have experienced four or more ACEs. And women and several racial and ethnically minoritized groups remain at greater risk for experiencing a high number of ACEs. These ACEs also represent billions, yes, with a B, billions of dollars lost in medical cost, early mortality or death, lower productivity, days of work lost, and cost of long-term mental health problems. More than 1. 9 million cases of preventable heart disease will also trace back to adverse childhood experiences. ACEs have detrimental effects on physical and mental health.

And toxic stress is the mechanism that links ACEs to physical health problems like diabetes, breathing difficulties, and heart problems. When an individual experiences an adverse experience like neglect or abuse during their childhood, the body responds with a heightened stress response like anxiety, high heart rate, hypervigilance, continuous flow of stress response hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. This response to long-lasting and serious stress without the benefit of support from caregivers or other coping mechanisms can wreak havoc on the body’s systems. ACEs and experiences like racism and community and family violence and dysfunction are connected to toxic stress. Toxic stress is also connected to mental health problems like poor school performance, depression and anxiety symptoms, even PTSD, suicide, and drug use as an adult. Resilience is predicated on the presence of risks. The ability to reduce toxic stress or mitigate it with positive coping resources will tilt the balance between the likelihood of positive and negative outcomes. More so, preventing ACEs altogether eliminates toxic stress and further tips the balance in the favor of positive outcomes. Therefore, when factors like strong, consistent relationships with a positive adult, access to positive coping strategies, and some internal, possibly biological predisposition to overcome. When all of these are present, then positive outcomes are more likely for children, even when risks are present.

These factors are at the core of resilience, especially for children. But the story is not that risks exist. We know that. The story is that resilience is possible. Most of our conversations about resilience though, often focus on strengthening the individual without adequate focus on environmental and contextual change. This image here is informed by the story of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is a figure from Greek mythology who became infamous for his general trickery and for twice cheating death. But he was ultimately punished by Zeus, who sentenced Sisyphus to forever rolling a boulder up a hill in the depths of Hades. So Sisyphus continues to roll that boulder up the hill, suggesting some level of resilience, right, continuing to thrive in the face of major risks, in this case, this punishment that he has been meted out. But think of Sisyphus’ position.

What if somebody were to ground or grade that hill so it becomes a flat, paved road? Sisyphus could be more successful at his task and roll the boulder along with ease. Well, what if the boulder were chipped down to becoming a small pebble so that Sisyphus could carry it in his pocket instead? Then he could focus on other, more meaningful task. True resilience requires that we strengthen the individual’s chances of success in the current environment and in future environments. But also that we reduce the current contextual adversity, thereby liberating the individual, liberating the child to pursue their full potential. So let’s talk a little bit about context, the ecological system within which a child develops. The model here accounts for the individual, interpersonal, organizational, and societal influences on child development. We see here in the first part of the model that the child’s ecological environment or context starts with themselves and those closest to their child, like their family members, their friends, friends of the family, adults at school, those who make up the child’s most intimate social connections. And in the second part of the model, there are the interpersonal influences. That is, the interactions between the home and person and groups outside of the home. So for instance, a family member, or caregiver, or parents visiting the school.

That would be the interpersonal influence. The third tier of influence from the child’s context or environment includes the influence from organizations that directly or indirectly impact the child and their family and community, like the community church, the school, the parents’ place of work, the police, and health and social service organizations. And finally, the macro or overarching influence in the child’s development happens within the boundaries of the society or culture and country that the child lives in. And these larger societal influences determine the norms and values and beliefs that are passed onto the child, the policies and worldviews that inform institutions like schools, courts, and the police, and which will differentially affect families, neighborhoods, and communities. Each part of the system is influenced by and influences the other. For instance, what happens at the individual or family level will have an impact on the family or the family members’ interactions with the school. Think, for example, of how substance abuse by one family member, say a parent or a primary caregiver, can affect the interpersonal level. It would mean that that family member or caregiver would be an unavailable parent for collaborating with teachers and the school. A societal norm or value, for instance, could negatively influence an organization, like the police or social service agencies. Understanding that context matters in predicting the effect of risks on resilience and in predicting future behaviors and outcomes for children, the Thomas Resilient Youth Lab, or the TRYlab for short, functions based on a model where a child’s behaviors, desirable and undesirable, are understood as being influenced by factors related to their family, the neighborhood or ZIP code in which they reside, the friends to whom they are exposed at school and in their neighborhood, and even online, and, of course, the child’s own predispositions.

This model holds regardless of whether we are interested in understanding violence or aggression, school performance, bullying, suicide, or the likelihood to attend college. Family, neighborhood, peers, and individual factors, as you will see in this model and the arrows between these models, have bidirectional effects on each other. Meaning that while the neighborhood could have a negative or positive effect on the family, the opposite is also true. That the family could have a negative or positive effect on the neighborhood. And so you will see that with the double-headed arrow. Neighborhood, peers, and individual factors interact to predict or help us understand children’s outcomes, both in the present and long term. But this model also has to take into consideration the current impact of recent and historical events on current lifestyle and life chances for different groups. So for instance, we think of the influence of racism and discrimination on societal systems and its effects on institutions, organizations, and their policies, and how these influences and policies differentially impact racially marginalized children and families. So let me go into sharing with you a little bit about some of the findings from a few studies that I’ve conducted that explored the effects of risks on children and how different resilience and answers, like parents, counter the possible negative outcomes from exposure to risks. When we think of certain neighborhoods, when we think of poorer neighborhoods, disadvantaged neighborhoods, they’re often characterized by high crime rates, drug activity, violence, and other kinds of disadvantages that we expect usually in poorer urban neighborhoods.

These characteristics, these neighborhood characteristics, have been associated with higher levels of psychological difficulties or mental health problems and higher levels of violence for youth who live in these neighborhoods and call it home. Black adolescents are more likely than their white counterparts to live in poor urban neighborhoods. They are also more likely to suffer negative outcomes, including violence victimization. While that is true, it is also equally true that not every Black child, not every racially marginalized child who lives in these settings will become violent or has the greater propensity for violence. We will explore why that is different for some kids. In a study of 553 Black adolescent boys in inner city Chicago, boys were about an average of about maybe 11 years old, we wanted to understand how experiences of violence affected these Black boys’ feelings of safety and what could be done at the community level to help make these boys feel safer in their own neighborhoods. So we asked a number of questions about the kinds of experiences that they had had and their different perceptions of safety and what was related to safety in their neighborhoods. We found very high levels of violence exposure. And this violence exposure included experiences of seeing someone shot or shot at, seeing someone stabbed, seeing someone beaten, and seeing someone severely injured from a beating. Just to give you a sense of the extent of violence exposure among these kids, about 92% of them, almost a full 100%, were exposed to one or more acts of violence.

75% had been exposed to about two or more acts of violence. And almost half of them, 46%, had more chronic exposure. Many of them had been victims as well. And some of them had also seen this violence perpetrated against a friend or a family member. So as would be expected with this level of violence exposure, boys who experience this level of violence exposure reported, of course, feeling relatively unsafe and unsure of their neighborhoods, concerned about what could happen to them, having seen what had happened to others. But boys who felt that their neighbors would look after them or that their neighbors had similar values to their parents about protecting children, those boys who had those views thought of their neighborhood as safer than those boys who had lower sense of collective efficacy or this perception that the neighbors are looking out for you. In other words, although there was a significant level of risk exposure, in this case, exposure to violence, the presence or perception that there was a consistent, positive adult around led boys to feeling safer in their neighborhood. And what would that look like? That would look like Mr. Joseph sitting on his porch and watching the kids as they play street ball. That would be Miss Rose peering through her window as the boys walk down the street to go to the basketball court or the football field.

Recognizing the presence of these adults, these adults who are aiming to protect their children, protect the neighborhood’s children, once kids recognized that this was present, they were more likely to feel safe in their neighborhoods. We used data from a fragile family study. It’s a national longitudinal sample of about 3,400 adolescents. And this is Black adolescents, Hispanic adolescents, and white adolescents. We wanted to investigate the impact of negative police interactions. ‘Cause we understood that police represent an organizational context as far as the child’s development, and that children are generally taught to respect police officers and to look to them for protection and safety. We wanted to understand what would happen if those interactions between this expectedly positive adult figure turned negative. So we explored children’s reports of being searched by the police, being randomly stopped and frisked without provocation, being hit by the police, or having profanity directed at them from a police officer. We also assessed children’s depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as their academic outcomes, using just their grades in class, as well as their health, their perception of how healthy they felt. For each of these outcomes, the psychological outcomes, the physical health outcomes, and the academic grades, the outcomes were worse for Black and Hispanic boys and girls.

And worse overall for Black boys after these negative experiences with the police. In our analyses, we wanted to make sure we understood exactly what was going on. So we controlled for these same factors, the psychological, physical health, and academic outcomes, long before these children were in contact with this negative experience. And even when we controlled for these outcomes before the interaction with the police, we still found the same findings. The findings, therefore, reinforce the powerful influence of consistent, positive adults in the lives of children, even if the adult is a member of the community or a representative of a large social institution, like the police or schools. In other words, teachers are important for protecting and supporting children’s positive development. Police, pastors, religious leaders, community leaders are all important as they provide a safe space for children to explore their environment and explore their full potential. We are aware that historical and current representations of racial marginalization, that is, racism, segregation, discrimination, and prejudice, disproportionately affect Black boys, often putting them in social situations that reflect the institutional and structural challenges that make it difficult for them to become their true selves and reach their fullest potential. These long-term effects of societal, organizational, and interpersonal risks are linked to negative outcomes. But some resilience factors may help to soften that blow.

However, we also recognize that changes to societal institutions and policies would altogether eliminate those negative experiences for Black youth. In our third study, we wanted to assess the power of a core part of resilience. That’s efficacy to avoid a negative behavior. Efficacy to avoid violence, for instance, is the child’s belief that if they have the opportunity to engage in violent behavior, that they would feel comfortable and safe to not engage. So this study used the same sample of these 553 Black boys that I spoke about earlier from the inner city Chicago neighborhoods, who had witnessed significant violence in their neighborhoods. What we found in this study was that those boys who had witnessed more violence and who also thought that their friends engaged in violence and that their friends wanted them to also engage in violence were more likely to eventually enact violent or aggressive behaviors. So this exposure to violence led these boys, one, to believe that their friends were also more engaged in violence, and to also believe that their friends wanted them to engage in violence. Now, it could well be that even without exposure to violence, those other perceptions of their friends would still exist. But when those three things came together, the likelihood of these kids engaging in a violent or an aggressive act was increased. Interesting, we also found that efficacy to avoid violence was lower.

And remember, this is the resilience factor. It was lower if adolescents witnessed violence and believed that their friends would encourage them to enact violent behaviors. So if they saw or heard about violence, lots of violence, and they also believed that their friends wanted them to engage in violence, these boys were less likely to feel powerful or efficacious in avoiding violence if the opportunity arose. But parents’ messages to their children, specific though, it had to be specific to messages about avoiding violence. Those messages made youth believe more in their ability to not engage in violent or aggressive acts. More importantly, this belief in their ability to not engage in violence or aggressive acts led to fewer violent behaviors, which suggests to us that parents emerge as a crucial resource in building and enhancing their children’s resilience through something as simple as these positive conversations. But it also means that parents need support in how to have these positive conversations in a way that’s both developmentally appropriate, but also useful for the child so that parents are not transmitting their own trauma or their own anxiety onto children as they’re having these really important conversations about avoiding violence, or avoiding early sexual initiation, or other negative behaviors. We wanted to see if this finding was maintained over time. That is, are parents able to help build this efficacy and to improve outcomes for their children simply by engaging their children and sharing these positive values and norms and beliefs with them about specific risks? We also wanted to see if resilience was present in the form of efficacy to avoid violence. And so we polled again these same boys that we’ve been talking about from these Chicago neighborhoods.

And we examined data instead at this point from these boys when they were in fifth grade, and again when they were in seventh grade to allow us to kind of take a look at that longitudinal effect. We found that exposure to violence at fifth grade predicted youth engaging in violent acts at seventh grade. That’s about two years later. And that exposure to violence, experiencing violence, also undermined or weakened boys’ resilience, in this case, their efficacy to avoid violence. So if they had witnessed violence at fifth grade, then by seventh grade, they felt a little bit less sure about their ability to avoid violence because norms had been passed down to them through these experiences, through witnessing these experiences, these norms that suggested and strengthened the idea of engaging in violent acts. So we wanted to see whether or not parents could do anything to lessen that impact of exposure to violence on children. If efficacy to avoid violence was high at grade seven, then boys were less likely to engage in violence. So efficacy to avoid violence, that resilience factor definitely helped to prevent a negative outcome. Now, as far as parents being able to enhance resilience, did we find anything? Yes. We found that almost two years after being exposed to violence, those boys whose parents had spoken to them more about avoiding violence, they engaged in fewer violent acts.

In other words, across time, across two years of experiences, parents were still able to provide sufficient support to help mitigate or lessen the impact of a risk exposure on negative outcomes. So let’s expand our discussion around parents and what parents are able to do and how they’re able to support children. Who are these involved parents who are enabling resilience in their children and increasing the chances of positive outcomes? Well, it wouldn’t surprise you to know that these are both mothers and fathers. But only over the last three decades have we begun to see a serious level of interest in the influence of fathers. In general, we have assumed that fathers are less involved or don’t want to be involved. We assume this even more so for Black fathers and those who may not share the same home as their child. The data, however, tells us that this is not true, that Black fathers are actually the most involved across multiple domains of childcare and involvement, with increased involvement in their children’s lives through their child’s development. Society also applies a historical default to maternal parenting and traditional roles of fathers and mothers, to the detriment of the entire family system and the exclusion of fathers in these sacred family spaces. So who are these fathers? Who are fathers? Fathers are male adult figures who play a critical role in the health and development of the child. These, of course, can be determined by culture and family structure.

And so you could have biological fathers, you could have non-resident fathers, that is, fathers who do not share the same house with the child, don’t reside in the same home with the child, but remain ever so involved and interested in the lives of their children. You have kinship fathers. These are grandfathers, uncles, cousins who step in and play the role of father, whether the biological father is present or not as a way of subsidizing support for the family and subsidizing support for the child’s development. What does father engagement look like? And so often when we think of engaging fathers, we try to figure out what exactly are fathers supposed to be doing. And I’ll give you a few examples of what fathers are already doing. And, of course, it’s not an exhaustive list, but fathers are currently engaged in prenatal support and continue to be actively engaged throughout the pregnancy and beyond. Fathers attend appointments, prenatal appointments, attend childcare well visits with their children and with their partners. Fathers are supporting moms’ health and nutrition throughout the pregnancy, and supporting moms’ health beyond the pregnancy. Fathers are supporting their own health and supporting their child’s needs, taking their children to services, or at least expressing interest in taking them to services in some cases. Fathers are also engaged in a range of parenting practices, from caregiving and play to child-related decisions like health care and support.

Fathers are also taking care of the well-being of their children, spending time with their children, seeing after their children’s basic needs, and making sure that their children have optimal growth environments or the most conducive environments, the best environments, the most enriched environments that allow for the child’s cognitive or mind functioning as well as emotional and physical development. You will see a lot of the photographs that I use here are from a group called Dad Gang. Dad Gang exists specifically to highlight the presence of Black fathers and the work that Black fathers have been doing behind the scenes, out of the gaze of most individuals who continue to perpetuate this myth, this stereotype that Black fathers are not present, that Black fathers have given up on their families or have abdicated their roles. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not what the research is telling us. It’s telling us that Black fathers are very present. So I deliberately pull a lot of these photographs to give you a hint of some of the work that’s already happening with Black fathers and their families. There are significant and emotional health benefits for engaging fathers with children and families. And these benefits include but are not limited to overall better outcomes. That’s social outcomes, emotional outcomes, and the cognitive development or the brain development of the child.

Less toxic stress. We talked earlier about how toxic stress is related to all of these physical as well as mental health issues. The father present in a positive way helps to reduce that toxic stress. Behavior problems improve and there’s lower relapse rate. Some studies have suggested that when children are involved in family therapy for significant behavioral problems, that when the mother is involved in that therapy, we see significant decrements or reductions in the kind of behavioral problems that we see with children. But when you add the father to that equation, you add the father into that mix, what we see are not just significantly better outcomes, greater improvement in the behavioral problems, but we also see a longer period before potential relapse, suggesting that fathers provide an additional buttress to the family and to the services that are offered to families. Increased support and coping resources. Often, we think of single parents as an overloaded circuit. Mom trying to do everything. You include the father, and often the father might be physically present, but the space for the father to be engaged and to be part of the discussion may not always be available.

And so bringing the father into the fold, giving him space and encouraging him to be part of the discussions, part of the work that’s happening in the family and in other spaces, school and therapy spaces, provides an additional level of support and additional resources for children and for families. It provides positive norms. Fathers are able to pass on additional positive norms to their children. Mothers are providing those positive norms, but fathers can subsidize that and add additional norms to that, provide guidance for deciding who the family is, what the family believes, what the family holds dear, the family’s values, and transmitting those family values, reaffirming and reinforcing those family values for the family as a whole, but also for the children. There are positive developments for the father himself. Some studies conducted in Flint, Michigan by colleagues at the University of Michigan, Cleopatra Caldwell, with the Father and Sons program found that when Black fathers and their young sons were brought together in this 10-week program, fathers who had concerns about their alcohol use saw significant reductions, both in the intention to use alcohol and in the actual use of alcohol, suggesting that grounding fathers in the overarching larger goal of protecting and supporting and encouraging the positive development in their children had a positive effect for both the child, but also for the father. But while the link between maternal mental health and child health are well-established in the literature, the work on fathers is still emerging. Like I said at the beginning, we’re only 30 years into this research. But the work shows a similar relationship between fathers’ poor mental health and negative outcomes. So we know that depression among moms leads to worse outcomes for kids.

We’re seeing a similar link between fathers’ depressive symptoms and children’s outcomes. In a recent study conducted in the City of Milwaukee, myself and a colleague from the School of Social Work talked with new and expectant Black mothers and fathers to learn about their pregnancy experiences and to discover from them what resources exist in their communities and to conduct a needs assessment within the population. The new and expectant parents completed surveys and engaged in focus group conversations to gather the full range of their experiences during pregnancy. And there were a number of key issues that emerged. First off, we noticed that there was a very high level of father involvement through the pregnancy. Also that many of the fathers and mothers highlighted transportation as a challenge to accessing the needed services. And fathers spoke of the inconsistency of the services available to them and a general feeling of being unwelcomed, an atmosphere in these provider spaces that did not make them feel like they were wanted in these spaces. And this was both in prenatal and postnatal visits. Fathers talked about feeling unincluded in consultations when their partner was with the care provider. For example, not having the ultrasound screens tilted in a way that fathers could be part of the conversation, be part of the experience of tracking and chronicling the pregnancy and the development of their child.

So we wanted to find out how much clinicians were engaging fathers in child-related therapy based on some of these experiences that we’ve been hearing. So I held a focus group, a couple of focus groups with psychologists, social workers, and psychiatry residents, all of them trainees. And across all three types of practitioners, that’s the psychologists, the social workers, and psychiatry residents, there was an unsurprisingly low level of attempts to engage fathers in family and child therapy. And a number of reasons emerged for this very low level of engaging fathers. One of the first was that the trainees talked about feeling uncomfortable and unprepared for the experience. Although many of them had suggested that they had thought it would be useful to engage fathers in these services, they also said that they felt ill-prepared and largely unsupported for engaging this kind of a challenge. Because engaging fathers also meant that clinicians would have to find times that might better fit sometimes the inflexible father schedules. Scheduling emerged as a major barrier to engaging fathers. Additionally, the time that was needed to follow up with resistant fathers, or fathers who were just generally difficult to reach or schedule could not be billed, to result in clinicians not making attempts to call fathers, because who would be paying for this time, this time that they could be putting towards another patient that they could bill for? Those clinicians who did not feel that their center or their institution prioritize or encourage father engagement were less likely to make attempts at reaching and engaging fathers. So suggesting that it’s not just at the individual clinician level, but that the whole system, the system of care and our systems of care need to themselves begin to validate and encourage father engagement in some of these services.

If we want to see fathers show up in these spaces, not only do we need to make it available for them, but we need to make it so that billing can happen, that institutions can appreciate those experiences. So of course, we’re not being overly romantic. We are very well aware that not every father will be willing to engage currently. The default assumption should not be that fathers do not want to be engaged or will try to avoid engagement. However, this is the current mindset of many of our clinicians and service providers, the assumption that fathers do not want to be engaged or are not interested in being engaged. Instead, those who work with children and families should recognize the critical resource that fathers represent to children and families and should begin by assuming that every father has a high level of interest in being engaged, that fathers are interested in child well care visits and health care decision making. They want to be engaged, they want to learn more, they want to do better. Assume that fathers are more involved than ever before. And that is what the research is telling us, that more and more, men are beginning to tie fatherhood, that fatherhood role to their own masculine identity. What it means to be a man is tied to being a good father, being a good provider, being a good nurturer of your children.

Also, assume that non-residence does not mean uninvolved because it does not. Not sharing the same house with your child does not mean that you are uninvolved in the child’s life or that you are uninterested. What can clinicians do? Talk with fathers, invite their involvement, and be alert to the cultural challenges to communication. Make community and service spaces father-friendly. Create father-affirming activities as part of child and family services, and ensure the longevity of programs and services and resources that are made available to fathers. Often, from what we’re hearing from fathers, these resources pop up and they disappear very shortly after, just as fathers begin to trust them. And that kind of an experience further undermines fathers’ trusts in future programs and resources. We have come to the end of our journey, our Iliad on ACEs, child development, and fatherhood. We have talked about how to raise resilient children through the presence of positive adults at home, in the community, and at societal levels. And we explored what it would look like to raise up fatherhood so that fathers become more recognized as an even more important resource in raising resilient children.

And so I end with these three reminders. One, we have seen that risks are present, but resilience is possible. Two, resilience supports the development of the individual’s strengths, but it must also include changing the context or the environment in which the individual lives. That is, the economic context, the social context, the physical context, and the health context. We must think, third, about how to engage all fathers, married fathers, single fathers, resident fathers, non-resident fathers, but especially those from marginalized groups, like Black fathers and those who do not reside in the same home as their child. I wanna thank PBS Wisconsin and University Place for inviting me to share this work with you. I hope that it encourages conversation and positive change action for you and your family. I want to thank all my collaborators, my students, and the families who allowed us into their lives and so generously shared their stories with us. And finally, I wanna thank you for allowing me into your homes and welcoming me to sit at your table. It was an honor.