Father Involvement - How Moms Can Help Dads

Consider the following points:

• Children who feel a closeness and warmth with their father are significantly more likely to enter college, significantly less likely to have a child in their teen years, be incarcerated, and show various signs of depression.

• The likelihood that a young male will engage in criminal activity is significant if he is raised without a father and even more likely if he lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of fatherless families.

• Children of involved fathers are less likely to live in poverty, more likely to receive healthcare, and less likely to be injured.

While it may be easy to immediately point blame for uninvolved fathers, dads today do face unique challenges.

Balance: Most social service organizations are predominantly female. Just as it may be uncomfortable for a woman to discuss their child in the middle of a highly male dominated engineering firm, it can be uncomfortable for a man to attend a back to school conference in a female dominated elementary school.

Work: Although there have been many changes in our society over the past few years, men are still expected to be the primary breadwinners. Don't make assumptions that the father of your child is working so much because he wants to escape the family - think about the idea that he is working so hard to provide for his child in the best way he knows how.

Boys and feelings: Peers, or even parents can pressure boys to be unemotional. If the father of your child doesn't speak about his feelings, it doesn't mean he doesn't have them. It may mean that he's uncomfortable expressing them and may need your support to do that.

So what is the recipe for father involvement? The recipe includes -

• Having both mothers and fathers attend appointment
• Fathers seeing the strengths of his child
• Fathers finding the opportunity to speak with other fathers
• Everyone understanding that fathers may be trying to be supportive in different ways

To this list, I would add to allow fathers to parent in ways that are uniquely paternal. When I asked my children what the role of a dad is, they answered, "To give rides and set rules." While I was at first insulted by the typical characterization, I realized that this role has very special meaning to them, one that can be the foundation for many positive memories.

The last step in the recipe involves having mothers and fathers developing and actualizing an aspiration for all children. It is my aspiration that children grow up with the courage and wisdom to share their natural talents for the betterment of the world, to express understanding and respect for humanity and to appreciate and extend the work done by previous generations of people.

Christopher R. Auer, MA is the author of Parenting a Child with Sensory Processing Disorder: A Family Guide to Understanding and Supporting Your Sensory Sensitive Child (New Harbinger, 2006) Additional information at