Russell – engaging fathers

Dad Central has been around since about the early 2000’s and our task really is to work with folks that work with families.  But we focus them on engaging dads and so we do a lot of resource development and training, community development kind of things just to help people start talking about father involvement and for planning how to make that happen. 

People don’t need to be convinced about engaging dads anymore.  I know when we started doing this work there was a lot of convincing.  People were coming at us with the ‘why?’  Why should we be doing this?  Does this take away from moms?  But I’ve noticed in the last 10 years anyway, people don’t ask why anymore.  It’s all ‘how?’  So how do I engage dads?  How do I understand the fathers that are in my community?  So I think that’s a really great shift. I think in general we get it that fathers matter to the healthy development of children and that’s really what our mandate is all about.  It’s about the kids.  And we don’t have to work hard to convince as much. 

So what we mean by father engagement is the ways that people can be working with dads, understanding fatherhood, designing programs and resources that actually speak their language, really keeping fathers part of the circle I guess.  When they’re thinking about engaging the family, we want to be looking at how to understand fathers so that when a dad comes in to a centre or we’re doing a home visit with a dad or whatever the situation is, there’s a way that we feel comfortable with that and we’re able to talk with dads at their level and we’re able to not have fear of engaging them or talking with them.  So we’re thinking about ways to encourage dads to be part of the conversation when it comes to kids and family and kind of growing, all those kind of things.