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1 APRIL 2009
NO 1420
Fathers
Many residential workers engaged skillfully and confidently with families, building relationships and trust that were beyond the scope of so many of those thought to be the experts. The task they performed was not often recognised systematically, nor were the opportunities presented by the strength of relationships they established with families capitalized upon.
If we did not do families, we certainly did not do dads. Where they were featured at all in the families of children, they were generally shadowy figures who rarely attended meetings and, more often than not, made sure they were not at home when we called. In some cases, where children had experienced significant harm at the hands of their dads, there may have been good reason for them not to be involved. However, it can become too easy within the child protection discourse to vilify men and to attribute motives or blame. When a dad did assert a role in their child's life, their approach may have been inarticulate anger, eliciting fear and suspicion amongst the professionals: "What does he have to hide?"
In contrast to this history, throughout my practice in Child and Youth Care I maintained an awareness of the need of children and youth for a strong male figure in their lives and for them to be presented with positive images of masculinity. This view would not be held universally in the profession. Considerations of gender in forums such as the discussion groups on CYC-NET, can be sidetracked to focus on the role of men in maintaining control in an establishment rather than on what men, by virtue of their gender, might offer to children and youth. Indeed, the paucity of male workers entering the profession is rightly a growing concern in some quarters (McElwee, 2001).
Most men working in Child and Youth Care, I imagine, can recall the sense of connection between them and particular youth for whom they represented something of what a youth wanted from a father figure. Rightly or wrongly, we took on some of those projections. These dynamics might be especially pronounced at different ages and stages of our own lives and those of the children and youth, reflecting different phases of what we represent to one another. Adolescents in pursuit of the "Who am I`?" question might particularly identify with or indeed reject a father figure on the staff group. Moreover, consciously or otherwise, our own experiences of being a father or being fathered, and the beliefs we hold as a result, edge into our relationships.
Much of what we offered to kids, in response to their projections of the father role onto us, was no doubt positive. Developmentally there is good reason to provide a mentoring role to adolescent boys in particular (Biddulph, 1998). The trouble was that, with little real thought as to what we were doing and why, we tended to assume those roles irrespective of wider family circumstances and often substituting for rather than a supplementing the position of the natural father.
Having made the move from practice to teaching residential child care in a university setting, I was asked to help out on research project commissioned by a community-based family support service. The organisers of the project had realized the need to support fathers in the parenting role, but early attempts to do so elicited little response from fathers in the area. We, therefore, set out to try and ascertain the views and experiences of fatherhood of local men and to consider the kind of supports they would welcome. The men's backgrounds were varied. Some were in settled relationships, others were single parents, and still others were involved in custody disputes with former partners. A couple fathers were experiencing parenthood a second time in reconstituted relationships. We also canvassed the views of schools and other local service providers as to how they perceived the issues facing fathers and how they worked with them. The findings were used as a basis for the development of a project to support men in the parenting role.
On completion of this report (Cavanagh & Smith, 2001) we were asked by another family support agency wanting to develop services for men to undertake a similar piece of work. This time we focussed on the experiences of young fathers (Smith & Cavanagh, 2002). Together, the studies involved in-depth interviews with 29 men. While most of those interviewed were fathers to younger children, what was striking was the strength and consistency of views expressed by men from a range of different experiences and circumstances about their hopes for their children and about the pressures of fatherhood. Many of these views can usefully be generalised to the situations of the fathers of youth with whom we work.
MARK SMITH
Smith, M. (2003). What about the dads? Issues and
possibilities of working with men from a Child and Youth Care
perspective. In Garfat, T. (Ed.) A Child and Youth Care Approach to
Working with Families. New York. The Haworth Press. pp. 150-151.
REFERENCES
Biddulph, S. (1998). Raising boys. London. Thorsons.
Cavanagh, B. and Smith, M. (2001). Dad's the word. Edinburgh. Family Service Unit.
McElwee, N. (2001). Male practitioners in Child and Youth Care: An edangered species? CYC-Online , 27. Retrieved 2003 from https://www.cyc-net.org/CYC-Online /cycol-0401-irishideas.html
Smith, M. and Cavanagh, B. (2002). Lads becoming dads. Musselburgh. First Step.
