Professor Catherine Panter-BrickA new world-wide study has identified key barriers to engaging fathers in parenting support programmes, despite the crucial importance of fathers. Catherine Panter-Brick and other authors reach this conclusion in a new paper published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry.

They conclude that despite robust evidence of fathers’ impact on children and mothers, engaging with fathers is one of the least well-explored and articulated aspects of parenting interventions.

Their study identified 199 publications that presented evidence on father participation and impact in parenting interventions. With some notable exceptions, few interventions separate out ‘father’ or ‘couple’ effects in their evaluation, mostly looking only at the mother and child.

Some parenting programmes do manage to invlove fathers, and the study quotes examples of good practice from the USA, Niger, Turkey, and Brazil.

Having looked at a range of reasons why fathers are missed out, the researchers go on to suggest how the design, delivery and evaluation of parenting support programmes could be radically changed to include fathers.