I told fatherhood leaders in Seattle that fatherhood work can’t survive another relaunch. Here’s why.

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

When I stepped to the microphone in Seattle for the Fathering Through the Ages Summit (hosted by the Washington State Fatherhood Council), I asked the room to say something with me: “I want all the smoke.” 

It got the laugh I expected, but I meant it. After more than three decades of working with fathers, families, practitioners, policymakers, and systems, I’ve reached the point where I’m less interested in comfortable conversations about fatherhood and much more interested in the conversations that require something from us. 

In front of a room full of fathers, practitioners, government representatives, community organizations, and family-serving professionals, I leaned even further into discomfort and told them I’m tired of attending fatherhood relaunches. 

I’ve watched committed leaders build initiatives, create momentum, develop relationships, and begin changing institutional culture, only to see the work fade when leadership changes, funding disappears, or priorities shift. Then, five or 10 years later, everybody comes back into another ballroom, rediscovers the importance of fathers, and announces that the work is being relaunched. 

In Seattle, I challenged the room to make this the last relaunch. I’d much rather return for a fifth, tenth, or twenty-fifth anniversary than for another ceremony announcing that father inclusion has been rediscovered.

That challenge wasn’t disconnected from what Washington has already built. I was encouraged to hear that the state’s fatherhood summit has never simply been about putting on a conference. The council’s history goes back to conversations beginning in 2018 about changing systems and elevating fathers’ voices, and despite staffing and funding challenges, a memorandum of understanding remains across seven state agencies. These things — institutional memory, relationships across agencies, and a roadmap — matter, and we must ensure they survive the people who originally carried them.

The summit itself offered evidence of what sustained work can look like. The day opened with a conversation about reentry and restoration that refused to define men only by incarceration or their worst decisions. The message was that successful reentry can’t be measured only by employment, housing, or whether someone stays out of the justice system. Men return to communities as fathers, sons, brothers, partners, and neighbors. Restoration requires accountability for harm, but it also requires pathways to rebuild trust and relationships. That framing mattered to me because dad-centered work can never become dad-defensive work. We should be able to hold two truths at the same time. Systems can create real barriers for fathers, and fathers are still responsible for what they do next.

Keynote Address at the Fathering Through the Ages Summit 

In my keynote, I focused on one word: “evolution.” I was originally asked to talk about fatherhood through the ages and fatherhood in the digital age. The more I thought about it, the more I realized they’re the same conversation. Fatherhood has always been evolving because childhood, work, relationships, technology, family structure, expectations of men, and the culture surrounding parenting have always been evolving.

I used music and media to make the point. I’m old enough to remember albums, cassettes, Walkmans, compact discs, radio broadcasts, and eventually streaming a basketball game in 4K. My 17-year-old son has never purchased a CD and has no emotional attachment to a Walkman. Yet sometimes we behave as though parenting should operate under rules created for a world that no longer exists. 

The fathers walking into our organizations today are parenting children whose friendships, identities, entertainment, education, conflicts, fears, and social lives move through devices carried in their pockets. Many of the younger fathers we serve have never known life without that technology themselves. If technology, communication, work, and culture can evolve that dramatically, fatherhood services can’t remain frozen.

But the most personal part of that evolution isn’t technological. It’s relational. I talked about my five children and the different measures of me they experienced as their father. My youngest son has grown up with a version of me that my older children didn’t always have. Some experienced me living somewhere else. One experienced my absence during part of her early life. My son has experienced something closer to the full daily presence of his father. 

Looking across my own family has taught me something I wish I had understood much earlier: Even when relationships heal, the percentage that was missing doesn’t simply disappear. We learn to forgive it. We learn to understand it. We learn to love beyond it. But it remains part of the story.

That’s why I asked practitioners to think differently about the fathers who walk through their doors. Dad may arrive at 40 percent. Mom may arrive depleted too. The child may already be carrying hurt from both of them. The practitioner sitting across from them may have unresolved family history of their own. Nobody gets to enter family work untouched by family. 

The question becomes how we help people move toward greater dependability without pretending their history didn’t happen. Sometimes we can’t immediately change a court order, a child support matter, a co-parenting conflict, or a damaged relationship. But as I said in Seattle, “I can’t change your circumstance, but I can help you manage your situation.” Sometimes, our first job is helping stabilize a father and family until circumstances can change.

That also explains why my own thinking about fatherhood initiatives has evolved. 

Fatherhood Program Evolution and Expansion

For years, much of our work at Fathers Incorporated concentrated intensely on Dad, and that focus was necessary. Fathers had been overlooked, misunderstood, reduced to financial obligations, or treated as secondary parents for too long. But strengthening Dad without strengthening the relationships around Dad can leave the work unfinished. 

A father can acquire new communication skills, become more financially stable, work on his emotional health, and commit himself to his child, yet still return to a co-parenting relationship unable to absorb any of that change. Healthy fatherhood doesn’t happen in isolation. Dad-centered must never mean Dad-isolated. I described in Seattle how our current work is bringing fathers together with members of their co-parenting support teams because the next evolution of fatherhood work has to understand the family as a system of relationships.

The summit in Washington reinforced that lesson in several ways:

• Organizations and fathers were recognized for doing the difficult work of creating places where men can belong, speak, heal, and become more dependable. 
• South Sound Parent to Parent shared stories from fathers navigating sobriety, anxiety, therapy, relationship repair, and the sudden disappearance of old support networks after becoming dads. 
• Perinatal Support Washington received an Ally Award and described a statewide warm line, peer support, and a weekly dads group that became its most popular support group with relatively little promotion.

That should tell us something. Fathers aren’t refusing support. Too often, we’ve failed to create support that feels accessible, relevant, and safe enough for them to use.

Later, the perinatal mental-health conversation at the summit made the point even more directly. Fathers need to hear that they’re not alone, that their health matters, and that families thrive together. The discussion challenged the isolation many men experience and emphasized community, peer connection, therapy, appropriate treatment, and spaces where fathers can acknowledge fear or struggle without having their humanity reduced to the struggle. 

One of my favorite observations from this portion of the day came from an unexpected source, the slogan on a bag of concrete: “Do it yourself doesn’t mean go it alone.” That may be one of the simplest descriptions of Responsible Fatherhood I heard all day. Responsibility belongs to Dad. Isolation doesn’t have to.

Responsibility was a major part of my keynote, as well, because support without accountability isn’t fatherhood advocacy. I told practitioners that if your brochure, mission statement, or website promises something to fathers, you need to do what you say you’re going to do. If you can’t provide it, build the partnership that can. Don’t invite men who are already walking in on empty to believe you can fill their tank when you know you don’t have the fuel. 

The same expectation applies to fathers. Barriers may be real. A co-parent may be difficult. The courts may feel frustrating. Employment may be unstable. A relationship may have ended badly. Those realities help us understand the circumstances, but Dad still has responsibilities to his child. He still has to work toward consistency, safety, emotional maturity, financial responsibility when applicable, healthy communication, and repair when he has caused harm.

The Impact of Language on Fatherhood Work and Family Services

Perhaps the most passionate portion of my remarks was about language because language determines what we learn to see. I challenged the familiar claim that fathers don’t speak. Fathers speak all the time. 

The deeper question is whether systems respect what they say, understand how they say it, and recognize the language fathers use to describe their lives. As I told the audience, words matter, but language matters even more. That’s why I continue to challenge language that turns parenting into winning and losing, as well as terms like “visitation” and “fatherless.”

I’ve said for years that there’s no such thing as a fatherless child. One hundred percent of biological children have fathers. The question isn’t whether he exists. The question is where he exists. Is he engaged, disengaged, inconsistent, incarcerated, estranged, deceased, blocked by access barriers, unsafe, emotionally unavailable, living somewhere else, or fully present? 

These distinctions matter because children experience them differently, and interventions should respond to what’s actually happening rather than collapse every situation into a single label. A household address can’t tell us the entire story of a father-child relationship.

Seattle reminded me why this work still has urgency. It also reminded me why fatherhood work must resist becoming a collection of annual events, slogans, grants, and commemorations. A father-friendly state isn’t created because fathers attend a summit. It’s created when: 

• Child welfare asks about Dad. 
• Maternal and perinatal health asks how Dad is doing. 
• Corrections understands that reentry includes returning to family relationships. 
• Courts and agencies use language that recognizes parenting rather than merely financial obligation. 
• Co-parenting services address the relationship between parents. 
• Community organizations create places where men can ask for help before crisis becomes harm. 
• Fathers understand that being seen more clearly doesn’t reduce their responsibility. It increases it.

The last thing I told fathers and fatherhood advocates in Washington was about absence and love. Different children experience different measures of parental absence, including children whose fathers live in the same household. Presence is more than an address. It’s dependability, emotional availability, attention, safety, responsibility, and repeated acts of care. Whatever measure of absence exists, I believe we have an obligation to fill as much of that space as we can with love.

That’s the fatherhood work worth sustaining. Not another relaunch. Not another temporary awakening to the fact that fathers matter. What I saw in Seattle was a community with enough history, honesty, relationships, and determination to build something more durable.

I hope the next invitation I receive from Washington isn’t to relaunch fatherhood but to celebrate how long they kept going.