Fatherhood – Poppa University

Because of my fatherhood work, I’m always looking for public images that tell boys and men the truth about healthy masculinity. We need those images. We need to see men compete without cruelty, win without arrogance, and cry without apology. We need to see men love their children in full view of the world. We need to see brotherhood that doesn’t collapse into performance, domination, or silence.

The Knicks gave us that.

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

I was a boy in New York the last time the Knicks won it all.

I was old enough to remember the feeling, even if I wasn’t yet old enough to understand everything it meant. In 1973, I was 12 or 13 years old, still becoming myself in a city that had a way of making boys grow up quickly.

I remember the names: Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere. I remember the sound of New York feeling proud of itself and the way the championship traveled through neighborhoods, barbershops, schoolyards, apartment buildings, parks, and street corners. The Knicks weren’t just a basketball team. They were part of the city’s pulse.

I didn’t know then that more than five decades would pass before that feeling returned.

For those who didn’t grow up carrying the ache of being a Knicks fan, it may be hard to understand what this championship released in New York. It wasn’t just the end of a drought but the lifting of something that had settled into the body of the city.

Year after year, generation after generation, we watched other teams rise and other cities celebrate. We watched our own hopes become jokes, then memories, then something we almost stopped saying out loud. And yet we stayed. That’s what fans do. That’s what New Yorkers do. We complain, we doubt, we argue, we suffer, and somehow, we still believe.

So when the Knicks finally broke through, I felt what much of New York felt. Relief. Joy. Disbelief. Gratitude. A strange and beautiful release.

But as Father’s Day approached, I found myself feeling something beyond fandom. I found myself watching the celebration not simply as a New Yorker or a long-standing Knicks fan, but as a father. I found myself watching as a man raised in Brooklyn without my father in my life and as someone who has spent much of his life trying to understand where my own masculinity came from and what kind of manhood I wanted to pass on to my children.

That’s why this championship moved me differently.

I’ve spent decades working with fathers and families: sitting with men trying to repair relationships with their children and listening to fathers talk about courtrooms, child support, co-parenting conflict, grief, shame, anger, unemployment, trauma, and the quiet fear that they may not know how to be the kind of man their children need. I have also listened to men speak with tenderness so deep it could rearrange a room. Men who loved their children fiercely. Men who weren’t absent in their hearts, even when systems, circumstances, or their own mistakes placed distance between them and the people they loved most.

Because of this fatherhood work, I’m always looking for public images that tell boys and men the truth about healthy masculinity. We need those images. We need to see men compete without cruelty, win without arrogance, and cry without apology. We need to see men love their children in full view of the world. We need to see brotherhood that doesn’t collapse into performance, domination, or silence.

The Knicks gave us that.

New York Knicks Offer Examples of Healthy Masculinity

In a sports culture that often rewards volume, swagger, and spectacle, OG Anunoby gave us calm. Throughout the playoffs, he carried himself with a quiet steadiness that could easily be misunderstood. The running joke is that he doesn’t smile, but that’s too simple. Some men don’t show joy the way people expect them to. Some men carry their intensity in stillness. Some men don’t need to perform emotion in order to feel deeply.

OG Anunoby’s tip-in during the playoff run, in a game that looked all but lost, was more than an athletic play. It was a lesson in staying ready when the outcome appears beyond reach. It was the discipline of a man who understood the moment and didn’t shrink from it. There’s a kind of fatherhood in that. A child doesn’t need a father who panics at every hard turn. A child needs a father who can remain present when the room is loud, when the odds are bad, and when everybody else thinks the chance has passed.

Jose Alvarado gave us another kind of lesson. He wasn’t the biggest man on the court. He wasn’t supposed to intimidate anyone by appearance alone. Yet there he was, playing with a fearlessness that every boy could see. Life will place our sons in front of giants. Some of those giants will be people. Some will be institutions. Some will be poverty, racism, grief, rejection, or doubt. The lesson isn’t that size doesn’t matter because sometimes it does. The lesson is that spirit matters, too. Tenacity matters. Preparation matters. Refusing to disappear matters.

Mikal Bridges showed a quieter form of courage. There were moments in the season when he had to find his way. A gifted man in a new environment still has to ask himself hard questions. Where do I fit? What does this team need from me? How do I contribute to something bigger than my own reputation? For many men, that’s the hardest work. Not the work of proving we’re talented, but the work of adjusting, listening, sacrificing, and still bringing value without resentment. This kind of humility isn’t weakness. It’s maturity.

Karl-Anthony Towns gave us the image of family and survival. He came to New York under bright lights and heavy scrutiny. Every mistake was examined. Every question about his fit became part of the season’s noise. Yet when the championship came, what stood out to me wasn’t only his play. It was the embrace of family. It was the way private love entered a public victory. It was also the way he honored Anthony Edwards, a former teammate, reminding us that brotherhood doesn’t have to end when competition begins. Men can compete and still love one another. Men can move on and still honor where they have been. Men can win and still remember the people who helped shape them.

Coach Mike Brown offered a lesson in leadership under pressure. New York doesn’t give coaches much room to breathe. The city questions everything. The media magnifies everything. Fans carry history in one hand and impatience in the other. Yet there he was, guiding this team through the noise and into history. And then, in one of the most lasting images of the celebration, he stood with his young son in his arms.

That image stayed with me. That child may not understand the championship now. He may not understand the pressure his father carried. He may not understand what it meant for the Knicks, for the city, for the men on that team, or for all the fans who had waited 53 years to exhale. But one day, he will see the footage. One day, he will see that in the middle of one of his father’s greatest professional moments, he wasn’t off to the side. He was held. That’s fatherhood at its best. Not children as accessories. Not family as an afterthought. Children held inside the moment.

Josh Hart gave us the gift of brotherhood with humor, grit, and heart. Every great team needs someone who connects the room. Hart’s relationship with Brunson and Bridges, stretching back to Villanova, reminded us that male friendship can be sacred and sustaining. Men need other men who know them before the applause. Men need brothers who can laugh with them, challenge them, steady them, and remind them who they are when the world gets loud. Sports can do that. So can barbershops, fatherhood programs, churches, community centers, and living rooms where men finally tell the truth.

Then there was Jalen Brunson. It’s hard to think of this Knicks championship without thinking of doubt. Doubt followed Brunson. Doubt questioned his size, his ceiling, his value, his ability to lead a franchise, and his capacity to be the best player on a championship team. Men know something about doubt. Fathers know something about doubt. Black men know something about having to prove themselves over and over again in rooms where their gifts are questioned before they are recognized.

But Brunson didn’t answer with bitterness. He answered with work and leadership. He answered by becoming the kind of man a team could trust. When he won Finals MVP, it felt like more than an award. It felt like a public affirmation of private discipline.

A Father-Son Moment for the Ages

But the moment that brought me back to Father’s Day wasn’t only Brunson lifting a trophy. It was seeing him with his father, Rick Brunson, who stood there not just as a former player or assistant coach, but as a dad. Their embrace held something that numbers can’t measure. A father and son sharing a moment. A son achieving what so many had doubted. A father witnessing not only success, but the fulfillment of years of guidance, sacrifice, correction, and belief.

For me, as a man who grew up without my father, that image wasn’t casual or decorative. It touched something old.

Boys who grow up without fathers can spend years searching for manhood in fragments. We find pieces of it in coaches, uncles, teachers, older boys on the block, athletes, ministers, music, movies, and sometimes in the wrong men because they appear strong when what they really are is wounded. We learn by watching. Sometimes we learn what to become. Sometimes we learn what not to repeat. But the search is real.

That’s why public images of men matter:

When boys see men celebrate one another without shame, that matters.
When they see fathers kiss their children, that matters.
When they see teammates playing with each other’s kids, as if the children already belong to the team’s extended family, that matters.
When they see a captain embrace his father, that matters.
When they see a coach hold his son instead of hiding him from the stage, that matters.
When they see strength joined with tenderness, that matters.

We talk a great deal in this country about what’s wrong with men. Sometimes we must. Violence is real. Absence is real. Emotional neglect is real. The wounds caused by unhealthy masculinity are real.

But we can’t build healthier men only by naming what they shouldn’t be. We also have to show them what they can become.

That’s what I saw in the Knicks. I saw men who had been doubted but didn’t become cruel. I saw men who competed but didn’t lose their humanity. I saw men who won but still honored family. I saw brothers who held each other up. I saw children welcomed into joy. I saw a city release 53 years of longing. And I saw, in the glow of that championship, a picture of masculinity that our sons deserve to inherit.

Fatherhood isn’t a championship parade. Most fathers will never be handed a trophy. Most will never hear an arena chant their names. Their victories are quieter: showing up to the school meeting, keeping a promise, apologizing first, choosing not to yell, going to therapy, paying what they can, fighting through a court process to be recognized, sitting beside a child who is hurting, learning to co-parent with maturity, staying when leaving would be easier, and loving when nobody applauds.

That’s the work.

And yet, every now and then, sports gives us a public mirror for private truth. The Knicks gave New York a championship. But for those of us who believe in fathers, families, and the possibility of men becoming whole, they gave us something more. They gave us a Father’s Day image worth holding.

They reminded us that healthy masculinity isn’t soft. It’s strong enough to love in public. It’s disciplined enough to serve a team. It’s humble enough to adjust. It’s brave enough to be tender. It’s mature enough to honor family, brotherhood, and community while still chasing excellence.

New York waited 53 years for this championship. I waited, too.

But when it finally came, I didn’t just see my Knicks win.

I saw men showing boys another way to be men.

Kenneth Braswell is a nationally recognized leader in the responsible fatherhood movement, storyteller, and visionary advocate for fathers and families. As CEO of Fathers Incorporated (www.fathersincorporated.com) and director of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, he has spent over 30 years changing narratives, shaping policy, and empowering fathers across the country. His award-winning work spans media, federal engagement, grassroots mobilization, and national thought leadership—amplifying the voices of men, building bridges between systems and communities, and centering the transformative power of fatherhood in the pursuit of family well-being.

By Dr. Matisa Wilbon, Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy

Juneteenth invites us to remember that freedom was never simply announced; it had to be claimed, protected, practiced, and passed forward. For Black families, that work continues in homes, schools, neighborhoods, churches, barbershops, playgrounds, and dinner tables across the country. At the center of that work are Black fathers.

Black fathers are freedom builders. They are freedom builders not only because they provide, but because they protect identity, create emotional safety, open doors of opportunity, and help heal generations. Their presence is more than meaningful; it is protective.

As we celebrate Juneteenth, we are reminded that freedom is not only a historical event. It is a daily practice. It is found in the ways families love, teach, guide, correct, affirm, and prepare children for the world. Black fathers have always been part of that freedom work. In the face of harmful stereotypes, social barriers, and systems that have too often tried to separate Black families or diminish Black fatherhood, research suggests that Black fathers continue to show up as protectors, nurturers, teachers, advocates, and builders of legacy.

Black Fathers Protect Identity

One of the most powerful ways Black fathers build freedom is by helping children know who they are.

A father’s voice can help shape a child’s understanding of their name, their history, their culture, and their worth. Around Juneteenth, that role becomes especially important. Juneteenth gives fathers an opportunity to teach children that their story did not begin with struggle alone. It is also a story of strength, faith, resistance, creativity, joy, and survival.

Black fathers protect identity by helping children see themselves through a lens of dignity rather than deficit. In a world that too often misnames or misunderstands Black children, a father’s affirmation can become a shield.

When a Black father tells his child, “You come from people who led, loved, and overcame,” he is doing more than teaching history. He is building confidence. He is giving that child a foundation. He is helping them stand in a world that may not always recognize their full humanity.

That is freedom work.

Black Fathers Create Emotional Safety

Fatherhood is a protective factor because it surrounds children with presence, guidance, affirmation, and accountability. Protection is not only physical. It is also emotional.

Children need to know they are safe to ask questions, safe to make mistakes, safe to feel, safe to grow, and safe to be loved even when life is difficult. Black fathers help create that safety through consistency, patience, listening, encouragement, and care.

A father’s presence can become a child’s first experience of safety. When Black fathers listen, and remain emotionally available, they help children develop confidence, emotional strength, and resilience.

This kind of fatherhood matters deeply. A child who feels seen and valued at home is better prepared to face the pressures outside of it. A child who hears words of affirmation from their father is better equipped to reject messages that question their worth. A child who experiences steady love learns that they are not alone.

In this way, Black fatherhood becomes a buffer. It helps protect children against the emotional weight of racism, instability, fear, and social messages that attempt to limit their sense of possibility.

Black Fathers Build Opportunity

Freedom also means access to opportunity. Black fathers help build that opportunity in many ways.

Sometimes it looks like helping with homework, attending school meetings, coaching a team, teaching financial responsibility, encouraging a dream, or making sure a child knows how to advocate for themselves. Sometimes it looks like introducing children to new places and possibilities. Sometimes it looks like discipline rooted in love and expectations rooted in belief.

Opportunity is not only created through money. It is also created through a father’s belief in his child’s future.

When a father says, “You can do this,” “I expect your best,” “I am proud of you,” or “Let me show you how,” he is opening a door. He is helping his child imagine a future beyond limitation. He is making freedom practical.

For many Black families, this kind of fatherhood is an act of resistance. It pushes back against every system, statistic, or stereotype that attempts to define Black children by risk instead of promise.

Black fathers help children see that their future is not already written by the world around them. They have agency. They have gifts. They have choices. They have a legacy to continue and a path to create.

Black Fathers Heal Generations

Juneteenth is about freedom delayed, but also freedom claimed. It reminds us that the impact of injustice can travel through generations, but so can healing.

Black fathers contribute to generational healing when they choose presence over absence, communication over silence, and connection over distance. Every act of engaged fatherhood is a form of generational repair.

For some fathers, this means giving their children what they did not always receive. For others, it means continuing the love, wisdom, and strength they inherited from fathers, grandfathers, uncles, mentors, and community elders. In both cases, Black fathers are shaping what gets passed down.

They are helping children inherit more than pain. They are passing down things that make families universal: love, discipline, faith, humor, emotional honesty, cultural pride, and family stories. They are showing their children that healing is possible and that manhood can include tenderness, accountability, affection, and growth.

This is one of the quiet but powerful ways Black fathers build freedom. They help families move from survival to wholeness.

Black Fathers Stabilize Communities

The protective role of Black fatherhood does not stop at the front door. When Black fathers are supported, families are strengthened. When families are strengthened, communities are stabilized.

Black fathers serve as so many things. They are coaches, mentors, neighbors, faith leaders, volunteers, advocates, and role models. Their influence often extends beyond their own children to nieces, nephews, students, young men on the block, and children in the community who are watching how they move through the world.

Fatherhood protects by creating belonging. It tells a child: you are seen, you are valued, you are covered, and you are not alone.

That sense of belonging can change a child’s life. It can also change the life of a community.

This is why conversations about fatherhood must not focus only on individual responsibility. They must also focus on support. Black fathers deserve systems, programs, policies, and communities that recognize their value and remove barriers to their full engagement. Supporting Black fathers is not charity. It is an investment in children, families, neighborhoods, and future generations.

Juneteenth and the Ongoing Work of Freedom

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom must be protected after it is proclaimed. The news of emancipation reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, but the struggle for full freedom did not end there. In many ways, Black families have continued the work of defining, defending, and expanding freedom ever since.

Black fathers are part of that ongoing work.

They build freedom when they hold their children close. They build freedom when they teach the truth about history. They build freedom when they model responsibility and love. They build freedom when they protect their children’s dreams. They build freedom when they help their families heal. They build freedom when they show up, even in a world that has not always honored their presence.

This Juneteenth, we honor freedom by honoring the fathers who help build it every day.

Black fathers are protecting more than households; they are protecting dreams, identity, confidence, and legacy. They are helping children know their history without being bound by pain, understand their worth without apology, and imagine futures rooted in strength.

To celebrate Juneteenth is to celebrate liberation. It is also to recognize Black fathers as essential freedom builders in the ongoing story of Black family life.

The question isn’t whether child support should be paid. It should.

The better question is whether our policies are designed to produce payment, presence, and child well-being or debt, disconnection, and punishment.

This isn’t an argument against child support. It is an argument for a smarter child support system.

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

The United States should expect parents to support their children. That statement shouldn’t be controversial. Children need food, housing, clothing, school supplies, medical care, safety, and stability. Mothers who are raising children deserve reliable support. Fathers who owe child support should not be excused from their responsibility simply because the obligation is difficult, inconvenient, or old.

Responsibility matters. Accountability matters. But when accountability lacks context, it may just be punishment dressed up as policy.

The U.S. Department of State now states plainly that people who owe more than $2,500 in child support cannot be issued a U.S. passport, and that a valid passport may be revoked. If a passport is revoked, the parent must work through the state where the child support debt is owed, and even after payment, the process through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can take at least two to three weeks. The State Department also notes that someone overseas may only be eligible for a limited-validity passport for direct return to the United States until HHS verifies repayment.

The legal basis is not new. Federal law 42 U.S.C. § 652(k) says that when HHS receives state certification that an individual owes more than $2,500 in child support arrears, HHS transmits that certification to the Secretary of State, who must refuse to issue a passport and may revoke, restrict, or limit a previously issued passport.

What’s new now is the posture of enforcement. According to the Associated Press (AP), the State Department is beginning revocations with approximately 2,700 passport holders who owe $100,000 or more, with plans to expand enforcement to those who owe more than $2,500. The AP also reported that, until now, the penalty was generally triggered when someone applied for or renewed a passport, while the new approach allows proactive revocation based on data from HHS.

For some people, this will sound like common sense. If a person has enough money to travel internationally, the argument goes, he should have enough money to support his child. There are certainly parents who have the ability to pay and refuse to do so. Enforcement tools exist for a reason. A child should not suffer because an adult decides to disappear behind convenience, pride, resentment, or avoidance.

But that’s not the whole story. In fact, it’s not even the most common story.

Noncustodial Parents, Poverty, and Child Support Debt

The child support debt conversation is often carried by the image of the willfully absent father, the man with money in his pocket, a passport in his drawer, and no intention of doing right by his child. That man exists.

However, policy shouldn’t be built only around the worst actor, because when we do that, we often punish the poorest father, the struggling father, the formerly incarcerated father, the unemployed father, the father who wants to pay but cannot find steady work, the father whose order was set beyond his actual ability, and the father who owes money to the state rather than directly to the household raising his child.

The Urban Institute’s “Assessing Child Support Arrears in Nine Large States and the Nation” (a report by Elaine Sorensen, Liliana Sousa, and Simone Schaner) found that most arrears are owed by noncustodial parents with no or low reported incomes. The same report noted that child support arrears had reached $107 billion by September 2007 and that interest on arrears was a primary reason arrears had grown.

A report from the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN) – “Policies and Programs Affecting Fathers: A State-by-State Report” by Jessica Pearson and Rachel Wildfeuer – puts the matter even more directly: Child support debt had grown to $115 billion by 2020, and 70% of that debt was owed by noncustodial fathers with annual incomes under $10,000. The report also notes that one-fourth of noncustodial fathers are estimated to live in poverty.

This is the part of the conversation that requires compassion, not as softness, but as accuracy.

A father who earns less than $10,000 a year is not refusing a luxury bill. He is living inside an economic emergency. He may be choosing between rent and food, gas and court, work clothes and diapers, child support and survival. If he loses a driver’s license, he may lose a job. If he loses a passport, he loses travel, yes, but perhaps also an employment opportunity, a family obligation, or the ability to repair a life already narrowed by debt.

The FRPN report explains that child support systems were designed around collection from nonresident parents with stable income, yet many current cases involve parents who are unmarried, unemployed, or underemployed. It warns that:

Orders may be set too high.
Enforcement techniques can be harsh and ineffective.
Uncollectible debt can reduce labor force participation, lower child support payment, reduce paternal engagement, and increase conflict between parents.

That’s the paradox. The system can be trying to collect support for a child while weakening the very conditions that make support possible.

Building Fathers’ Capacity to Pay Child Support

Child support must be collected, but if the goal is child well-being, we have to ask a deeper question: What actually increases a father’s ability and willingness to pay?

The research gives us direction. Employment matters. Accurate orders matter. Debt compromise matters. Parenting time matters. Legal rights matter. Human connection matters.

FRPN reports that employment programs for noncustodial parents have demonstrated promise. In Texas, the NCP Choices program increased employment by 21% and the child support collections rate by 47%, relative to the comparison group. Colorado’s Parents to Work program increased employment and earnings and improved the percentage of owed support paid. New York’s Strengthening Families Through Stronger Fathers Initiative showed significant gains in wages, employment, and a 38% increase in child support payments.

These findings should guide us:

Fathers who can work are more likely to pay.
Fathers who are supported into employment are more likely to pay.
Fathers whose orders reflect reality are more likely to pay.
Fathers who are treated as parents, not merely paychecks, are more likely to stay engaged.

There is also a relationship between parenting time and payment. The FRPN report notes that child support and parenting time are legally distinct, yet studies confirm they are deeply connected and that lack of parenting time contributes to nonpayment. It also notes that studies integrating parenting time into child support processes increased child support payments, increased contact between nonresident parents and children, and reduced conflict between parents.

This aligns with what Fathers Incorporated (FI) has seen in the lives of fathers. In Georgia, the issue is even more complicated because paternity and legitimation are separate. A man can be established as the biological father and still lack legal rights to make decisions, request custody, or secure parenting time unless he completes legitimation. Dr. Chalonda L. Smith’s dissertation, “The Effect of a State Legitimation Process on Child Support Payments and Father-Child Relationships,” found a statistically significant positive relationship between knowledge of legitimation policy and attitudes toward visitation and child support obligations among unmarried fathers in Georgia’s Fatherhood Program.

The Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy brief, “Georgia State Legitimation, Father Engagement and Youth Academic Outcomes,” states that fathers with joint custody and parenting time are more likely to pay child support, while fathers with no custody and no parenting time are least likely to pay.

This isn’t an argument against child support. It is an argument for a smarter child support system.

When a father sees his child, knows his role, understands his rights, has a workable parenting plan, and believes the system recognizes him as more than a debt holder, he is more likely to stay connected. When he is connected, he is more likely to contribute. When he contributes, the child benefits. When the child benefits, the purpose of child support is fulfilled.

That’s why responsible fatherhood programs matter.

FI’s Gentle Warriors Academy (GWA) is built around the realities that many fathers face at the same time: child support, employment, co-parenting conflict, legitimation, parenting time, housing, mental health, incarceration history, and family legal needs. The 2021-2023 FI Impact Report identifies the top services needed by fathers as legitimation, child support, housing, parenting time, family legal support, and employment. It also reports that 643 dads enrolled from 2021 to 2023, more than 400 completed the full primary workshops, more than 355 attended graduations, and the graduating fathers represented more than 1,400 children.

FI’s 2024 Impact Report explains that GWA’s curriculum includes responsible fatherhood, co-parenting, conflict resolution, communication skills, financial empowerment, emotional intelligence, and child development, while also responding to needs such as child support, housing, parenting time, custody, expungement, incarceration issues, and employment.

This is what enforcement alone cannot do. Enforcement can pressure a payment, but it can’t build capacity, heal distrust, or create employment. It can’t teach co-parenting communication, help a father understand the legal difference between paternity and legitimation, or repair a relationship with a child who thinks Dad doesn’t care because the adults never learned how to build a parenting team.

None of this excuses nonpayment. It explains why nonpayment must be addressed with more than penalties.

A passport policy may collect money from some parents who have the means to pay and have chosen not to. That is a legitimate public interest. But when the threshold reaches $2,500, it also sweeps in fathers whose debt may reflect poverty, unemployment, incarceration, interest, court confusion, unrealistic orders, or years of trying to survive below the radar of systems that never fully saw them as fathers.

The question isn’t whether child support should be paid. It should. The better question is whether our policies are designed to produce payment, presence, and child well-being or debt, disconnection, and punishment.

We should enforce support obligations, but we should also:

Expand payment plans that account for actual income
Improve order modification access
Reduce uncollectible state-owed arrears
Limit the growth of interest
Protect employment
Fund fatherhood and workforce programs
Connect child support proceedings to parenting time when safe and appropriate
Make legal education available before fathers fall into debt they do not understand and cannot escape.

Children need support. Mothers need support. Fathers need capacity. And families need systems that can distinguish between unwillingness and inability.

The myth says fathers in arrears do not care. The research says many are poor. Our work says many are trying. The policy should be strong enough to require responsibility and wise enough to build the conditions that make responsibility possible.

Children have to be the anchor. Not adult pride. Not program numbers. Not public relations. Not whether dad feels validated or mom feels vindicated. The child’s well-being is the outcome. If the child is not safe, a healthy family cannot exist. But when the child is safe and there is a father who can be engaged responsibly, supported properly, and held accountable consistently, then fatherhood can become one of the strongest protective factors in that child’s life.

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

For too long in family-strengthening work, fatherhood has been treated as either the missing piece or the risky piece. And depending on the room, fathers are either lifted up as essential to child well-being or quietly kept at a distance because of concerns about conflict, safety, inconsistency, or harm.

All of these responses come from real experience and contain truth, but none is complete on its own. This is why it’s critical to bring a nuanced, father-inclusive conversation about protective factors into child and family services spaces, including responsible fatherhood programming.

We propose that protective factors, defined by the CDC as “characteristics that may decrease the likelihood of adverse childhood experiences,” are incomplete if they do not account for fathers. At the same time, father inclusion must never mean father access without discernment, accountability, and safety.

Father Involvement As a Protective Factor

The question cannot simply be, “How do we get dad more involved?” The better question is, “What kind of father involvement protects the child, respects safety, strengthens accountability, and supports the parenting team where appropriate?” This question changes everything.

It moves fatherhood work away from slogans and into practice. It keeps us from acting as if every father’s presence is automatically protective. It also keeps us from assuming that every father’s absence is safer. Responsible fatherhood work operates within this tension. It holds two truths at once: Fathers are essential, and safety must lead.

Children have to be the anchor. Not adult pride. Not program numbers. Not public relations. Not whether dad feels validated or mom feels vindicated. The child’s well-being is the outcome. If the child is not safe, a healthy family cannot exist. But when the child is safe and there is a father who can be engaged responsibly, supported properly, and held accountable consistently, then fatherhood can become one of the strongest protective factors in that child’s life.

Father-Inclusive Framework for Protective Factors

“Dad-centered” work doesn’t mean “dad-only” work. It doesn’t mean ignoring mothers. It doesn’t mean excusing fathers. It doesn’t mean taking sides. Dad-centered work means fathers are intentionally seen, heard, considered, and engaged within the larger family system. It means practitioners do not build programs around children while pretending fathers are not part of their emotional, financial, cultural, relational, and developmental world.

Children don’t experience their families in pieces. They do not say, “This is a mother-only issue,” “This is a father-only issue,” “This belongs to the court,” or “This belongs to child support.” Children experience the whole environment. They feel the tension, hear everything adults think is hidden behind closed doors, and carry the full weight of adult conflict.

This is why any protective factors framework that fails to seriously account for fathers is incomplete:

Fatherhood can strengthen family resilience, but only when fathers are given space to develop emotional regulation, responsibility, and support.
Fatherhood can strengthen social connections, but only when fathers are not forced to walk the parenting journey alone.
Fatherhood can increase concrete support in times of need, but only when systems stop reducing fathers to child support orders and start helping them become stable, employable, present, and accountable.
Fatherhood can support knowledge of parenting and child development, but only when fathers are fully invited into learning spaces rather than treated as optional visitors.
Fatherhood can strengthen a child’s emotional security, but only when the father’s presence is safe, consistent, nurturing, and mature.

That last word matters: mature. And we need to talk more about it, especially co-parenting maturity.

Co-Parenting Maturity and Protective Factors

Co-parenting maturity is the ability of adults to manage emotion, conflict, communication, safety, responsibility, and decision-making in ways that keep the child at the center. It doesn’t require parents to be romantically involved. It doesn’t require them to like each other or erase the past. Instead, it requires them to understand that the child should not have to carry what the adults have not healed, organized, or resolved.

For many families, co-parenting breaks down not because a parent doesn’t love the child, but because the adults don’t yet have the tools to manage the pressures around the child. Housing, employment, childcare, school decisions, transportation, child support, new relationships, old wounds, family opinions, court orders, and economic stress begin to stack on top of the parenting relationship.

What often shows up as anger may be grief, fear, rejection, exhaustion, or shame without language. Good fatherhood work helps create that language, but it must also recognize mothers’ experiences.

If we are working with fathers without helping them understand what mothers may be carrying, we are not doing deep fatherhood work. Many fathers see the child support order but not the childcare scramble. They see the disagreement but not the daily decision fatigue. They see the boundary but not the fear that may have created it. They see the mother’s anger but not always her overwhelm, loneliness, or lack of support.

Recognizing mom’s experience does not weaken fatherhood work. It strengthens it. A father cannot become a better co-parent if he is never helped to understand the experience of the person co-parenting with him.

The same is true in reverse. Mothers, systems, and practitioners also need to see fathers beyond the narrowest assumptions. Some fathers are struggling. Some are immature. Some are inconsistent. Some need correction. Some need boundaries. Some should not have access without safeguards. Some are trying with everything they have, only to be met by systems that see them as absent, dangerous, delinquent, or disposable.

Protective work requires discernment. Not denial. Not blame. Discernment.

This is especially true when domestic violence concerns are present. Father inclusion cannot become a back door around safety. Programs must be domestic-violence aware in their intake, facilitation, referrals, documentation, supervision, and staff training. Practitioners must understand intimidation, coercive control, threats, emotional abuse, physical harm, and the ways children can be used as leverage in adult conflict.

Safety cannot be a paragraph in a policy manual. It has to be infused into program culture and protocols. Fatherhood programs need protocols, trained staff, referral partners, and case managers who understand when coaching is appropriate and when clinical, legal, or safety intervention is needed. Programs need to know when to slow down, when to document, when to separate, when to refer, and when to say no. The goal isn’t to connect fathers to children at all costs. The goal is to strengthen the conditions under which children can be safe, loved, and supported.

That’s the difference between father involvement and responsible fatherhood. Responsible fatherhood isn’t just about showing up but showing up in a way that helps. Responsible fatherhood is:

Consistency, not performance.
Accountability, not entitlement.
A presence that protects rather than disrupts.
A support that reduces stress rather than creating more of it.

Responsible fatherhood is also the willingness to move from “What are you going to do?” to “What are we going to do for our child?” This shift from “you” to “we” may be one of the most powerful protective factors a family can develop.

This is why fatherhood programs have to stop confusing outputs with outcomes. Attendance is an output. A completed class is an output. A signed form is an output. A father taking a picture at an event is an output. But outcomes ask deeper questions:

Is the father more consistent?
Is communication safer?
Is the child less exposed to adult conflict?
Are co-parents better able to coordinate?
Does Mom feel more supported?
Is Dad more emotionally regulated?
Is the support circle stronger?
Is the family safer because of program participation?

These are the questions that move the responsible fatherhood field forward.

Protective factors must be more than checklists. They must become a way of seeing the whole family. And seeing the whole family means seeing fathers clearly, not romantically, not fearfully, not carelessly, but clearly:

Fatherhood is a protective factor when it is safe.
Fatherhood is a protective factor when it is accountable.
Fatherhood is a protective factor when it strengthens the parenting team.
Fatherhood is a protective factor when it honors the experiences of mothers and protects the well-being of children.
Fatherhood is a protective factor when it helps adults mature enough and “keep the main thing the main thing.”

And the main thing is children.

The sideline is a place where childhood, ambition, community, and family values meet in public. That means it’s also one of the places where leadership is needed most.

We don’t need louder parents; we need wiser ones. We don’t need more sideline theatrics; we need more sideline maturity.

A father’s presence on the sideline can communicate steadiness, confidence, perspective, and protection. It can also communicate volatility, ego, and misplaced pressure. Sideline Dad will lean into this tension honestly.

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

There was a time when the sideline was just the sideline.

It was a folding chair, a concession stand, a whistle, a few loud cheers, maybe an argument over a call, and then everybody went home. Today, the sideline has become something else. It has become a stage where adult pressure, personal ambition, public performance, and unresolved emotion too often collide in full view of children.

That is one of the reasons Sideline Dad matters.

Created to explore what is happening on the sidelines of our children’s lives, “Sideline Dad with Coach Javin Foreman” is a new series within the I Am Dad Podcast.

In spaces where many parents show up with love, sacrifice, and deep commitment, there is also a growing need to confront the moments when support turns into spectacle, encouragement becomes interference, and what should remain centered on children is overtaken by adult emotion, pressure, and behavior.

The warning signs are no longer isolated.

In January 2026, ESPN reported on a national U.S. Center for SafeSport survey showing that “managing parents” is among the top reasons youth coaches have considered leaving or decided to quit. The report, in which coaches described verbal harassment and abuse from parents, tied its findings to a larger pattern already affecting the future of youth sports. To make its point, it cited a 2023 survey from the National Association of Sports Officials in which more than 40% of respondents said unruly parents at youth sporting events were the biggest impediment to officials’ job satisfaction.

This data isn’t floating in the abstract. It’s meeting us in real gyms, real bleachers, and real communities.

In January on Long Island, a high school basketball game erupted into a brawl, and a 36-year-old spectator was accused of punching a 15-year-old player during the chaos. In February, a fight at a Georgia high school girls’ basketball game led to charges against three people. These are not just ugly moments. They are warning flares. They tell us that a youth event can become unsafe in seconds when adults forget why they’re there.

Children do not merely play in front of us. They learn from us.

They learn how to handle disappointment by watching us handle disappointment. They learn how to respond to authority by watching how we speak to referees, coaches, umpires, officials, and event staff. They learn what competition means by watching whether we treat it as growth or warfare. They learn whether their value is rooted in effort and development or in points, rankings, offers, and applause.

That is why this conversation is bigger than sportsmanship. This is a conversation about formation.

A child on the basketball floor may be trying to master footwork, defensive rotations, confidence, and poise. Meanwhile, the parent in the stands may be teaching something far more lasting without saying a word:

Every outburst becomes instruction.
Every public humiliation becomes instruction.
Every entitled confrontation becomes instruction.
And every disciplined response becomes instruction, too.

The deeper issue is that youth sports no longer operate in the same cultural climate they did a generation ago.

Families are navigating travel teams, recruiting pressure, private coaching, highlight culture, social media visibility, transfer conversations, performance branding, and now a broader sports economy shaped by Name, Image, Likeness (NIL).

Even if NIL is most immediately associated with college athletics, it has changed how many families imagine the pathway. The dream feels closer, the stakes feel higher, and the temptation to treat a child’s activity like an investment portfolio is stronger than ever.

These pressures distort parents’ presence. A father or mother may begin with sincere support, but support can quietly become management. Management can become control. Control can become public frustration. Public frustration can become damage — not only damage to a team environment, but damage to the child’s confidence, joy, emotional safety, and sense of identity.

And here is the part many adults miss: The child usually pays twice.

First, they carry the weight of the game itself. Then they carry the weight of the adult reaction to it. The burden is heavy enough when the reaction is a ride home filled with criticism. It becomes worse when the reaction spills into a confrontation at the scorer’s table, a screaming match in the stands, or a fight that gets captured on somebody’s phone and shared before the team even gets back to the locker room.

This is why Sideline Dad is not merely a sports show: it’s a guide for parental presence.

Sideline Dad Podcast: A Guide for Parental Presence

We need a place where fathers, mothers, coaches, and supporters can talk honestly about what it means to show up well. We need room for conversations about

Injury protocol (because too many parents push children back too soon)
NIL and the false promises that sometimes swirl around youth development
How the behavior of adults at games impacts their child’s development
Current events, expert insights, and real-world stories that help families see the bigger picture.

We also need a new definition of what a good sideline parent looks like. A good sideline parent is not silent, passive, or disconnected. A good sideline parent is:

Present without becoming possessive
Supportive without becoming controlling
Proud without becoming performative
Engaged without making the event about themselves.

A good sideline parent understands that the role is not to coach from the bleachers, referee from the baseline, or audition for authority in front of a child. The role is to create emotional safety, model restraint, and reinforce the lesson that character matters even when the scoreboard does not cooperate.

This is where fathers, in particular, have a powerful role to play.

A father’s presence on the sideline can communicate steadiness, confidence, perspective, and protection. It can also communicate volatility, ego, and misplaced pressure. Sideline Dad will lean into this tension honestly. The issue isn’t whether fathers should be present but what kind of presence they bring when they show up.

The sideline is one of the places where childhood, ambition, community, and family values meet in public. That means it’s also one of the places where leadership is needed most.

We don’t need louder parents; we need wiser ones. We don’t need more sideline theatrics; we need more sideline maturity. We don’t need adults fighting over children’s games while children watch their examples fall apart in real time.

We need mothers and fathers who understand that every game, meet, recital, and performance isn’t only an event for the child. It’s an opportunity for the adult to demonstrate who they are.

That’s the lane Sideline Dad intends to occupy. Not to scold, sensationalize, or pretend every parent gets it wrong. But to say clearly that our children deserve better than chaos from the people who come to support them.

And they deserve adults who understand that sometimes the most important thing happening on the floor is not the game: It’s what the child is learning from the sideline.

The opportunity in front of the responsible fatherhood field is not only to preserve resources but to clarify relevance. Our field has matured beyond the point where it should be treated as a stand-alone niche. It now has enough research, practice, and systems experience to demonstrate that father engagement affects outcomes across multiple domains: child well-being, co-parenting, family economic stability, system navigation, and community support.

The more clearly the field can connect this work to family outcomes that other systems already value, the more durable its place becomes.

by The Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy

The FY2027 federal budget presents the responsible fatherhood field with an important analytical challenge. It asks us to think carefully not only about funding levels but also about structure, priorities, and where fathers fit within the nation’s evolving family policy framework.

At the broadest level, the proposed Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) budget reflects both contraction and reorganization. HHS proposes $111.1 billion in discretionary budget authority for FY2027, down from the prior year, while also restructuring several major functions. This includes creation of the “Administration for Children, Families, and Communities” (ACFC) and the “Administration for a Healthy America” (AHA). The administration frames its approach as consolidation, efficiency, prevention, and targeted health investments.

For the responsible fatherhood field, this means it’s not simply a year to ask whether known, familiar line items survive: It’s a year to examine:

How are family-serving systems being reorganized?
Which supports remain in place? And which adjacent supports are being narrowed or eliminated?
Where are there new opportunities to strengthen outcomes for children and families?

The proposed ACFC is especially important in this regard. In the FY2027 HHS Budget in Brief, ACFC discretionary budget authority falls from $35.535 billion in FY2026 to $28.680 billion in FY2027. At the same time, several of the ACFC’s major child- and family-serving platforms remain level, including Head Start ($12.357 billion), the Child Care and Development Block Grant ($8.831 billion), Family Violence Prevention and Services ($245 million), and the National Domestic Violence Hotline ($21 million). Yet the budget proposes eliminating LIHEAP, Preschool Development Grants, and the Community Services Block Grant.

These changes tell us something important: Even when certain foundational child and family systems remain intact, the broader support environment around families may become thinner.

For families already navigating economic instability, co-parenting strain, housing insecurity, child care pressure, or system complexity, reductions in adjacent supports can increase stress even when core services remain available. This reality deserves thoughtful attention from everyone committed to healthy families.

The proposal for AHA presents a similar mix of continuity and change. The FY2027 Budget in Brief describes AHA as a consolidated entity that would bring together major public health, behavioral health, and maternal and child health functions to improve coordination and reduce duplication. Its proposed funding emphasizes prevention, maternal and child health, primary care, behavioral health, tribal services, and chronic disease reduction as priority areas. At the same time, AHA’s discretionary budget authority falls from $19.649 billion in FY2026 to $14.673 billion in FY2027, and the FY2027 materials Teen Pregnancy Prevention, Sexual Risk Avoidance, and Family Planning zeroing out in this new structure.

From a research and policy perspective, these are not merely administrative details. They represent a different way of organizing the federal family and health landscape. The question for the field isn’t whether one agrees or disagrees with every element of that approach.

The more useful question is this: Within this new landscape, where can father engagement contribute to the goals that nearly everyone shares?

This is where common ground becomes possible. There is broad agreement that:

Children benefit from stable, supportive, and healthy family environments.
Early childhood matters.
Parental engagement matters.
Prevention matters.
Communities do better when families are safer and more stable.

Whatever one’s broader interpretation of the FY2027 budget, it preserves major systems connected to those outcomes. Head Start remains funded. Child care remains funded. Child welfare remains funded. Family violence services remain funded. Tribal child and family services remain funded. Maternal and child health investments remain present.

This matters because fatherhood work is often strongest when it is connect to (not isolated from) these systems:

If Head Start continues to emphasize parental engagement, fathers should be part of that conversation.
If child care continues to support working families, fathers’ caregiving and employment realities should also be recognized there.
If child welfare and prevention systems are trying to keep families intact and support permanence, father engagement should be paramount.
If anti-violence systems are working to ensure family safety and recovery, fatherhood organizations should continue to model accountability, partnership, and safe engagement.
If maternal and child health remains a priority, the role of fathers in supporting mothers, children, and building effective co-parenting relationships should not be overlooked.

The responsible fatherhood field also has reason to remember that federal fatherhood work has a long history and a serious policy footprint. For example, the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood program has operated as a competitive federal grant program for years, supporting work in healthy marriage and couple relationships, responsible parenting, and economic stability, with over $1 billion awarded or committed across multiple grant cohorts through 2025. That legacy should not be viewed as separate from family policy; it is family policy.

In that sense, the opportunity in front of our field is not only to preserve resources but to clarify relevance.

The responsible fatherhood field has matured beyond the point where it should be treated as a stand-alone niche. It now has enough research, practice, and systems experience to demonstrate that father engagement affects outcomes across multiple domains: child well-being, co-parenting, family economic stability, system navigation, and community support.

The more clearly the field can connect fatherhood work to outcomes that other systems already value, the more durable its place becomes.

This is especially important in a budget environment where not every relevant funding stream remains visible in the same way. The FY2026 appendix explicitly displayed Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grants within TANF. The FY2027 summary materials currently available do not separately display that line item in the same way. This doesn’t mean fatherhood work is less important. It means it’s more important than ever for the field demonstrate how father engagement contributes to the success of the systems that are clearly present in the budget.

This moment calls for analysis, not alarm, and clarity, not caricature. It calls for the responsible fatherhood field to ask where healthy families can still be advanced, and it calls for practical collaboration, smart design, and stronger integration of fathers into systems that remain central to family life:

Researchers can help by continuing to document the relationship between father engagement and outcomes in early childhood, child welfare, maternal health, behavioral health, and family stability.
Practitioners can help by continuing to show what happens when fathers are treated not as afterthoughts, but as part of the family support equation.
Policymakers and administrators can help by ensuring that efforts to strengthen children and families do not unintentionally exclude fathers from their design.

Healthy families must remain the shared goal.

If the FY2027 budget reflects a more consolidated and more targeted federal approach, then the responsible fatherhood field has a corresponding opportunity: to show, with discipline and evidence, how father engagement strengthens the very outcomes these systems still seek to improve.

This is a practical, not partisan, proposition, and it is one the responsible fatherhood field must be ready to lead.

Our study asks a question that the responsible fatherhood and human services fields sometimes avoid because it’s inconvenient: If we say fathers matter, why are so many systems designed as if they don’t?

Those that truly want to engage fathers must adopt a simple discipline: Stop confusing outcomes with intent. If a father is not consistently present, ask what has been blocking him before you make assumptions or lean on stereotypes.

by Dr. Jeffery Shears, Co-Chair, The Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy

Fulton County, Georgia, sits inside Metro Atlanta, an area that has long been used as a national mirror, a place where America’s hopes and contradictions show up in high definition. The story many people think they already know is a tired one: Black fathers don’t show up. But new fatherhood research published by MIFRP fellows and their colleagues says something more honest. Black fathers show up with love, intention, and persistence, despite being forced to navigate a maze where the walls move.

At its core, our study asks a question the responsible fatherhood and human services fields sometimes avoid because it’s inconvenient: If we say fathers matter, why are so many systems designed as if they don’t?

Our Latest Fatherhood Research and Its Findings

This research centers nonresidential Black fathers in Fulton County and explores what stands in the way of engagement, what helps it flourish, and what fatherhood programs and stakeholders must do differently to stop mistaking barriers for a lack of love.

Our approach to this study matters because its method signals respect. The co-authors used a qualitative, phenomenological design, conducting semi-structured interviews and follow-up focus groups with 12 self-identified Black fathers in Fulton County. These were not “checkbox” conversations. We intentionally made room for men to describe what it feels like to love their child and still have to negotiate access to fatherhood.

Here’s what we learned:

The study reveals co-parenting dynamics as a major fault line.
When co-parenting is healthy, fathers describe communication that stays centered on the child and makes space for both parents to function. When co-parenting becomes hostile, fathers describe emotional strain, frustration, and a level of gatekeeping that can make dads feel like they’re auditioning for access rather than stepping into responsibility. Our research shows that strained co-parenting relationships are not simply interpersonal drama. They become structural barriers when reinforced by systems that lack pathways for repair and for shared parenting support.

The study points to a dearth of father-centered community supports.
Fathers repeatedly described how family-serving environments are often built with mothers in mind, leaving men to either squeeze into spaces not designed for them or give up after repeated signals that they are peripheral. This is not an indictment of mothers or mother-centered supports. It is a challenge to the field: Family work cannot be fully funded, staffed, and structured around one parent and then act surprised when the other parent struggles to stay connected.

The research highlights legal and institutional barriers.
The fathers describe legal processes, including child support and legitimation in Georgia, as confusing, expensive, and emotionally draining, especially when layered with experiences of discrimination within systems meant to administer fairness. When a father believes the system is rigged against him, he may still fight for his child, but he does it with a constant tax on his mental health, time, and stability.

The study explores what public narratives routinely ignore: fathers’ interior world.
Many fathers described fear at the start of fatherhood. Younger men, especially, felt unprepared. However, fathers of all ages reported that these feelings often shifted to pride and deep attachment once their child arrived. Fathers spoke about identity, self-efficacy, and the drive to offer their children what they did not always receive. In the language of leadership, this is purpose forming under pressure. In the language of family, it’s a man deciding the pattern stops here.

One throughline should reframe how America reads Black fatherhood: resilience.
Our findings do not romanticize struggle, but they do document persistence. Even with co-parenting conflict, limited community supports, and legal barriers, fathers described pushing to remain present and positively involved. The point isn’t that men should have to be heroic to be fathers. The point is that they already are doing the work, and the responsible fatherhood and human services fields have a responsibility to stop building (or advancing) systems that require heroics for dads to maintain a relationship with his child.

What This Research Means for Fathers Incorporated

Research is only as valuable as what it changes. Fathers Incorporated (FI) won’t let this study sit on a shelf. It sharpens service-delivery models and validates what frontline work has long shown: Fathers need more than motivational speeches. Fathers need navigation, skill-building, and systems that stop punishing involvement.

Here are practical ways this research is being used, and how it can shape the work going forward:

FI can continue to tighten the integration between fatherhood development and co-parenting support, treating co-parenting as a core engagement strategy rather than an optional add-on. If co-parenting conflict blocks access, then co-parenting skill-building is father engagement work.
The MIFRP study reinforces the need for father-inclusive program design across community agencies. This means leveraging FI’s expertise to train partner organizations to welcome and communicate with fathers, and to build father-affirming environments that don’t treat men as visitors in their own families. Our research even underscores how staffing and the presence of men in service environments can shape whether fathers feel supported enough to engage.
Since legal navigation remains a major lever, FI can continue building bridges between fathers and credible navigation, particularly regarding legitimation and the father’s understanding of rights, responsibilities, and pathways that protect the child relationship. When fathers know the process and feel accompanied through it, they are less likely to disengage out of exhaustion.
Our findings also point to a gap that many programs under-address: reentry stabilization and the financial rebuilding that makes consistent parenting easier to sustain. Programs that treat employment, stability, and father engagement as separate tracks will keep losing fathers to the friction of survival. In contrast, program models like FIs that serve incarcerated and returning-to-community dads holistically will successfully retain and engage fathers.

Research as Guidance for the Responsible Fatherhood and Human Services Fields

Now for the larger question: How can this paper inform fatherhood programs and stakeholders nationwide?

Fields that truly want engaged fathers must adopt a simple discipline: Stop confusing outcomes with intent. If a father is not consistently present, ask what has been blocking him before you make assumptions or lean on stereotypes.

Fatherhood programs across the country can take at least five cues from this study:

Build fatherhood services that include co-parenting repair as a standard feature, because co-parenting conflict isn’t a side issue; it’s often the gate to the child.
Make father supports visible in community spaces where men already are, and design programming that treats fathers as clients, not collateral.
Create warm handoffs into legal education and navigation, especially in states with unique policy barriers that shape father access.
Expand economic stability and reentry supports as a father engagement strategy, not merely workforce development.
Teach staff to engage fathers with dignity and clarity, because program culture is a form of infrastructure.

If this sounds like a big shift, it is. But history has shown how quickly public sentiment can change when truth is spoken with moral force. Dr. King did not persuade the nation by offering a softer story. He named what was happening and demanded alignment between our stated values and our public systems. That is the invitation in this research: Align the systems with the values we claim to hold.

Black fathers in Fulton County aren’t asking for trophies. They’re asking for a fair shot at being present.

This blog post includes insights from “Barriers to and Facilitators of Paternal Engagement for Black Fathers in Fulton County, Georgia,” an article published recently in Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Servicesby SAGE Publications by Dr. Jeffrey Shears, Dr. Cassandra L. Bolar, Dr. Lorenzo N. Hopper, Dr. Matisa Wilbon, and Dr. David C. Miller from the Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy (MIFRP) with colleagues Carmen Rudd and Aremu M. Smith.

To learn more about the work of the Moynihan Institute, visit www.themoynihaninstitute.com.

You can also read summaries of MIFRP’s recent research right here on Dads Pad Blog:

From a programmatic perspective at Fathers Incorporated, we spend our days encouraging fathers to model respect for women, to support mothers, and to raise children who understand the value of dignity and healthy relationships.

This partnership pushes against that work, and the contradiction deserves to be named.

by Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

There are moments when a story unfolding in the public square is about something deeper than sports, entertainment, or business. It becomes a moment that forces parents, leaders, and communities to ask themselves a simple question: What are we willing to normalize in front of our children? This moment arrived for me when I learned about the partnership between the Atlanta Hawks and Magic City.

For those who may not know, Magic City is one of the most famous strip clubs in the world. It’s an Atlanta institution in its own right, surrounded by decades of cultural lore tied to music, celebrity, and nightlife. Athletes, entertainers, and visitors to the city have long treated it as a rite of passage. And locally? It sits squarely within the entertainment culture of the city.

But this cultural familiarity does not erase the reality of what Magic City represents as an establishment: At its core, it’s a business whose model is built on the objectification of women.

Now, through an upcoming promotional partnership, that misogyny is being publicly aligned with one of Atlanta’s most visible family-centered institutions – the Atlanta Hawks.

For many, this may simply sound like a clever marketing stunt, a moment where sports and entertainment collide in a city known for both. But for fathers — and particularly fathers raising daughters — the question lands very differently, and I find myself confronting it in a deeply personal way.

I had already purchased tickets to attend an upcoming Hawks game with my youngest daughter, who is 24. It was meant to be a simple father-daughter outing, the kind of night many parents cherish: a basketball game, laughter, shared snacks, a memory created in a place that has long been considered safe and welcoming for families.

But now, the Hawks, who invite families into their building, have decided it’s perfectly acceptable to celebrate a strip club. The arena where I planned to continue creating memories with my daughter has decided it sees no moral conflict in promoting a partnership with a business built around the commodification of women’s bodies. Because of this, my daughter and I will find another place to bond as father and daughter.

This isn’t simply a conversation about Atlanta culture. Anyone who lives here understands the role that places like Magic City play in the city’s entertainment ecosystem. Atlanta is a global hub for music, sports, and nightlife. It’s a destination for celebrities and athletes. No one is pretending that those realities don’t exist.

But acknowledging culture is not the same thing as elevating it with an endorsement. The Atlanta Hawks are not simply another nightlife venue. They are a professional sports organization representing one of the largest cities in the United States. Their games are marketed as family events. Their arena is filled with children, parents, school groups, and youth teams who come to watch athletes perform at the highest level.

And when a family-facing institution aligns itself with the objectification of women, it sends a message. It tells young people what adults consider acceptable. It tells girls how the broader culture views their bodies and their worth. It teaches boys something about how women are valued.

Our sons and daughters are forming their understanding of who they are in a culture saturated with messages that seek to define their worth and roles. We cannot be casual about the messages they receive from institutions they admire.

These messages do not arrive in isolation. They arrive within a broader cultural moment in which the lines between entertainment and responsibility are already blurring at an alarming rate.

Consider what we are seeing across sports today.

Alcohol companies have long used sports arenas as their most powerful marketing platforms. And now, sports gambling has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry with advertising woven seamlessly into broadcasts watched by millions of young people. Athletes are no longer just competitors; they are marketing vehicles for betting platforms, encouraging viewers to wager money in real time.

Domestic violence remains a serious issue within sports culture, despite years of public reckoning and promises of reform. And now, on courts across the country — from the NBA to college basketball to AAU tournaments and high school gyms — violence between players has become increasingly common, with fights erupting almost nightly.

These trends share a common thread: They normalize behavior that adults may feel capable of navigating but that young people are still learning to interpret.

Children do not possess the lived experience required to filter these contradictions. They rely on adults — parents, coaches, institutions, and others — to model the values that shape their understanding of the world.

This is why the silence surrounding the Hawks/Magic City partnership is so troubling.

This week, I spoke with my staff at Fathers Incorporated (FI) about the partnership. Around the table were men and women, Black and white – professionals whose work centers on families, fathers, mothers, and children. Our discussion was thoughtful, reflective, and deeply uncomfortable, not because anyone was shocked by the existence of strip clubs but because of what it means when a major public institution decides to celebrate one.

From a programmatic perspective at FI, we spend our days encouraging fathers to model respect for women, to support mothers, and to raise children who understand the value of dignity and healthy relationships.

This partnership pushes against that work, and the contradiction deserves to be named.

Equally troubling is the quiet that has surrounded this moment from voices that typically speak loudly about men’s issues, fatherhood, and community responsibility. Where are the leaders who champion responsible fatherhood? Where are the advocates who organize around men’s accountability and respect for women? Where are the voices within the NBA ecosystem willing to say that this partnership may cross a line?

Instead, the few individuals who have raised concerns have found themselves quickly dismissed, mocked, or drowned out by the noise of social media. But social media isn’t where moral clarity is forged. Social media rewards outrage, amplifies controversy, and generates clicks. It’s rarely where thoughtful conversations about ethics and community responsibility thrive.

What matters more is the conversation happening in living rooms and at dinner tables, in homes where parents are trying to raise sons who respect women, and in spaces where daughters are learning how society determines their worth.

Atlanta is not just another entertainment city. It’s the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Atlanta is a place whose moral legacy helped reshape the conscience of a nation. This legacy reminds us that culture is not simply what exists — it’s what communities choose to elevate.

And that choice carries responsibility.

This op-ed is not written with the expectation that the Atlanta Hawks will reverse their decision, nor is it written with the illusion that a single column can alter the direction of cultural winds already blowing strongly. It’s written because silence in moments like this sends its own message.

If organizations dedicated to strengthening families remain quiet on topics like this, then we have abandoned part of the responsibility entrusted to us.

FI has spent decades advocating for fathers to be more present, more engaged, and more responsible in their children’s lives. This advocacy includes teaching men that fatherhood is not only about financial provision or discipline. It is also about modeling the values our children will carry into the world long after we are gone.

Sometimes this requires speaking even when it would be easier to stay quiet, being willing to say what others are unwilling to say, and raising questions that cut through the noise.

Where do we draw our lines?

Children are watching and listening. The world we normalize today will become the one they inherit tomorrow.

At the very least, somebody should say something.

This is the moment to treat fatherhood as a national, not niche, strategy. A father’s presence is a protective factor, not a slogan. A father’s stability is both personal triumph and public good. A father’s ability to co-parent peacefully is bigger than a relationship win; it’s child development work.

America can keep debating fatherhood like a moral argument, or we can finally treat it like what it is: a practical, urgent, solvable challenge that requires real investment.

by Dr. Matisa Wilbon, Fathers Incorporated and Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy

Men don’t show up to a fatherhood program when life is easy.

They show up when the noise in the house grows louder than their pride. When the co-parenting situation feels like a daily contest with no referee. When the job isn’t steady enough to promise anything beyond next week. When they’re tired of hearing, “Be there for your kids,” without anyone offering a practical path to actually do it.

That’s what the men who reach out to Fathers Incorporated (FI) about our Gentle Warriors Academy (GWA) tell us. It isn’t theory. It isn’t a tidy narrative that makes everyone feel good. It’s experience, shared by real men who raise their hands and say, “I need help, and I’m willing to do the work.”

What we’re seeing is not a local or isolated story; it’s an early warning system for the country. And this is why the national responsible fatherhood field needs to pay attention right now.

The fathers reaching out to FI and GWA are not on the margins of parenting. They are in the most active, demanding years of raising children. Their average age is mid-thirties, and nearly all have children under 16. They are in the years where routines are built, school calls happen, emotions run hot, relationships are tested, and the presence or absence of a father leaves marks that last.

This matters because the national fatherhood conversation still treats dads as attitude problems who just need motivation or inspiration or enough guilt piled on them that they’re shamed into doing better.

Our data tells a different story.

Fathers Seeking Support Report Three Main Obstacles

The stories our dads share are about constraints:

Work: Many dads who reach out to us are unemployed, but even for those who are working, the ground under them is still unstable. Job tenure is fragile or elusive. This means fatherhood program models with “show up every week” requirements become unrealistic fast and force fathers to choose between doing the right thing for the long term (program attendance) and surviving the immediate reality of bills, schedules, and volatility.
Housing: A significant share of fathers who come to us do not have stable housing, and some are in shelter or homeless conditions. People love to talk about “responsible fatherhood” until they meet a father who is trying to be responsible without a place to lay his head.
Transportation: Another meaningful percentage report lack of reliable transportation. This one detail alone can erase the most beautifully designed curriculum if your fatherhood program model assumes everyone can travel or move easily around the city or community.

When you stack these realities, you see beyond “need.” You see structural risk. You see fathers who can drop off, not because they don’t care, but because the logistics of survival are winning.

Now here’s where urgency enters the room: The children of these fathers can’t put their childhood on pause while systems get it together.

This is why the national responsible fatherhood field must stop treating wraparound supports as optional upgrades. For many fathers, wraparound support is the doorway. It’s the bridge between intention and completion. It’s the difference between finishing a program and becoming another statistic people later argue about.

When the Legal System Stands in the Way of Father Involvement

This is the part of the story that too many fatherhood efforts tiptoe around: family law.

If you want to understand why fathers struggle to stay engaged, you cannot keep pretending that love is the only factor governing access. You can’t keep giving fathers lessons on effective communication while systems hand them confusion, barriers, delays, and legal dead ends.

Many unmarried fathers who complete FI’s intake form need help navigating legitimation — not just legitimation awareness, not just a legitimation brochure, but practical support. This isn’t a small technical issue; it’s a national fatherhood issue playing out in Georgia.

Legitimation is one expression of a broader truth: In too many spaces across the country, America treats fatherhood and fathers’ rights as separate conversations. A man can be expected to provide, but not automatically empowered to participate. He can be held accountable, while still being excluded. He can be judged for absence while struggling in a legal maze that creates barriers to his presence.

This imbalance doesn’t just frustrate fathers; it destabilizes families.

Child support systems are also part of this dynamic, and it needs to be said plainly. Most fathers do not object to supporting their children. Many are trying to do it while working unstable jobs, managing multiple obligations, and sometimes carrying arrears that feel like a permanent shadow.

What’s striking is how layered these challenges are. Co-parenting, custody, and visitation struggles appear alongside legitimation, child support, and legal issues. Fathers are not showing up to fatherhood programs with one clean problem at a time; they’re showing up with bundles of real-life hurdles.

This means the national responsible fatherhood field has to evolve past siloed programming.

Lessons for the National Responsible Fatherhood Field

If a father needs clarity on parenting time, child support navigation, and co-parenting conflict management, giving him only one of these and calling it “impact” is not accurate. It’s a partial “solution” that leaves him exposed where life hits hardest.

And life does hit hard.

A majority of fathers who complete GWA intake forms are interested in support related to mental health, stress, or substance use. Justice system involvement is present, with notable proportions reporting probation, parole, or recent release from incarceration. Housing instability correlates with higher need in these areas. This isn’t surprising, but it’s revealing.

It tells us the national responsible fatherhood field must stop asking fathers to manage unbearable pressures with willpower alone. Fathers are saying, “I need tools. I need structure. I need someone to walk with me, not just lecture me.”

And here’s the most overlooked part of this whole story: These fathers are not only bringing needs; they’re bringing assets. They have skills and capacities that align with real workforce pathways and community contributions. They’re not asking to be rescued; they’re asking to be resourced.

Their stated goals reflect that. They want personal growth, stronger bonds with their children, and healthier co-parenting. And they want help navigating legal processes so they can show up fully and consistently.

So why should the national responsible fatherhood field treat this as urgent? Because what GWA dads reveal goes beyond a program metric for us to measure. It provides the field with a national temperature check.

When fathers show up in significant numbers and say the same themes over and over, they’re telling us where society is cracking. They’re telling us what’s happening in families before it becomes a headline, CPS case, fatherhood program dropout statistic, or generational pattern we pretend we didn’t see coming.

They’e also telling us what works.

Fathers respond to environments that respect them enough to be honest with them. They respond to fatherhood programs that don’t treat them like villains or visitors. They respond to models that acknowledge the full reality of fatherhood in America, including systems, legal barriers, economic instability, housing insecurity, and emotional strain.

The national responsible fatherhood field cannot afford to operate with outdated assumptions. Motivation is not the main barrier. Access is. Stability is. Navigation is. Support is.

And this is where funders need to lean in, not step back.

The Urgent Need to Fund Well-Built Fatherhood Programs

It’s a mistake to fund fatherhood work as a small, feel-good add-on to “real” family policy. Those attempts misunderstand what fatherhood programs actually do when they are built well:

They stabilize families.
They reduce conflict.
They increase consistent parenting.
They support economic mobility.
They help men become safer, steadier, more emotionally present caregivers.
They give children more of what they need: reliability.

If we want outcomes, we must invest in infrastructure like FI’s Gentle Warriors Academy and we must expand program capacity. A national-scale response fully funds:

Robust case management to prevent attendance drop-off when life collapses.
Embedded legal navigation.
Built-in workforce partnerships.
Culturally-grounded mental health and stress supports.
Flexible delivery formats that accommodate dads’ scheduling, transportation, and housing needs.

This is the moment to treat fatherhood as a national, not niche, strategy. A father’s presence is a protective factor, not a slogan. A father’s stability is both personal triumph and public good. A father’s ability to co-parent peacefully is bigger than a relationship win; it’s child development work.

America can keep debating fatherhood like a moral argument, or we can finally treat it like what it is: a practical, urgent, solvable challenge that requires real investment.

The fathers are already arriving. They’ve already raised their hands and reached out to us. Now, the responsible fatherhood field has to decide whether it will provide a level of support that matches dads’ willingness.

When fathers show up asking for a pathway, and we respond with underfunded programs, limited staffing, and fragmented services, we are not just failing them. Our children inherit the gaps, and we already know what happens when children inherit gaps for too long.

The purpose of the study is both practical and corrective. Practically, the team set out to learn which supports exist for fathers in NPU-V and which supports are missing, so service delivery can match real needs. Correctively, the paper pushes back on a long tradition of policy and public narrative that treats fathers as an afterthought in “family strengthening,” even while research keeps reaffirming that fathers are a protective factor in child development.

by Dr. Matisa Wilbon, Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy

Much research on Black fathers begins with an assumption and then seeks evidence, but we did the opposite. We began with a place, a set of neighborhoods, and a simple commitment: Listen closely to what young, nonresidential Black fathers say they are carrying, what they need, and what keeps them from being the fathers they are trying to become.

Researching Young Black Fathers in Atlanta

The Moynihan Institute for Fatherhood Research and Policy (MIFRP) at Fathers Incorporated (FI) contributed findings from this research to a peer-reviewed article published by the Child Welfare League of America in its journal Child Welfare. Authored by Jeffrey Shears, David Miller, Lorenzo N. Hopper, Cassandra Bolar, Armon Perry, and Britany Hodges, “The Experiences and Needs of Atlanta’s Young NPU-V Black Fathers” focuses on Neighborhood Planning Unit V (NPU-V), a historically Black area of Atlanta with concentrated economic hardship and a high share of households headed by unmarried females.

The purpose of the study is both practical and corrective. Practically, the team set out to learn which supports exist for fathers in NPU-V and which supports are missing, so service delivery can match real needs. Correctively, the paper pushes back on a long tradition of policy and public narrative that treats fathers as an afterthought in “family strengthening,” even while research keeps reaffirming that fathers are a protective factor in child development.

Method matters here because trust is part of the data. The researchers employed a phenomenological approach and conducted semi-structured focus groups with 13 young Black fathers aged 18–30 who were connected to NPU-V. Fathers were recruited through familiar community touchpoints like churches and barbershops, along with social media and FI’s local reach. The conversations — conducted in virtual focus groups — were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis, alongside constant comparative qualitative methods.

This approach did more than “collect information.” It created a setting where fathers could address what they don’t usually get asked, a setting where they could hear each other say it, too. The final paper notes that this group dynamic fostered solidarity and that several fathers wanted to continue meeting after the study ended. This is a signal in itself: Sometimes the intervention begins the moment a man realizes he isn’t the only one trying to figure it out.

Young Black Fathers Face Fear, Stigma, and Service Gaps

Three core findings rise to the surface. Each is blunt, human, and teachable.

First, fear is not the enemy of fatherhood. Fear is often the doorway. Fathers described the transition into parenting as emotionally heavy, especially when many of them did not grow up with active fathers and had few positive models to borrow from. That lack of modeling did not produce apathy. It produced anxiety about getting it wrong. One father said the quiet part out loud. He was “excited and scared” because he might “screw up” his children’s lives, but he still had to “do the best” he could. That line is the opposite of inertia: It’s a mission statement.

Second, stigma is not just something fathers feel. It is something systems do. The young fathers we talked with spoke about the way Black fatherhood is socially discounted, as if fathering is automatically assumed to be a mother’s domain and a father’s presence is optional. “Everything goes to mothers,” one participant said, capturing how recognition, resources, and social permission often flow in one direction. The fathers also named how community patterns get turned into permanent stereotypes, such as “Most homes are broken” and “Dads not being there… is too much of the norm.” These narratives influence policy and culture, as well. People assume Black fathers don’t care, and so they question the logic of investing in them.

Third, the service gap is real, and fathers feel it in their bones. The fathers described limited access to support designed for men and contrasted it with what they routinely see for women. One line lands like an indictment of how we’ve built the safety net: “There is no welfare system for men.” Citing an example of a couple feeling pressured to claim separation to qualify for food support, another father described how public assistance rules can indirectly penalize a father’s presence. When eligibility rules incentivize the appearance of father absence, we should not be surprised when communities begin to normalize it.

How Research Impacts the Work of Fathers Incorporated

The paper does not stop at the problem. It highlights what fathers do when they face economic strain, stigma, and thin supports: They improvise. They build informal networks through relatives and “fictive kin,” and they keep trying to stay active. Some find their way into fatherhood programming that becomes a lifeline.

Fathers described the difference that a local fatherhood program made. Without it, one said, he would not have had anything to help him with his child. Another said fathers need this kind of support at birth so they know their rights before crisis forces them to learn them in the hardest way possible.

This is where FI comes in, not as a footnote, but as the bridge between research and repair. The paper explicitly references FI’s Gentle Warriors Academy (GWA) as a response to the void of supportive services, a place where fathers can increase their capacity rather than be treated as a problem to manage.

This lines up with how FI describes its broader posture: Listen, lead, innovate, then turn what we learn into programming that reaches men where they are and walks with them toward where they’re trying to go.

The most important thing to understand about how FI is using this research is that it is not being treated as a “report to admire.” It’s being used as an operating document.

Fatherhood research informs how we design entry points.

The study reinforces that young fathers often enter fatherhood with fear and uncertainty, not a lack of love. That means early engagement should normalize anxiety, build parenting confidence, and provide practical coaching quickly, before shame hardens into disengagement.

Fatherhood research informs how we talk about fatherhood.

If fathers are navigating stigma as a daily headwind, then narrative change is not branding work; it’s service work. Programs utilize language that restores dignity and expectation and imagery that makes father presence feel normal, not rare.

Fatherhood research informs local partnerships.

When fathers say they don’t see anything “specifically catered” to them, the answer is not simply to advertise harder. It’s to embed father-focused supports where fathers already are. The recruitment strategy, then, points toward effective community infrastructure: barbershops, churches, community hubs, and trusted relationships.

Fatherhood research informs advocacy and policy reform.

In its conclusion, this recent paper calls for further exploration of co-parenting, father access, and legal rights, pointing directly to Georgia’s legitimation process as an added barrier for unmarried fathers’ access and decision-making authority. It argues that fathers are often required to carry responsibility while being denied rights, and that this imbalance harms families.

This policy emphasis is critical for other stakeholders across Metro Atlanta and beyond, because the MIFRP paper is not only about NPU-V. NPU-V is a lens. What the fathers describe shows up in many places: in child welfare systems that struggle to identify and engage fathers, in public benefits rules that unintentionally encourage father invisibility, in court processes that confuse rights with residence, and in agencies that have “family” programming that is functionally mother-only.

Research-Informed Action Steps for Fatherhood Programs

So how should other fatherhood programs, funders, agencies, and policymakers use this information?

Begin with one shift: Move from a deficit lens to a strengths lens. The paper directly situates its implications in the shadow of the Moynihan legacy and the corrective work of scholars who documented Black fathers’ engagement, including caregiving behaviors that contradict popular portrayals. The invitation is clear: Stop treating Black fatherhood as an absence to explain and start treating it as a capacity to build.

From there, the actionable takeaways are straightforward:

Design services that answer fear with skill. Build modules and coaching that increase parenting self-efficacy, especially for fathers who didn’t have an active father model. Normalize parents’ “emotional roller coaster,” while teaching practical routines: child development, discipline, bonding, and communication.
Treat stigma as a service barrier, not just a social problem. Audit your agency’s intake forms, waiting rooms, staff language, hours of operation, assumptions embedded in case planning, and the unspoken message about whether fathers belong. Are these father-inclusive? Fathers notice when “everything goes to mothers.” Fix anything that reinforces that message.
Build supports that are real, not symbolic. Fathers are asking for more than inspiration. They are asking for navigation: employment supports, legal education, child support guidance, parenting time pathways, and help building stable co-parenting routines. The study’s participants are clear that the gap is structural.
Nurture group-based brotherhood. The research shows the power of men hearing men, then wanting to continue. Be intentional about building cohort models, peer mentoring programs, and alumni networks that turn isolation into belonging.
Partner with women-serving systems without making fathers an add-on. Many services flow through maternal health, early childhood, schools, and child welfare. Create agreements that ensure fathers are identified early, invited, and engaged with dignity, while keeping family safety as a nonnegotiable standard.
Advocate for policy that aligns responsibility with rights. If your state has legal processes that delay or complicate fathers’ rights, build clear pathways to education, legal referrals, and reform efforts. The paper elevates legitimation as one such pressure point in Georgia.

Final Thoughts

If you want a single sentence that captures why this research matters, it’s this: Fathers are not asking to be rescued from fatherhood; they’re asking to be resourced for it.

Our research issues a challenge to every stakeholder who touches families. When a father says he’s scared he might mess up his kids’ lives, he is not confessing weakness. He is embracing responsibility. Our job as a field is to meet this instinct with structures that make his presence possible.

And that is what the rigor of MIFRP’s work accomplishes. It takes what has been treated as a private struggle and places it in public view. It takes what has been treated like an anecdote and names it as evidence. It takes fatherhood narratives that have become stereotypes and returns them to their rightful owners: fathers themselves.