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Community-led dads’ groups improve wellbeing for men and their children, new research shows
A team of researchers, led by Steve Robertson, Professor of Men, Gender and Health and Co-Director of the Centre for Men’s Health at Leeds Beckett University (pictured top), evaluated the Salford Dadz network, which supports, and provides a safe space for, fathers in an area of Salford. The findings have been published in the latest edition of Health Promotion International journal, alongside another aspect of the same evaluation, led by Dr Esmée Hanna, Researcher within the Centre for Men’s Health and published in the Journal of Gender Studies, examining the impact the fathering group has had on the women of the community.
The aim of the research was to understand the development and impact of a programme co-created by a social enterprise and fathers from within the community.
Professor Robertson explained: “Our findings suggest that allowing fathers to define their own concerns, discover solutions to these and design locally appropriate ways to share these solutions can result in significant change for them, their children and the wider community. Discovering safe opportunities for men to share the difficulties they are experiencing helped them find alternative ways to deal with many of the challenges they faced. This improved their confidence and had a positive impact on their relationships with their children and with significant others around them. There were clear links between the fathers’ wellbeing and that of their children.”
Health promotion programmes engaging men have shown to be challenging and fathering has been highlighted as one way of making this engagement possible as it is seen as a possible opportunity for behaviour change in men. Fathers have a significant impact on child health and development however family interventions such as parenting groups rarely target men.
The Salford Dadz network aims to improve the wellbeing of men and their children by providing sustainable community-led support to local fathers. Professor Robertson explained: “The community itself identifies fathers with positive, yet often uncommon, behaviours and works with them to find ways to practice these behaviours father-to-father, so changing men’s current social practices.”
The Leeds Beckett researchers collected information from four sources: reflective diaries written by a Project Manager and Engagement Worker for Salford Dadz; in-depth interviews with dads participating in the project; semi-structured interviews with women within the local community (including mums); and a workshop with children engaged in the project.
The positive impacts of the programme were wide-ranging. Men reported that the safe space established by the programme for practical and emotional sharing, alongside the fun and enjoyment of the activities and time spent with their children, provided them with feelings of belonging, trust, being valued and importantly provided them with alternatives to their existing ‘maladaptive’ methods of coping. As a result they felt free from previous feelings of isolation and, in volunteering within their community and helping others, the men reported a boost in confidence.
A big impact noted was the clear change in the amount of time spent with the children and the nature and quality of that time. One effect of this was that new role-modelling and positive attitudes offered by the dads were mirrored within the children, with one dad noting that his new confidence had been reflected in his children riding their bikes for the first time without stabilisers, which they had never attempted previously.
The programme also had a significant impact on the women in the community. Taking their children to the group was seen by the women as a way that men could take parental responsibility and demonstrate parenting ability to themselves and to the women. They noted that, as the men also began engaging in some of the more emotional aspects of parenting, children were learning that men do ‘caring’ as well as ‘providing’ within family life, creating healthier practices.
Dr Esmée Hanna
Dr Esmée Hanna said: “Interestingly, whilst the women I interviewed saw it as a positive that the men were spending more time with their children and taking more responsibility, they also had a nervousness about this and wanted to keep control of the domain that is socially constructed as ‘theirs’. As such, they recognised that they sometimes perpetuated traditional roles in relation to childcare themselves – the idea that ‘mums know best’ perhaps hampering men’s ability to be more involved with their children.”
A number of the women made reference to the positivity of the initiative in not involving the pub and that the development of new means of coping with the stresses and problems of life was part of setting a good example to their children.
Dr Hanna commented: “The women showed how an initiative for men in the community can begin to change sometimes long-held perceptions of men, for example as being ‘useless’. By taking men out of the home and into healthier settings that facilitate positive behavior, they saw men being brought more into family life and demonstrating a different picture of the men within their wider community. The initiative was therefore seen to be challenging some of the negative stereotypes within the eyes of this community.”
Additional benefits to mums included allowing the mothers (the identified ‘go to’ person for the children) to regain some ‘me’ time. They also noted that the father-children joint activities gave the whole family something different and positive to discuss when they returned home. The women also noticed that, where parents were separated, relationships between ex-partners had often become less strained.
Dr Robertson added: “Throughout our two-year evaluation of the project, we saw dads taking increasing control and a sense of ownership of the project. We believe that having a support network with community ownership is likely to engender sustainability as it is developed through local people’s skills, commitment and social networks.
“By expanding their repertoire of acceptable (and beneficial) ways to ‘be a man’, men increase the range of coping strategies available to them to deal with the significant issues they face and thereby impacts on a range of daily relationships.
“We suggest that the commissioning of services delivered ‘to’ people could be replaced, or supplemented, by commissioning appropriate organisations to work with communities to co-create solutions to needs they themselves have recognised.”
The researchers have now been commissioned to evaluate two new projects established by the Salford Dadz network in two new areas around the Salford and Greater Manchester areas.