From slavery to present day, the narratives of Black fatherhood have been fraught with biases and stereotypes, failing to accurately capture the voices and lived experiences of Black fathers. Contrary to these narratives, Black fathers play an important role in the lives of their children and families. Health, Parenting, and Community Perspectives on Black Fatherhood: Defying Stereotypes and Amplifying Strengths, edited by Tasha L. Alston, Brianna P. Lemmons, and Latrice S. Rollins, celebrates Black fatherhood and highlights the ways Black men defy stereotypes and embrace their role as fathers with unwavering resilience. Drawing on the expertise of well-regarded experts in the field and using a strengths-based perspective, this comprehensive book provides insight into the experiences of Black fathers in three key areas: health, parenting, and community. The contributors explore the salience of the co-parenting relationship for Black fathers, community-based participatory research with Black fathers, the Black father-daughter relationship, the male in-law relationship in Black families, support systems for Black fathers parenting autistic children, and more. This volume is an essential resource for scholars in social work, psychology, sociology, child development, allied health, and similar disciplines and professions.

Engaging and Working with African American Fathers: Strategies and Lessons Learned challenges traditional and historic practices and policies that have systematically excluded fathers and contributed to social and health disparities among this population. With chapters written primarily by African American women – drawing on years of research, interviews, and practical experience with this demographic – each section explores current evidence on engagement approaches, descriptions of agencies/programs addressing specific issues fathers face, and case studies documenting typical clients and approaches to addressing their diverse needs. Offering an expansive overview of issues affecting African American fathers, the book explores such important topics as public, child and mental health, education, parenting, employment, and public initiatives among others. Engaging and Working with African American Fathers is a key resource for social work, public health, education students, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and members of communities who are challenged by meeting the diverse needs of African American fathers.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), which became law in 1997, elicited a major shift in federal policy and thinking toward child welfare, emphasizing children’s safety, permanency, and well-being over preserving their biological ties at all costs. The first edition of this volume was the earliest major social work textbook to map the field of child welfare after ASFA’s passage, detailing the practices, policies, programs, and research affected by the legislation’s new attitude toward care. This second edition highlights the continuously changing child welfare climate in the U.S., including content on the Fostering Connections Act of 2008. Gerald P. Mallon and Peg McCartt Hess have updated the text throughout, drawing from real world case examples, using data obtained from the national Child and Family Services Reviews and emerging empirically based practices. They have also added chapters addressing child welfare workforce issues, supervision, and research and evaluation. Divided into four sections—child and adolescent well-being, child and adolescent safety, permanency for children and adolescents, and systemic issues within services, policies, and programs—this newly edited volume provides a current understanding of family support and child protective services, risk assessment, substance and sexual abuse issues, domestic violence issues, guardianship, reunification, kinship and foster family care, adoption, and transitional living programs. Recognized scholars, practitioners, and policy makers also discuss meaningful engagement with families, particularly Latino families; health care for children and youth, including mental health care; effective practices with LGBT youth and their families; placement stability; foster parent recruitment and retention; and the challenges of working with immigrant children, youth, and families.

This aim of this open access book is to launch an international, cross-disciplinary conversation on fatherhood engagement. By integrating perspective from three sectors -- Health, Social Policy, and Work in Organizations -- the book offers a novel perspective on the benefits of engaged fatherhood for men, for families, and for gender equality. The chapters are crafted to engaged broad audiences, including policy makers and organizational leaders, healthcare practitioners and fellow scholars, as well as families and their loved ones.

Social workers need to work with fathers across many service systems, but lack guidance on how to do so, and most engagement, assessment, and intervention work for family-serving systems is mother- and child-focused. Father-inclusive readings and resources are also limited. Drawing on the expertise of well-regarded research and practice experts in the field, this comprehensive book provides guidance to social work practitioners and researchers on how to engage, assess, and serve fathers. Instructors can use the text to include fathers in courses on the human behavior and social environment, family systems, clinical practice, diversity, or service systems. Social service systems, unfortunately, have often struggled to positively engage men as parents. Recent demographic trends indicate that fathers are providing more direct care to children and single-father households are one of the most rapidly growing demographic groups in the United States. Barriers to their successful engagement include biases and assumptions about men and fathers, a lack of father-friendly policies and practices in the field, limited training on how to work with fathers, and relatively limited father-inclusive social work research until recently. This book addresses these barriers. It is a guide to social workers in their efforts to better serve men as parents, and does so from an ecological and systems perspective. Multiple case examples and practical tools are provided, as well as specific content on major social service systems. Topics explored include: Father Engagement Organizational “Father Friendly” Assessments Interventions with Fathers Setting the Course for Future Theory, Research, and Practice with Fathers Social Work Practice with Fathers: Engagement, Assessment, and Intervention is a book that could be folded into foundation courses in social work or used by practitioners in the field. It is an essential text for graduate students in social work, psychology, sociology, child development, allied health, and similar disciplines and professions, and a go-to resource for helping professionals/practitioners such as social workers, psychologists, and licensed professional counselors. Advanced undergraduate students in these disciplines and professions also will find the text useful in their studies and work.

All parents experience stress as they attempt to meet the challenges of caring for their children. This comprehensive book examines the causes and consequences of parenting distress, drawing on a wide array of findings in current empirical research. Kirby Deater-Deckard explores normal and pathological parenting stress, the influences of parents on their children as well as children on their parents, and the effects of biological and environmental factors. Beginning with an overview of theories of stress and coping, Deater-Deckard goes on to describe how parenting stress is linked with problems in adult and child health (emotional problems, developmental disorders, illness); parental behaviors (warmth, harsh discipline); and factors outside the family (marital quality, work roles, cultural influences). The book concludes with a useful review of coping strategies and interventions that have been demonstrated to alleviate parenting stress.

This dissertation is based on two years of extensive face-to-face semistructured interviews with 36 African-American noncustodial fathers of children who received cash assistance from the state of Wisconsin. I discuss the fathers' characteristics, their conceptions of their roles and responsibilities toward their children, the barriers and supports to managing their day-to-day lives, and their understanding of the child support enforcement system.