Making Fathers Relevant: How Practitioners Include Both Parents in Talk About Parenting Programmes

The importance of engaging with both parents is supported by the promotion of a “whole family” approach endorsed in policy, but one obstacle to achieving this has been the difficulty in engaging fathers who continue to be underrepresented in parenting programmes (Panter-Brick et al., 2014). For example, a national evaluation of the CANParent trial (which included a specific aim to recruit more fathers), found the proportion of fathers was only nine per cent of the 2,956 participants (Lindsay et al., 2014).

Some evidence suggests that there may be benefits for developing programmes specifically for groups of fathers in particular circumstances such as fathers in prison (Hayes, Butler, Devaney, & Percy, 2018; Langston, 2016) or fathers of at-risk children (Scourfield, Allely, Coffey, & Yates, 2016). However, when there are more general difficulties with children’s behaviour or the parental relationship, there is evidence of improvements to paternal behaviour when parents attend co-parenting programmes together (Pilkington, Rominov, Brown, & Dennis, 2019).