1. The loving care of a father is a foundation for his child’s wellbeing and creates a life-long relationship.

2. The loving care of father can be as powerful and important as that of a mother.

3. All fathers, both biological and non-biological, have an innate ability to bond with their babies from the first days. A father’s brain changes when he actively cares for his child, generating enhanced capacity for care and empathy.

4. Loving care takes many forms. Each family and each father-child relationship is unique.

5. Fathers are family, and family carers are among the most important influences on children’s development, wellbeing and health. This is so even when fathers do not live permanently with their children.

6. A harmonious community of care around a child, with parents and carers supporting each other, is a foundation for the child’s healthy development.

7. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is a journey. Fathers need time and practice – to care for, nurture, play with, and teach their children.

8. Loving fatherhood means respect for and collaboration with the mother and the absence of violence.

9. To provide the care and form the relationships that children need, fathers need support and validation from their partners, families, communities and society.

10. Maternal and newborn health services, early years services, and economic self-sufficiency services should offer, and encourage the use of, support for fathers and other family carers in ways that engage creatively with the local culture and socioeconomic conditions. They should provide information and help about how to support maternal and child health and child development. They should support family carers’ relationships with their children and a harmonious community of care for children within families. They should offer support for all carers to meet their children’s financial needs. This support should be accessible to fathers even if they live apart from the mother.

11. Workplaces and employment laws should honour and support the caring responsibilities of both fathers and mothers.

12. Fathers’ involvement in the first 1,000 days of their children’s life should be a focus of international early childhood development strategies.

13. Promotion of gender equality needs to include support for fatherhood. Equal economic opportunities for women and men must include the opportunity to share the care of their children.

14. Men are inherently loving and caring beings. Men’s caring instincts and emotional life should be celebrated as part of what it is to be a man in today’s cultures.

15. Loving fatherhood and men’s caregiving of all kinds should be recognised and celebrated as an inspiration to other fathers, mothers, grandparents and carers, in this generation and the next.

The Charter was coordinated by Duncan Fisher, Editor of the Child & Family Blog. The authors would like to thank the following researchers for their help in drafting the Charter: Andrea Doucet (Canada), John & Lynn Rempel (Canada), Richard Fletcher (Australia), Margaret O’Brien (UK), Kate Ellis-Davis (UK), Jaipaul Roopnarine (USA), Ruth Feldman (Israel), Ron Mincy (USA), Brenda Volling (USA), Marsha & Kyle Pruett (USA), Gary Barker (Brazil).

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A holistic approach, replacing fragmented interventions, should support couple partnerships and how both parents relate to their children.

Today we have an opportunity, probably for the first time, to redesign family and public services in ways that will genuinely benefit families and maximise the impact on child development. You might think that’s already happening. It isn’t – at least not nearly enough.

We estimate, for example, that of thousands of parenting classes in the US, UK and many developed countries, 90 per cent are attended only by mothers. So factors crucial to child development – fathers and the parental couple relationship – are mostly left out, even though early interventions, including both parents, are known to prevent later problems.

How can we explain this extraordinary omission? It’s partly a legacy of failures in social science research to look beyond mother-child relationships. That’s now been rectified, but the problem has long been compounded by fragmented social services which spread help for families across many isolated departments and programs. Our challenge is to modernise systems to deliver services based on evidence.

Child development evidence

In the past 20 years, research has clearly identified two major determinants of early child development that social scientists previously ignored and that practitioners and policy makers have only begun to incorporate into public service delivery.

The first determinant is a key asset to children – their fathers. And here we mean fathers who are positively involved with their children. The second is an environment that is also vital for child development:  the quality of the relationship between their carers, who are usually their parents.

We now know that if we can support fathers and parenting partnerships – as well as the mother-child relationship – the future for children will be a great deal rosier.

Since the 1980s, research has produced a wealth of indisputable evidence demonstrating the positive contributions that fathers can – and do – make to children’s development and well-being. The research also shows that children benefit from the involvement of a second parental figure – and that person may not be the mother or father but the child’s grandparent, uncle, aunt, or a close family friend.

“The structures and delivery systems of most public services still largely reflect an erroneous view that the mother-child relationship is the only one that really matters.”

More recently, since the late 1990s, research has filled in the second part of the puzzle. We, and many other researchers, have shown that unresolved couple conflict – whether between intact or separated parental couples – is a risk factor for child development. We now know that the quality of the relationship between two parents makes a big difference in how children manage their lives.

If parents collaborate effectively and don’t undermine each other’s parenting, children do better – socially, emotionally, behaviourally and academically. They don’t become preoccupied with worry about parental tensions, which leaves them free to explore their own worlds and learn new things. In contrast, it undermines child development if parents cannot manage differences of opinion without aggression or moving into a silent, “we’re not talking to each other” pattern; they become anxious or fearful and find it difficult to concentrate on learning new things.

The challenge to family and public services

Fixing family and public services in the light of this evidence is challenging for two reasons. First, the structures and delivery systems of most public services still largely reflect an erroneous view that the mother-child relationship is the only one that really matters. Fathers are often excluded from programs.

Second, these systems, particularly in health and social services, are fragmented and involve many disconnected, “siloed” units. These rarely coordinate their attempts to be helpful, and sometimes work at cross-purposes. This fragmentation makes it difficult to deliver holistic interventions to support child development through children’s key relationships and the broader contexts in which they can thrive.

Photo: Shutterstock.

Family services commonly encompass numerous distinct interventions from siloed units that typically focus on mother and child, such as maternal and child health services, child support services or child mental health interventions. Our most vivid example of men being ignored by such services is based on visits we made to several Family Resource Centers in rural California.

We observed fathers driving their wives to appointments and sitting outside in the parking lot while mother and baby went in for their appointment. Those men could so easily have been involved, but they were not invited to appointments about their babies. As if mirroring this stance, the case files for those families included only the names of the mother and baby, but not the father.

Why is practice so slow to reform? Public services generally respond sluggishly to cultural change. One reason is that many social services agencies work with deeply troubled families, some with a history of violence. The staff, mostly women, may come to the conclusion that men are generally violent when, in fact, most men are not. Fathers can then be seen as liabilities for child development rather than assets in caring for children.

Compounding this problem, agency staff often tell us that they are not trained to work with both parents together. In anticipation of parents’ differing opinions, they hesitate to invite both parents in.

Reforming child development practice and policy

How might policy and practice change to promote healthy development that children need but often miss: fathers’ involvement and collaborative, supportive parental relationships?

For 20 years, we and our colleagues, Marsha Kline Pruett and Kyle Pruett, have pioneered an approach to parenting support through a 16-week course for groups of couples with clinically trained leaders. It includes both fathers and mothers and focusses on the relationship between them, not simply on dispensing advice about childrearing.

“We observed fathers driving their wives to appointments and sitting in the parking lot while mother and baby went in. Those men could so easily have been involved but were not invited.”

In the United States, the programme is known as Supporting Father Involvement, originally funded by the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention. In Britain, the program is called Parents as Partners, and it has been introduced in 20 cities, operated by Tavistock Relationships in conjunction with Family Action, funded currently by the UK Department for Work and Pensions.

Our research in the US and Britain shows that this combination – support that includes both parents and focuses on their relationship as partners and parents – is most effective in staving off declines in satisfaction within their relationship. It also reduces their symptoms of depression, anxiety, and parenting stress. These benefits help maximise positive child development outcomes. In contrast, fathers-only or mothers-only parenting classes continue to be characterised by a fall in couple satisfaction and poorer outcomes.

All of this makes sense. After all, we know that a good couple relationship often breeds success at work and is good for personal health. We now have evidence that it’s also good for the children.

Focus on prevention

We also need a better focus on prevention. Over the past 40 years, we have worked with well-functioning and troubled families, some wealthier and many poorer. Many parents and children in both groups have challenging difficulties in their relationships. We have found that interventions with groups of couples, using trained facilitators, can help parents or parent figures become more effective and satisfied as co-parents. When that happens, child development is enhanced. Their children’s behavior improves, along with the well-being of the whole family.

One of the lessons of our research is that it’s possible to take a preventive, early intervention approach to strengthening families and supporting child development, dealing with difficulties long before they become intractable. Early interventions have two benefits. First, families are likely to be experiencing less volatility or violence. Second, the parents are more often still together, so we can work with the whole family. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which followed thousands of vulnerable US families in many cities, found that in 75 per cent of cases, the father is present around the birth and intends to stay involved. This, then, is when services should be supporting fathers, mothers and their relationships as partners – during pregnancy, childbirth, and well-baby visits.

The future looks brighter

It is easy to become downhearted looking at the continuing gulf between research findings on child development and current policy and practice. However, expectations are growing that public services will strategize better by integrating their interventions and focussing on outcomes rather than inputs.

The need to maximise child development grows ever stronger for 21st century economies where national success will depend on adaptable, psychologically healthy labour forces and families. These conditions offer a fair wind to policy makers and practitioners who have much to gain by avoiding the omissions of the past.

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Continued financial backing of group support for couples is under threat even though evaluation has largely ignored its value for children and parenting.

Governments around the world may soon abandon what could prove to be a powerful tool for stabilizing family life and supporting children. They may be persuaded by critics who have concluded that group support for couples, known more generally as Couple Relationship Education (CRE), is largely a waste of public money that offers few benefits.

In contrast, our own research with couples warns that this could be a mistaken and possibly disastrous conclusion, based on appreciating only half of what already has been – and could be – achieved through strengthening couple and co-parenting relationships. We have identified two major flaws in the current assessment and practice of CRE that may have resulted in considerable underestimation of its benefits. We advise policy makers to look very hard before they leap to accept a negative verdict and reduce financial backing for couple relationship support.

First, CRE program designs and evaluations typically focus only on couple relationships. As a result, they often fail either to develop or evaluate how such programs can benefit couples as parents and, most important, benefit their children. Second, general analyses of these programs, looking across large groups of studies, have tended to ask a simple question: “Does CRE work, Yes or No?” But this crude approach reveals little about which types of these varied programs have positive effects on which kinds of couples. They tend not to distinguish the ingredients of success and failure, such as the intensity, content and length of program support as well as the expertise of its leadership.

“Policy makers should look very carefully before they leap to accept a poorly evidenced negative verdict and reduce support for these programs.”

Our wide-ranging review of evidence suggests that well-run CRE programs have considerable and frequently unevaluated benefits for children. Moreover, these programs could be still more effective, both for children and the adults involved, if they engaged with couples as coparents as well as partners, regardless of whether they are married, not married, or divorced. Our review also suggests that the programs most likely to be effective are those that provide moderate rather than low level support, that use professionally trained group leaders, and that observe both parents and their children. All of these potential elements of success – and how they interact – need to be properly teased out by more systematic in-depth research before the jury delivers a verdict on the effectiveness of support for couples.

A longstanding problem is that CRE and parenting support programs have been like ships passing in the night, emerging from separate ports, bound for different destinations. This is partly because programs and research studies around parenting have historically focused on mothers. Only recently, as research has shown how fathers contribute to children’s welfare, have a few approaches to parenting begun to consider both mothers and fathers and, fewer still, to focus on coparenting – that is, coordination (or lack of it) in the parenting strategies of two parents. It’s staggering that this shift to linking partnership support with parenting has taken so long. After all, it’s simple common sense that, when parents are having a difficult time, their stress can spill over into the parent-child relationship and affect the atmosphere in which children are developing. Likewise, if the couple relationship is going well, parents are happier in themselves because their own needs are being met. They can then be warmer and more responsive to their children’s needs, set reasonable limits for them, and have the patience to follow through on keeping those limits. With encouragement, parents can also reflect on their earlier lives with a view to avoiding the repetition of negative patterns from their own childhoods.

Failure to evaluate the potential benefits for children is puzzling, given that many programs supporting couple relationships have been justified on the grounds that, if couple relationships were strengthened, children would be better off. However, when we reviewed hundreds of published studies, we could find only nine (three of them by us) that actually evaluated the impact on children of working on the relationship between their parents. Our studies have found that couple relationship support has long-acting, positive effects on children’s wellbeing that can be seen from kindergarten to high school. Even as teenagers, children who were toddlers when their mothers and fathers received relationship support were rated by their teachers as less aggressive, withdrawn, anxious, or depressed than their peers.

One stark fact argues for strengthening the relationship between parents. Research demonstrates that, without any particular support, parents’ satisfaction as a couple, on average, declines over time, and that parents’ distressed couple relationships have negative consequences for their children. In more than 50 studies in a number of industrialized countries, marital or couple relationship satisfaction declined over time, even more quickly after couples became parents, and this decline increased risks for children’s cognitive, social and emotional development. The decline was steepest for the couples who were initially least satisfied with their relationship, which suggests that the gains for both children and adults might be greatest in CRE programs that focus on couples in distress. Our review of parenting programs and our own intervention studies further suggest that programs that involve both parents, rather than only the mother or only the father, show greater positive effects on family relationships and children’s behavior.

All of these insights have led us, as researchers, to design more comprehensive programs to strengthen couple relationships. Our couples groups, designed with Marsha Kline Pruett and Kyle Pruett, meet weekly over three or four months, use clinically trained leaders, incorporate support for couple and co-parenting relationships, and encourage the parents to consider which patterns from their families of origin they wish to change. The programs are evaluated in terms of their impact on the adults as individuals, as couples, and as parents, and on their children’s well-being or distress.

The UK’s Department of Education has recently allocated £2.9m ($4.84m) to the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships and Family Action for a trial of such an approach among low income and vulnerable families, called “Parents as Partners”. This is the direction in which we suggest CRE design and evaluation should move in general. Only then can governments expect to be reliably informed of the potential that more comprehensive programs may have to strengthen parents, children, and their families.

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