With Father’s Day right around the corner, it’s important to honor and celebrate the roles of dads and father figures in our lives. A father’s role in a child’s life can be a very positive influence. We see it in research, and we see the benefits of kids having caring fathers and good role models well into their adult lives and their own roles as parents.
Military Father
Dads that are members of the military face unique circumstances as they navigate fatherhood, being a service member, and raising a military child. In military families, deployment and separation often disrupt a family’s homeostasis. It can be tough trying to wear your “best dad” hat while at the same time being required to wear the various hats of a military service member. Challenges like being away when your child is born, missing important milestones and events in your child’s life, and having to find ways to parent and connect with your child while not physically present are common to military fathers. We shared a few resources on the topic of military dads and deployment in this 2019 blog post. Fatherhood in the military comes with unique challenges. But fatherhood in general is often a challenging journey filled with learning and growing for all forms of fathers.
Fatherhood and Modeling Healthy Relationships
Men play a pivotal role in the lives of their children. And as today’s fathers are influenced by expectations of masculinity, shifting societal pressures, and gender norms, there are many challenges those in this role face. Discussing traditional gender norms can be uncomfortable, but important work. Positive parenting practices are important for healthy parent-child relationships. But is there more that dads can do to think about and bolster their influence when it comes to issues of preventing family violence and promoting gender equality?
With this in mind, we wanted to introduce our audience to Equimundo (formerly Promundo), an organization leading the advancement of gender equality and violence prevention by “engaging men and boys in partnership with women, girls, and individuals of all gender identities.” Promundo’s global work focuses on creating safe spaces for men and women to heal from trauma, for families to question harmful gender norms, and to discuss the benefits of involved fatherhood.
To showcase all the great work at Promundo, OneOp invites you to join our next webinar, “Engaging Military Fathers to Model Healthy Relationships for their Children: Lessons from Promundo’s Global Work with Dads.”
We will be joined by Jane Kato-Wallace, who is a Technical Advisor with the Programs team at Promundo. Jane co-developed many of Promundo’s flagship curricula, including Program P and the Very Young Adolescent 2.0 manual. She also provides leadership on program development and design both domestically and internationally. In this webinar, she will be focusing on Promundo’s resources and sharing information that military family readiness professionals can utilize when working with military fathers as well as military families. She will also discuss best practices and tips for promoting the active engagement of dads in their children’s lives.
Free continuing education opportunities are available for our webinar as always. Head on over to our event webpage to get all relevant CE information and to RSVP for the live event on July 7th, 2020. We can’t wait for you to join us and learn about Promundo’s global work on promoting and practicing healthy fatherhood!
Blog Image: Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels
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