Study Outlines Factors That Help Engage Nonresident Fathers in Child Welfare Efforts

A recent study outlines a number of things that social service providers should be aware of if they want to engage nonresident fathers in efforts aimed at supporting the well-being of their children. The study also highlights the need for more formal training to help service providers work more effectively with nonresident dads.

Nonresident fathers are defined as fathers who do not reside with their child’s primary caregiver.

“We know that nonresident father engagement is positively associated with the emotional well-being, mental health, and academic success of children—and the well-being of the fathers themselves,” says Qiana Cryer-Coupet, PhD, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor of social work at North Carolina State University. “However, while teaching a graduate-level social work course with students who were doing fieldwork, it became clear the students would benefit from additional training in how to engage nonresident fathers on issues related to childcare, child rearing, and child well-being.”

As a step toward developing that training, Cryer-Coupet and her collaborators recruited a cohort of 20 social service providers with experience and expertise on engaging fathers. Fourteen of the study participants were men.

“We knew that nonresident fathers were more likely to feel engaged if they were working with male social workers,” Cryer-Coupet says. “So we deliberately sought out male social workers to see what they’re doing and how they’re approaching their efforts to engage with fathers in their casework.”

The researchers conducted semistructured interviews with the study participants aimed at better understanding what practitioners felt prepared them to engage fathers effectively on issues related to their children.

“We found a number of key points that came up time and again, allowing us to identify values, characteristics, and mindsets that could facilitate engaging fathers,” Cryer-Coupet says.

Four of those key points were the following:

• Interrogate your own biases. Engage in self-examination to determine how and whether beliefs based on your lived experiences may affect your ability to establish a meaningful rapport with nonresident fathers.

• Self-disclosure. Shared experiences with the father can help establish a rapport. In addition, openly discussing issues that a social worker or father have concerns about can help to alleviate those concerns and establish clear lines of communication.

• Respect. Fathers need to feel respected, and their role as the child’s father should also be recognized as important, even though he does not reside in the child’s household.

• Shared decision making. Social workers may already know about family goals from the mother, the guardian, or the court system. But it’s important to know what the father’s goals are in terms of both the child’s well-being and the father’s relationship with the child and caregiver.

The study, “Engaging Nonresident Fathers: Exploring Collaborative Competencies in Support of Family-Centered Practice,” is published in the journal Research on Social Work Practice. The work was done with funding from the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network, which is housed at Temple University and supported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

— Source: North Carolina State University

Goal Setting and Positive Parent-Child Relationships Reduce Risk of Youth Vaping

Adolescents who set goals for their future and those with strong parental support are less likely to use e-cigarettes and other tobacco products, according to a study by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine physician-scientists.

The research, published in the journal Pediatrics, suggests that strategies to prevent youth vaping may be different from what works to dissuade youth from smoking cigarettes.

“The use of e-cigarettes by young people is at epidemic proportions, with 27% of youth surveyed saying they’d vaped in the last 30 days,” says lead author Nicholas Szoko, MD, a fellow in the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at UPMC Children’s. “And a lot of the traditional methods we think of for counseling youth on the dangers of tobacco and drug use may not apply to vaping. Pediatricians and parents need a better understanding of what motivates adolescents to eschew e-cigarettes.”

Szoko and his colleagues analyzed anonymous questionnaires administered in partnership with the Allegheny County Health Department and completed by 2,487 high school students in Pittsburgh Public Schools. The surveys asked questions to ascertain whether and how often the students used e-cigarettes or other tobacco products, and to determine to what extent any of four “protective factors” validated by previous research were associated with a lower likelihood of vaping or smoking.

The protective factors examined were the following:

• Future orientation: A person’s beliefs, hopes and goals related to the future.
• Parental monitoring: Parent-child interactions and communication.
• Social support: The ability to rely on friends and peers.
• School connectedness: A sense of belonging and inclusion at school.

In the study, positive future orientation and high levels of parental monitoring were both linked with a 10% to 25% lower prevalence of recently or ever vaping, compared with peers who had lower scores on those protective factors. There was no link between social support or school connectedness and use of e-cigarettes.

All four protective factors were associated with lower prevalence of smoking or use of other tobacco products, but none were linked to intent to quit using tobacco products. This suggests that once young people begin to use tobacco, quitting may be more difficult to promote. The researchers note that these findings should be explored to develop improved youth tobacco prevention efforts, but that it isn’t surprising that the results for vaping weren’t exactly the same as for smoking.

“E-cigarettes are positioned and marketed differently than tobacco cigarettes. They’ve been popularized as tools for smoking cessation, and previous research has found the various flavors and trendy ads for vaping are attractive to youth,” Szoko says. “We also know that vaping primes adolescents to transition to smoking cigarettes and other substance use. So, it stands to reason that we may need different approaches to keep kids from vaping than we use to stop them from smoking.”

Senior author Alison Culyba, MD, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor of pediatrics, public health, and clinical and translational science at Pitt, notes that frameworks already exist to help clinicians use future orientation and encourage parental monitoring when providing health care to young people, which bodes well for developing e-cigarette intervention programs to strengthen these protective factors.

“Future orientation is something very tangible that pediatricians and other health care providers can talk with teens about in the clinic—motivational interviewing is something we’re very comfortable doing with our patients,” says Culyba, also an adolescent medicine physician and director of the Empowering Teens to Thrive program at UPMC Children’s. “And we can help parents to navigate their roles as their children become preteens and teens, and help encourage open conversations with their kids about what they’re encountering.”

Additional authors on this research are Maya I. Ragavan, MD; Susheel K. Khetarpal; and Kar-Hai Chu, PhD, all of Pitt or UPMC, or both.

— Source: UPMC