How Many Days are Father’s Day?

Father’s Day has come and gone earlier this month and with it the gatherings and celebrations in honour of the family’s key men. For some this will have been a happy day and opportunity to express genuine love and appreciation for their parent but in other families it will have been a show of connection covering resentment, anger, and disappointment. Yet others will not have been recognized at all.

Given the obvious centrality of this relationship in work with families it was a surprise to discover how sparse the literature. A review of key family therapy journals produced a limited number of research papers, often with a very specific focus, for example engagement of men who have been drug users or perpetrators of partner violence and another on strengthening the role of unmarried fathers. While of interest and certainly of value they were not the papers I was seeking. Fathers were also conspicuous by their absence in the index of family therapy texts except for ‘fathers, engagement of’.

Practitioners are often heard to critique fathers’ lack of investment in the therapy process and contribution to the emotional life of the family. It is easy to blame a person who presents as critical and disinterested. However, there may be another explanation. Do we as practitioners sincerely believe in the importance of fathers in the life of a family and the difficulties of children or do we continue to assume that parenting is more naturally the domain of mothers? Do we open the space in our thinking and our practice to encourage fathers to fully share responsibility as they exercise proper authority in the lives of their children? Perhaps change in relation to fathers, needs to come first from practitioners with the assumption that every day should be Father’s Day, not just the first Sunday in September.

To see the full article as well as complete access to our bower(Knowledge), sign up to one of our subscription packages here.