By Douglas Guest (Contact: douglas_guest@yahoo.co.uk)
Summary
This paper is my personal reflection of 15 years of working in father inclusion across three organisations Fathers Network Scotland, Home-Start Scotland and Circle. It examines the systemic barriers to father inclusion in family services across Scotland and proposes a trauma-informed, restorative framework for supporting fathers and families. Drawing on policy developments including The Promise and Whole Family Wellbeing funding, I argue that father inclusion is essential to social justice and family wellbeing. The paper explores how historical trauma, cultural barriers, and institutional biases have marginalized fathers in service provision, and presents evidence-based principles for creating father-inclusive services that benefit all family members and contribute to addressing child poverty and intergenerational trauma.
Introduction
Scotland has been pioneering father-inclusive services and family-friendly workplaces for over a decade. Since the Scottish Government sponsored Year of the Dad in 2016, policy developments have included biannual fathers’ roundtables, focused attention on perinatal mental health for fathers, and sustained funding for father-focused charities. Yet despite this progress, fathers report continuing challenges in having their role recognized by health, education, and social work professionals. Too often, fathers are viewed primarily through a risk lens rather than as assets to family wellbeing.
This gap between policy aspiration and lived experience raises fundamental questions about the cultural beliefs, institutional practices, and historical legacies that shape how services engage—or fail to engage—with fathers. This paper argues that meaningful father inclusion requires not merely procedural changes, but a fundamental shift in how services understand masculinity, trauma, and family support.
The Policy Context: Opportunity for Transformation
Scotland’s policy landscape presents significant opportunities for advancing father inclusion. The Independent Care Review and subsequent Promise initiative offer a potentially transformational vision for families. Coupled with the Scottish Government’s £500 million Whole Family Wellbeing funding through 2030 and incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), conditions exist to challenge the historic marginalization of fathers across Scottish services.
The Positive Masculinity Alliance, involving Scottish Government leadership alongside practitioners working to promote healthy masculinity, provides additional policy support. This work connects to broader initiatives like the “Imagine a Man” youth-led research, which has given voice to young people’s evolving understandings of masculinity and gender.
These policy developments create space to address a fundamental tension: while 95% of men want to be good fathers, services have historically been designed around maternal support, reflecting both the legacy of patriarchal gender roles and feminist responses to male violence and absence.
Understanding the Barriers: Culture, Trauma, and Systems
Historical and Cultural Marginalization
The barriers to father inclusion are deeply rooted in historical and cultural contexts. For centuries, formal caring roles have been predominantly female spaces, shaped both by patriarchal gender divisions and by women’s leadership in developing support services. Following the expansion of the welfare state and the rise of feminism, services increasingly emerged to address harms done to women and children by men. This created a paradox: services designed to protect families from male violence and absence often struggled to engage constructively with fathers who wanted to be involved.
This history has created what might be called a “deficit discourse” around fathers. When fathers appear in professional conversations, it is often as risks to be managed rather than as assets to be supported. Many professionals in health, education, and social work—fields with predominantly female workforces—have significant experience with absent or harmful fathers but limited models for engaging positive male involvement.
The Impact of Intergenerational Trauma
Understanding father exclusion requires grappling with intergenerational trauma. Many men carry wounds from their own childhoods—from absent or abusive fathers, from communities marked by violence and poverty, from cultural messages that equated masculinity with emotional suppression and aggression. As Gabor Maté’s work on attachment and trauma demonstrates, these experiences shape not only individual wellbeing but patterns of relating that pass across generations.
Historically, men have been encouraged to be “warriors”—to fight in wars, to compete economically, to suppress vulnerability. The traumas resulting from violence, economic hardship, and emotional isolation were met not with therapeutic support but with cultural approval of self-medication through alcohol, drugs, and other addictive behaviours. These coping mechanisms, developed in response to unacknowledged trauma, then contributed to the very patterns of absence and harm that justified viewing fathers with suspicion.
This creates a vicious cycle: trauma produces behaviours that alienate fathers from families and services; alienation produces further trauma; and the cycle continues across generations. Breaking this cycle requires services that can simultaneously hold fathers accountable for harmful behaviours while recognizing them as people worthy of support and capable of healing.
Surveillance, Risk, and Professional Bias
Contemporary child protection and family support systems operate within what might be called a “surveillance culture,” particularly in communities already marginalized by poverty and inequality. This surveillance tends to focus on identifying and managing risks, and fathers are often positioned primarily as sources of risk.
This is not to dismiss legitimate concerns about child safety. Some men do harm their families, and protective responses are necessary. However, when the dominant professional lens views fathers primarily through risk assessment, several consequences follow. First, fathers who want to be involved may be overlooked or discouraged. Second, opportunities for early, preventative support are missed. Third, the focus on individual “bad men” obscures systemic factors—poverty, trauma, lack of opportunity—that shape parenting capacity.
Professional biases, both conscious and unconscious, further compound these dynamics. When most direct service staff are female and most families coming to attention are experiencing poverty and stress, patterns emerge. Mothers become the default point of contact and fathers become invisible—or visible only when problems arise. These patterns reflect not individual prejudice but institutional cultures and practices that have developed over decades.
Evidence Base: Why Father Inclusion Matters
Research consistently demonstrates that involved fathers benefit children’s development across multiple domains. Children with engaged fathers show better educational outcomes, emotional regulation, and social skills. Father involvement is associated with reduced behavioural problems and improved mental health for children.
But the benefits extend beyond children. Involved fatherhood contributes to men’s own wellbeing and life satisfaction. It provides purpose, connection, and opportunities for personal growth. For mothers, genuine co-parenting can reduce stress and improve family functioning. And at a societal level, supporting fathers to be involved contributes to gender equality—as Gloria Steinem observed, “Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.”
The evidence is particularly compelling around poverty reduction. Two-parent families with supportive networks face significantly lower rates of child poverty. While family structure alone is not determinative—many single-parent families thrive with adequate support—the presence of two involved parents does make a material difference when coupled with adequate resources and community support.
The Changing Face of Fatherhood
Understanding contemporary fatherhood requires recognizing significant cultural shifts. Millennial and younger fathers increasingly reject traditional masculine stereotypes. They want to be emotionally present, to share caregiving, to be involved in daily parenting tasks that previous generations of fathers often avoided.
This shift represents both progress and challenge. Progress, because men are embracing more nurturing and equitable roles. Challenge, because services and workplaces often have not kept pace with these changing expectations. Antenatal services, for example, were designed when fathers were expected to pace in waiting rooms, not attend births and early parenting appointments. Many workplaces still operate with assumptions about male breadwinners and female caregivers that do not reflect contemporary family patterns.
Young men today also face different pressures and questions. They are navigating gender fluidity, questioning stereotypes, grappling with their role as allies to feminist and anti-racist movements. They are more likely to reject Scotland’s drinking culture and to seek emotional literacy. Yet they often lack positive male role models and spaces to explore what healthy masculinity might mean.
The “Imagine a Man” project gave voice to these concerns, with young people requesting brave spaces to discuss masculinity, to challenge harmful stereotypes, and to envision positive models of manhood. This work suggests that the next generation is ready for more inclusive and expansive visions of fatherhood—if services and supports can meet them where they are.
Toward Father-Inclusive Services: Principles and Practices
A Trauma-Informed Foundation
Creating genuinely father-inclusive services requires a trauma-informed approach that applies to fathers as much as to other family members. This means recognizing that many fathers carry wounds from their own childhoods and life experiences. It means understanding that harmful behaviours often reflect unhealed trauma rather than inherent badness. And it means creating services that can offer both accountability and compassion.
Trauma-informed practice does not excuse harm or remove consequences for dangerous behaviour. Rather, it seeks to understand behaviour in context and to offer pathways for healing and change. For fathers, this might mean services that can simultaneously address substance misuse or domestic abuse while supporting the underlying trauma and attachment disruption that contributed to these behaviours.
A trauma-informed approach also challenges the stigma, blame, and shame that too often characterize interactions between marginalized families and services. These three elements—stigma, blame, and shame—are primary mechanisms through which poverty and trauma are transmitted across generations. Services that inadvertently reinforce these dynamics, even with good intentions, may contribute to the very problems they seek to solve.
Co-Creation and Lived Experience
Meaningful father inclusion cannot be designed without fathers. Services need to move beyond token consultation to genuine co-creation, engaging fathers from diverse backgrounds in designing, delivering, and evaluating family support.
This is particularly important for reaching marginalized fathers—young fathers, fathers experiencing poverty, fathers from minoritized communities, fathers with experience of the justice system. These fathers often have profound insights into what does and does not work, yet their voices are rarely centred in service design.
Co-creation also requires attention to power dynamics. When services ask fathers for input but then dismiss their concerns or fail to act on their suggestions, this reproduces the very marginalization that father inclusion seeks to address. Genuine co-creation means sharing power over decisions about resources, priorities, and approaches.
Whole-System Change
Father inclusion cannot be relegated to specialized projects or individual champions. It requires whole-system change across education, health, social work, and voluntary sector services.
This includes practical changes: ensuring that appointment times accommodate working patterns, using inclusive language in communications, training all staff in father engagement, collecting and monitoring data on father contact and involvement. But it also requires cultural change: shifting from assumptions that mothers are the primary or default parent to recognizing that most children have two parents who both deserve support and respect.
Workforce development is particularly crucial. Pre-service and in-service training for professionals in all family-facing roles should include content on father inclusion, positive masculinity, and the impact of gender on parenting. This training should not position fathers simply as potential risks but as potential resources—while maintaining appropriate safeguarding awareness.
Creating father-friendly workplaces is equally important. If services employ predominantly female staff who lack support for work-life balance and parental leave, this reproduces gender inequality. As Richard Reeves has argued in work on HEAL professions (Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy), recruiting and retaining more men in these fields requires addressing structural barriers and cultural assumptions about appropriate work for men.
Early Intervention and Prevention
Much current father engagement happens at moments of crisis—when relationships break down, when child protection concerns arise, when fathers are involved with the justice system. While crisis intervention is necessary, it is insufficient. Father inclusion must begin much earlier.
This includes supporting boys and young men to envision positive models of manhood and fatherhood. Schools, youth work, and community programs can create spaces for young people to explore masculinity, relationships, and future parenting roles. The “Imagine a Man” framework offers one model for this work.
For expectant and new fathers, perinatal services should be genuinely inclusive. This means not only allowing fathers to attend appointments but actively welcoming them, providing father-specific information and support, and addressing fathers’ mental health needs. Research shows that perinatal depression affects fathers as well as mothers, yet services rarely screen for or respond to fathers’ psychological distress.
Prevention also means addressing the social and economic conditions that create stress for families. Poverty, inadequate housing, unemployment, and social isolation all strain relationships and parenting capacity. Father inclusion initiatives cannot compensate for inadequate material support to families. Rather, they should be part of a comprehensive approach that addresses both practical needs and relationship support.
Confronting Difficult Questions
The Patriarch, Feminism, and Gender Justice
Any serious discussion of father inclusion must grapple with difficult questions about patriarchy, feminism, and power. The historical exclusion of fathers from caring roles reflects patriarchal gender divisions that positioned men as breadwinners and women as caregivers. Fathers were not included in family services because they were not expected to do hands-on parenting work.
At the same time, feminist activism rightly drew attention to male violence, economic domination, and the unpaid care work performed by women. Many family services emerged from this activism, created by women to support women and children experiencing male violence or abandonment.
How, then, to advance father inclusion without undermining hard-won feminist gains or minimizing ongoing concerns about male violence? The answer lies in recognizing that father inclusion and gender justice are not competing priorities but complementary ones. Supporting men to be nurturing, present fathers challenge patriarchal definitions of masculinity. Expecting men to share care work advances women’s equality. Creating communities where both parents are supported benefits everyone.
This requires what bell hooks called “levelling up”—not pulling anyone down but lifting everyone toward greater freedom, equality, and possibility. It means challenging patriarchy not by excluding men but by transforming what manhood means. And it means recognizing that men too have been harmed by patriarchal expectations, even as they have benefited from male privilege.
Violence, Accountability, and Second Chances
Another difficult question concerns accountability for fathers who have been violent or abusive. How can services be both father-inclusive and committed to women’s and children’s safety?
The answer cannot be simply that all fathers should be welcomed into all services regardless of risk. Child and partner safety must remain paramount. Yet current approaches often swing between extremes—either viewing all fathers with suspicion or, conversely, minimizing legitimate concerns about particular fathers.
A trauma-informed, restorative approach offers a middle path. It maintains clear boundaries and accountability for harmful behaviour while also recognizing that many men who have caused harm themselves experienced trauma and that healing is possible. This means developing services that can work with men who have been abusive, supporting their recovery while protecting those they have harmed.
It also means recognizing that family breakdown, while sometimes necessary for safety, carries costs for everyone involved—including children, who in most cases wish to maintain relationships with both parents when this can be done safely. Restorative approaches seek to create conditions where accountability, amends, and healing become possible, rather than simply excluding fathers from family life.
Class, Race, and Intersectionality
The barriers to father inclusion are not uniform across all groups. Working-class fathers, fathers from minoritized ethnic communities, and fathers with experience of the justice system face particular challenges in being recognized and supported as fathers.
Professional services often carry middle-class assumptions about appropriate parenting, family structure, and gender roles. Fathers who do not conform to these norms—who are young, who have non-standard employment, who parent in ways that differ from professional expectations—may be judged negatively even when they are deeply committed to their children.
Similarly, Black and minoritized ethnic fathers face additional barriers rooted in racism and cultural stereotypes. Professional biases may lead to fathers from these communities being viewed with particular suspicion, while their strengths and contributions go unrecognized.
Any framework for father inclusion must therefore attend to intersectionality—how gender intersects with class, race, disability, and other dimensions of identity and power. This means not only including diverse fathers in co-creation but also examining how institutional practices reproduce inequality along multiple dimensions.
A Vision for Change: Supporting Boys, Men, and Families
The ultimate goal of father inclusion extends beyond fixing current services. It requires supporting boys to become healthy, emotionally literate men who can be the fathers they wish to be. This is inherently intergenerational work, seeking to interrupt cycles of trauma and to create conditions where the next generation can thrive.
This vision rests on several key principles drawn from The Promise and emerging best practice:
Voice and Agency: Children, young people, and families should have genuine say in decisions affecting them. For fathers, this means being recognized as important family members whose input matters.
Relationships and Connection: Supporting families means supporting the relationships within them—between parents, between parents and children, and with extended family and community. Services should strengthen rather than substitute for these relationships.
Whole Family Approaches: Effective support recognizes that family members’ wellbeing is interconnected. Supporting fathers benefits children and mothers; supporting mothers benefits fathers and children. Siloed services that engage only with one family member miss opportunities for whole-family healing.
Strength-Based Practice: While remaining alert to risks, services should lead with recognition of strengths, capacities, and assets. Most fathers want to do well by their children; services should support this aspiration rather than assuming failure.
Trauma-Informed Care: Understanding behaviour in context, recognizing the impact of adverse experiences, and offering pathways for healing should underpin all family support work.
Anti-Oppressive Practice: Services should actively work against stigma, discrimination, and structural inequality. This includes examining their own practices for bias and taking action to address it.
Community and Collective Response: Families do not exist in isolation. The ancient wisdom that “it takes a village to raise a child” remains true. Father inclusion is part of rebuilding community support networks that have been eroded by individualism and austerity.
Conclusion: From Aspiration to Action
Scotland has made important policy commitments to supporting families and including fathers. The Promise, Whole Family Wellbeing funding, and incorporation of children’s rights provide a strong foundation. Yet translating these commitments into changed practice remains work in progress.
This paper has argued that meaningful father inclusion requires more than procedural changes or specialized projects. It requires cultural transformation in how services understand masculinity, trauma, and family support. It requires confronting difficult questions about patriarchy, violence, and accountability. And it requires sustained attention to the intersecting barriers that marginalized fathers face.
The potential benefits of getting this right extend far beyond fathers themselves. Children benefit from having involved, nurturing fathers. Mothers benefit from genuine co-parenting partnerships. Communities benefit from men who are emotionally present and engaged. And society benefits from challenging patriarchal definitions of masculinity that harm everyone.
The path forward requires several concrete actions:
- Systematic inclusion of fathers’ voices in service design and evaluation
- Workforce development to build skills and challenge biases around father engagement
- Reform of perinatal, health, education, and social work services to be genuinely father-inclusive
- Investment in preventive work with boys and young men to support positive masculinity
- Development of trauma-informed services that can engage fathers who have caused harm
- Research to document what works and to build the evidence base
- Leadership from policymakers to maintain focus and accountability
Perhaps most fundamentally, change requires recognizing that father inclusion is not a special interest or niche concern but a matter of social justice and children’s rights. Every child deserves relationships with parents and family members who are supported to offer their best. Creating conditions where this becomes possible benefits us all.
The question is not whether Scotland can afford to invest in father inclusion but whether we can afford not to. The costs of marginalized fathers—in family breakdown, in children’s outcomes, in men’s wellbeing, in perpetuated trauma—are already being paid. The opportunity now is to invest instead in healing, in relationships, in families, and in a vision of masculinity fit for the 21st century.
References and Further Reading
The Promise. (2020). Plan 21-24. Available at: https://thepromise.scot
Scottish Government. Whole Family Wellbeing Funding. Available at: https://www.gov.scot/policies/girfec/whole-family-wellbeing-funding/
Scottish Government. (2023). Shaping Positive Masculinity. Available at: https://www.gov.scot/news/shaping-positive-masculinity/
No Knives Better Lives. (2023). Imagine a Man: Youth-Led Research on Masculinity.
Reeves, R. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling.
Tarrant, A. et al. Fathering and Poverty.
Maté, G. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
hooks, b. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.