Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

Season 5, Episode 10: Beyond Presence: Redefining Responsible Fatherhood in a Domestic Abuse-Informed World

• Ruth Reymundo Mandel & David Mandel • Season 5 • Episode 10

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đź“ť In this thought-provoking episode, we explore the nuanced intersection of father engagement and domestic abuse-informed practice with Chris Brown, President of the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI). Our conversation examines how we can thoughtfully promote father involvement while maintaining high standards for men as parents, disrupting gender double standards and keeping the safety and long term wellbeing of children at the center.

🎯 **Key Topics:**
• The historical context behind NFI's founding and evolution of fatherhood programs
• Examining father absence through a domestic abuse-informed lens
• Balancing father engagement with survivor safety and well-being
• The importance of holding perpetrators accountable as parents
• Building community capacity to support safe, stable father involvement

đź’­ **Notable Quotes:**
"We need to acknowledge fathers as key caregivers while having high expectations for their behavior as parents. Supporting father involvement can't come at the expense of adult and child survivor safety." - David Mandel

"When we talk about father absence, we have to look at the whole picture - including how perpetrator patterns of coercive control contribute to family separation." - Ruth Reymundo Mandel

✨ **Key Takeaways:**
• The need to integrate domestic abuse screening and safety protocols into fatherhood programs
• How gender bias impacts our expectations of fathers vs mothers
• The importance of early intervention to develop parenting skills in boys and young men
• Strategies for practitioners to engage fathers while partnering with survivors

đź“š **Resources Mentioned:**
• Safe & Together's Working with Men as Parents training
• Multiple Pathways to Harm framework
• NFI's fatherhood program resources 
• Domestic abuse-informed engagement strategies

đź”— **Connect with NFI:**
[https://www.fatherhood.org/](https://www.fatherhood.org/)

đź”— **Connect with Safe & Together Institute:**
[https://safeandtogetherinstitute.com/](https://safeandtogetherinstitute.com/)
[https://academy.safeandtogetherinstitute.com/pages/home](https://academy.safeandtogetherinstitute.com/pages/home)

Join us next time as we continue exploring domestic abuse-informed approaches to strengthening families. Remember - meaningful father engagement must center the safety and well-being of adult & child survivors.

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

Start taking Safe & Together Institute courses

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Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And we're back, and we're back hey.

David Mandel:

Hey how you doing.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Good, how are you?

David Mandel:

Good to see you again. I see you every day, all the time. It's wonderful. It's one of the highlights of my life actually. So, anyway, welcome to Partner with a Survivor. I'm David Mandel, CEO and founder of the Safe and Together Institute.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And I'm Ruth Ramundo Mandel and I'm the co-owner and many things at the Safe and Together Institute.

David Mandel:

Yes, you are that we keep sorting out and you're willing to run into the breach for almost anything. Basically, yeah.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

You do what you got to do.

David Mandel:

And we've got a very exciting topic today. We've got a great guest, chris Brown of National Fatherhood Initiative, that we're going to be talking to in a minute, but before we go any further, I just want to acknowledge that we are on beautiful Masako Tungstus land here in the northeast part of the United States, and this is colonized land. We just celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day here in the United States yesterday and you know, and this land is amazing all year round, but particularly now when it's cool and cooling and we're watching the leaves change and we just want to acknowledge any indigenous elders, past, present, emerging who might be listening. So, fathers and fatherhood, that's the topic today.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

We'll be talking to Chris. None of us would be here without him.

David Mandel:

That's true. That's true and it's so important and for me, as many of you who listen and I just wrote a book called Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers how to Transform the Way we Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence, and so for me, just to frame this up, there's been so many learnings in the last 35 years about how systems really are not father inclusive and that has a lot of implications for the work for families. That's not fair to fathers, to mothers, to kids. But it also means that we're not only providing programming for fathers but we're not thinking at least my way of thinking about it about fathers and just the way we approach families and thinking about what they do, that bring strengths to families to make them stronger through their behaviors and their choices right and also where they make them the weaker and and can be destructive, and that's where the domestic violence piece comes in.

David Mandel:

but this underlying for me, this thing about gender double standards, low expectations for dads, uh, is one of my real points of passion and one of the real underlying aspects of the model. So I'm really excited about today's Right.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yes, I'm very excited too, you know, visibility of the people within the family who are providing that stability or not. Providing the stability is really really important. Stability or not providing the stability is really really important, and we've really lived in a society that has focused on women as the primary caretakers of children, and men and fathers and their role in the family is fundamentally formative to children and to their wellbeing. So it's very, very important to know and teach boys and men around what type of behavior support their relationships and nurture their families. It's very fundamental.

David Mandel:

So with that, I'd like to introduce our guest, chris Brown, president of the National Father Initiative, and Chris is joining us from Texas. Welcome, chris.

Chris Brown:

Thank you, david. Thank you Ruth. I appreciate it. I'm honored to be here today.

David Mandel:

Yeah, and you're a longtime activist in this space. I think you've been the head of the National Father Initiative for over 20 years, is that correct?

Chris Brown:

Not the head of it. I became president in 2013, but I joined the organization in late 1999.

David Mandel:

Okay and we'll start with. We've kind of teed up a whole bunch of questions, but why don't we just start with? Because our audience is international and even in the United States people may not be familiar with the NFI and this work and this general stream of work, which you're a not-for-profit, but it interacts heavily with the federal government and local entities and not-for-profits. So can you talk about the NFI and its work and that whole network of responsible fatherhood work that happens in the US?

Chris Brown:

Absolutely so. Just a quick history or background on NFI. So NFI was founded in 1994 by some civic scholars and academic scholars who recognized that for about 30 years, starting in 1960, there had been a rapid increase in the proportion of children growing up absent a biological step or adopted father in the home being correlated with some of the rise in negative child outcomes that we were seeing in concordance with this rise in father absence, but were actually caused by father absence. And so they came together to talk about this one weekend in Denver, colorado, about what could be done to raise awareness in the general public and start to see policy change in Washington to better support the role of the father and specifically two-parent families. And so they decided to form a nonprofit that would do that very thing. So they incorporated in 1994 in Lancaster, pennsylvania, and soon thereafter moved just outside of Washington DC to Gaithersburg, maryland, and began the process of building that nonprofit. And so over the years we've evolved.

Chris Brown:

As you might imagine, any organization that's been around for 30 plus years would go through an evolution in order to maintain its relevance and its effectiveness. And so we eventually became an organization that focused on building capacity at the community level to create programs and resources that would help fathers, in whatever circumstance they found themselves in whether they're married to the mother or not, romantically involved or not, living with the children or not to be as involved in the lives of their children as possible. So while we do not serve fathers directly, we do have fathers come to us from time to time. We have thousands of partners that we provide with resources and support that can do the sometimes difficult work day in and day out, to work with fathers and families. And that's how we maximize our effectiveness is sort of through network based effects as opposed to trying to serve fathers directly.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah, I have a couple of. It's interesting because you know I pretty openly talk about how I'm a bisexual woman, so I'm always thinking about the LGBTQ plus community and how people may be a little bit reactive around the focus around two-parent homes. That's very heterosexually based. But what I have to say as a person who did grow up with an absent father is that it doesn't really matter the relationship construct that you're living in is that it doesn't really matter the relationship construct that you're living in.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

If there is a parent that is absent in the home, whether or not they are a male or they are a female parent, that's always going to be impactful to a child and that really all of us are focused on the best interest of the child and having as many nurturing and loving parents that are providing for them, that are teaching them behaviorally how to live in relationship and are supporting them financially in ways that are materially important for their long-term success.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So I just want to say that because I think sometimes people can get a little bit reactive when we move into this father's space. But I can totally say that, even as a person who values different family constructs, it's always better that you have a parent that's involved in some way, shape or form, and that's providing that nurturance and that care and that connection to the child. And even you as a stepfather right, there's many different ways that we engage with our kids with their biological father, stepfather, you know, and also stepmother-in-law. So it's very important that people hear that the central focus here is that the well-being of children, that parents be involved in a materially important way, and at this point what we're talking about is fathers, and I know I have to say that and I'm going to be the woman in the room saying it, so just to kind of put a pin in that, yeah, and you make a very good point, ruth, and that leads me to share something.

Chris Brown:

That Very good point, ruth, and that leads me to, you know, share something that I've harped on for many years to help people understand why they don't have to be so reactive Whenever we're talking about fathers, specifically, men specifically, in the two parent family where you have a father and a mother together raising their children. And that is to distinguish between population-based measures of what reduces the risk to children on average for poor outcomes, and looking at and respecting individual variances in family structure and what is most important to every single child. And so you're absolutely right, ruth, that the most important thing is that we have two parents and really a village, if you will, doing their best to raise children in whatever circumstance they find themselves. But when we talk about, from a population-based perspective, what is best for children on average, there's lots of research that supports the notion that when children grow up with their two parents in the same home and those parents, ideally, are married, we see, on average, that we have a lower risk of poor child outcomes. That doesn't mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that a child who grows up in a single parent home, whether that be with a single mom or a single dad, is doomed to have poor outcomes.

Chris Brown:

I come from a father absent home. Like you do, ruth, I had a terrible relationship with my father. My parents eventually divorced when I was in high school, but I had basically no relationship with my father, and while he was not abusive physically toward my mother or me or my younger brother, he was very emotionally and spiritually abusive. And so when we talk about domestic violence, something an intimate partner violence, we have to talk about the idea of that type of violence being very broad-based. And so, you know, one of the things that sort of that drove me to this work is that personal experience of wanting fewer children growing up in that kind of situation as possible. So that distinction, I think, between you know, approaching our work from a population-based perspective and being sensitive and compassionate to all forms of family structure, as well as every single child who grows up in a situation, regardless of whether their parents live with them or not, is very important.

David Mandel:

You use the term, you know, father absence from homes or father presence in homes right, which is sort of almost a binary right Either the father's there or not.

David Mandel:

And I know from my work and then also from the literature that originally the look at fathers was about that presence or absence and even some of the early research counted the amount of hours or minutes that fathers had contact with kids and correlated outcomes.

David Mandel:

But as the conversation evolved and I'm really interested in your take on this the focus became more on the quality of and both of you are still speaking to that right. The real conversation is about quality right, because you can be present and very abusive and in fact some of the literature about marriage and relationships suggests that couples, that, whether they stay together or not, the actual, the more defining characteristic of good outcomes for kids is actually the quality of the co-parenting, not the relationship status right. So for me, a lot of my work, reflective of my experience and the literature, is about quality of fathering and raising expectations and standards. So can you talk about that evolution and that focus to the quality and the behaviors versus like whether he's in the home or not or whether he's having contact or not, because that can be good or bad.

Chris Brown:

Right. So we have a publication that we started actually the second year of NFI, 1995, called Father Facts, and it started as just a one-page document that summarized the research at the time on the importance of father involvement to child well-being, and it's grown over the years. It's now in its ninth edition we just released that earlier this year into the most comprehensive guide of research on the risks to children when they grow up without a father present in their home and the benefits to children when they grow up with a present father. And so it's fascinating to see how that literature has evolved over time as more and more people are doing research in this area on more and more topics related to father involvement. And one of the most significant pieces of research that's come out in the last decade or so it speaks to what you're talking about, david, which is we now know unequivocally that there are many fathers who are involved in the lives of their children but aren't physically present in the home, and this is particularly true with Black fathers. And if you're familiar with this literature, you know that the Black community has been, you know that the black community has been incredibly affected by the lack of father presence, and so we've actually seen a reduction over time in the proportion and number of black children living without a father in the home. So we've seen that, that that trend reverse, which is very positive. And so where we are now in terms of the quantity-quality debate is it's not either-or it's both-and so you first have to have the presence of the father in a child's life In all the ways that we talk about the importance of father presence.

Chris Brown:

There's, of course, all the ways that we talk about the importance of father presence. There's, of course, the traditional notion of financial provision right, but we talk about it in a much broader sense. It's more than financial provision. It's also about emotional, spiritual, intellectual provision. So there has to be a time element first, but then on top of that, in addition to that, to be a time element first, but then on top of that, in addition to that, what's critically important is what's happening when the father is present. How is he involved in the lives of his children? And so, to your point, we're now seeing much more research about the importance of that quality. So what I try to tell people is don't get into the debate about quantity versus quality. What I try to tell people is don't get into the debate about quantity versus quality. It's important to have both as much quantity as you can, but to have as much of that time be quality.

David Mandel:

So I'm going to, you know, kind of keep the pivot to the domestic violence piece. You know, kind of going in this which is and maybe be even a little bit provocative or kind of curious about this because, again, thinking about who our listener base is right. A lot of survivors, a lot of professors work in domestic violence space, many involved with family court or child protection systems.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Many family crisis workers.

David Mandel:

Family crisis workers stuff like that that's right Is is you know, that awareness that there are some situations where any quantity is bad, you know, and I really want to kind of just land that in this conversation, cause I agree with you in general, right, I mean, you can't have quality without presence, you can't have quality without somebody being there to do the right things and support somebody else's parenting.

David Mandel:

And I want to test out and check out with you sort of that place where we see at least, for instance, domestic violence field where some folks, any amount of presence, they're so committed to undermine the other person's parenting, they're so committed to using their kids as weapons against the other person, they're so committed to bad parenting, they're sexually abusive, they're physically abusive in ways that are irredeemable, I hate to say, sort of. In some sense they have no awareness and desire to change and the behavior is so severe. So I'm curious sort of how that gets integrated from your perspective. To hold both truths. In some sense, for me it's almost like I don't want to sit up oppositions, I just want to say to me that's a truth and the other thing you're saying is too.

Chris Brown:

Yeah, and let me just let me say very clearly and bluntly that quantity and quality is important, except when there's violence present.

Chris Brown:

It is completely unacceptable for either parent to be violent in any form or fashion toward their children and when that's present, it is vital that contact in many cases be completely cut off of the parent and whoever they are committing the violence against the children, the other parent, whatever the situation is, until that person can get the help that he or she needs in order to address that destructive behavior. So that is really important and we're very clear about that fact. And you can do that while still having compassion towards the perpetrator. I think it's really important that we have compassion towards the perpetrator and that we don't just write them off as being irredeemable, because and I know that you've been around you've probably both been around BIT programs for many years and you've probably seen great transformation of batterers into loving, supportive parents, but also you've seen a lack of transformation. So there are situations clearly, where in no form or way at any point should a person who is violent be in contact with their family.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah, you know I'm just kind of mulling over the statistics and the demographic focus, and I really get it, and I also want to acknowledge that a lot of the reason why there has been a tremendous amount of family separation and absent parents in certain demographics is actually because of the way that we have not supported families or we've actively undermined certain families.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

We've focused on the poverty issues, we've had racial injustices which have really compounded that family separation. That lack of ability of families to culturally stay together created actual cultures of family separation. I grew up in an environment where, in order for my mother to receive food stamps, there could not be a male in the household. That was in the early 70s and that was a government policy that actually supported the lack of parental support in the household in order for somebody to get vital economic support to feed their children, and that was a terrible policy. And so I want to know how you all are working against policies that are actually not supportive of family integrity, both economically and and and I know that there's been a long racial and ethnic focus on that as a Latina, so I'd love to hear about that.

Chris Brown:

Absolutely so. You know, one of the most important levers of culture change, regardless of the culture you're talking about, is policy. You know policy, can you know either support or hurt certain. You know outcomes that we want to see, and certainly there's been lots of discussion about how certain policies have not supported the importance of a family. The way that we're working on policy is we partner with other organizations, typically that are working at the national level, that have a much broader competency to address policy change than we do. So, as with any organization, when you think about how you can have the most impact, you have to make decisions, critical decisions, about not just what you will do but, most importantly, what you won't do.

Chris Brown:

What do you say no to in addition to what you say yes to? And so we have been asked over the years why don't you do more on the policy front? And that is because we have developed core capabilities around providing evidence-based and evidence-informed resources for human service organizations at the community level, and that's where our focus is. What we do, then, is we partner as quote-unquote fatherhood experts, with policy groups that have the importance of supporting fathers on their radar. So, for example, we're working with and we have worked with an organization called the Center for Policy Research out of Denver, which does a lot of work around policy related to family strengthening, and so we are now updating what is still the only national study on the cost economically to support households in which their father is not present, and so, back in 2006, we published the only study that attempted to quantify the economic costs of father absence. So we looked at 14 means-tested programs programs that are designed to support families with housing, with food, with utilities and other things and we estimated that cost at the time, conservatively, at about $100 billion, that's, with a B $100 billion. Since then, no other study has attempted to do that. We are now about to release an update of that study, which indicates that that cost has increased and this is in real dollars adjusted for inflation by $50 billion, so it's now costing us over $150 billion.

Chris Brown:

Now that's not to be reductionistic. This is not just about the economic impact billion. It's now costing us over $150 billion. That's not to be reductionistic. This is not just about the economic impact, it's really more about the human impact, but obviously the economic impact is related to that.

Chris Brown:

One of the things we're going to do is work with the center to raise awareness about these costs again, so that policy advocates can use it with the other information about the importance of father involvement to advocate for policy change at the national and state level. We also helped the center to release the only comprehensive study of state policies in every single state that in some way impact father involvement negatively or positively. So, again, advocates in individual states can do this work, and that's, of course, one of the challenges in our country, right around policy change, is that we're not just a single country. We're really a country of 50 different republics that each have the ability to set their own policies. Even with the sources of funding that come down from the federal level to the state level, a lot of how that money is spent is dependent on individual policymakers. So it's a huge issue, right, and so that's one of the reasons why we partner with these other groups that have the capability to affect policy change more effectively than we do.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

But I'm also very curious about how you view and how we can do better at supporting good fathering, good parenting, good co-parenting, not with that really specific absent father lens lens, but from a generalized lens, because we know that though children are impacted by having a parent that is not present in the home, that is not financially supportive, that has separated themselves from the family, that that is a traumatic and impactful event.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

That happens, it causes more vulnerability, it causes more poverty. There's all sorts of implications to not having that full family and parental support of involved fathering, that's nurturing, that are perhaps coercively controlling, that are also domestically violent, that have never ever taken a fatherhood class or a parenting class. Because we don't talk about men as parents and though there may be the markers of what your mission is is absent fathers not in the home, how do we help the fathers that are also in the home but who are not able to truly step into that role and are not stepping into that role of being a nurturing, supportive parent in ways that are going to support their children long term? Mental health, behavioral health, financial health, you know, stability, all of those things.

Chris Brown:

Right. So let me potentially clear up some confusion about the organizations that we work with. So we are working, as I said at the outset of our time, together with fathers in whatever circumstance they find themselves in, and that includes fathers who are, and have been, living consistently with their children, and so the organizations that partner with us run our programs and use fathers to hopefully eventually prevent their exit from the home for whatever reason. So we're doing things to support those, those families as well. Speak a little bit about sort of the way that we frame the work that we do with our organization partners today in terms of how they should approach their work with fathers, so kind of fast forwarding from our beginning and how we've evolved over time. Today what we talk about are two primary kind of approaches in doing this work with fathers and families, and the first is a family based approach, and we call that a whole family approach, and it's not that's not our term. That comes from other social service fields in which there's an understanding that when we include fathers in the picture, we want to make sure that we're not losing, leaving moms or the other parent out of the equation. So we've created an infrastructure in this country that is focused primarily on supporting maternal and child health, and that's very important for a variety of reasons historical reasons and also reasons that are that are very present. But in creating that, we've left fathers out of the picture, and this comes from the fact that as a culture, we don't do a good job at all of raising our boys to be fathers. We just don't do that very well, and we need to do more of that, and perhaps we can talk a little bit about that later. But what we do is we don't just provide the programming that can help these organizations to work effectively with fathers, but we also help them address, at a broader level, their organizational culture and how well it does or does not support working effectively with fathers. So we have tools that these organizations can use to conduct an in-depth examination of things like policies and procedures, how well they're training staff around working with fathers, so that they can create a foundation that supports the effective delivery of programming or whatever services that they deliver.

Chris Brown:

So it's a whole family approach. The second thing is to use a strengths-based approach. So we are using the term father presence a lot more than father absence these days. Well, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that there are homes in which the father is not present. We want to drive more father presence as opposed to reducing father absence. I mean, in some ways they're the same side of the coin. But when we talk about approaching the work from a strengths-based perspective, where you are building father's strengths as opposed to trying to address their weaknesses as fathers and partners, that's a very important piece. So our resources have evolved to really emphasize the whole family and a strengths-based approach to working with fathers, and so that allows our organization partners to work with fathers and families in all sorts of situations, all sorts of configurations.

David Mandel:

Thanks for that. It makes me think about how you'd respond. There's some historical skepticism, I think, in the domestic violence community about the fatherhood work as to improve co-parenting. Can you speak to sort of the evolving kind of thinking in the father inclusive, responsible fatherhood community around responding to domestic violence perpetration by fathers particularly and male caregivers? And I just want to say to everybody we know on this call we're talking about anybody in a fathering role. It could be an uncle, a grandfather, a stepdad like myself. It could be a boyfriend who's in a non-biological role but is parenting, so anyway, but just when I say that's used for a male caregiver who's not the biological parent or some other legal parent is father figure, and so this could be a cousin, an uncle or just a coach.

Chris Brown:

It could be a friend, I mean, it can be anybody who steps in and fills that kind of male role model, if you will, for children, and so that's another critical thing to understand about our work is that we are there to support anyone who's filling this role as well.

Chris Brown:

So many of the males who go through our fatherhood programs are not the biological or otherwise legal parent of a child that they're raising, so that's important to understand.

Chris Brown:

As far as the domestic violence fields interaction with the fatherhood field, the good news is that over the years that I've been doing this work and I started this work actually before I came to National Fatherhood Initiative I was with the state health department in Texas, working across the department to help programs better understand how do you involve men and fathers in the work that you're doing? I started doing some work with human service organizations in the Austin area, and so that was back in the mid-1990s, and so you know, fast forward, you know, 30 odd years or so, and there used to be a huge divide between domestic violence prevention advocates and fatherhood involvement advocates, such that you didn't see a whole lot of collaboration. Over the years, that dialogue has increased between those two fields to the extent that we're seeing a lot more collaboration these days, a lot less skepticism, doesn't mean, it doesn't exist in certain quarters, but a lot less in certain quarters, but a lot less.

Chris Brown:

And so the cause of that has been an awareness and a willingness in both fields that we need each other. We need each other, we need to collaborate if we're going to have the kind of impact that we truly want to have. We have domestic violence shelters now running our fatherhood programs. These are shelters that serve women and children primarily who are the victims of the domestic violence, and they've realized we need to reach out to the dads, help them be better fathers, in addition to addressing the violent behavior. We also have fatherhood programs that have integrated domestic violence protocols into their intake procedures so that they can identify fathers who have a history of, or potentially could be, domestically violent, so that they can then determine whether they need to address that behavior first before having them go through the fatherhood program. And that's typically what we advocate for is that if you know that you are working with a father who has committed domestic violence, address that first before taking him through a fatherhood program, right?

Chris Brown:

Another wonderful evolution has been on the part of funders, both on the public and the private side, who provide funding to fatherhood programs, who are now requiring the integration of work around domestic violence. So you have to have a domestic violence protocol to get funding and you have to have in place solid relationships with domestic violence prevention advocates who run, for example, bit programs. So there's been a much greater evolution and we also have, and you know depending on how much you'd like me to go into this there are some individuals working at the national level who've done a great job like you have, david, in your book of talking about this intersection between the domestic violence arena and fatherhood who have produced some wonderful tools that can be used both by father involvement advocates and domestic violence prevention advocates to better understand how to integrate the work that the two areas are doing.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

You know, I think that there's a lot of siloing that happens within our family crisis services and I'm really happy I know that there's a lot of siloing that happens. I'm really happy that things have shifted so that that behavioral piece identifying it, looking for the potential risk factors and then addressing that first when we're dealing with fatherhood initiatives is so important, because services are so strapped and people are so poorly trained in how to work with men as parents, as fathers in the home, whether or not they're the biological father or not, that what we see a lot of is that people who have histories of domestic violence, who are even in active investigations for serious domestic violence, including the murder of their partner, sometimes are referred to child and family services to get parenting classes with the assumption that they're now the person who's in charge of their child, as if that domestic violence does not impact that child, as if those children are not being abused by that person as well, because it was abuse between two adults. And that is a very dangerous assumption and it's been really difficult to try to break into these different spaces of silos where that attitude leaks in and people are assigned to parenting programs, where it's very inappropriate and it's actually really dangerous and where they can use that parenting program, having completed it especially if it was court mandated to show to try to prove that they should have custody of children when it's actually very dangerous for them to have custody of children. So I just want to acknowledge that it's really important that you all are doing that and that all of us have a responsibility. All of us as professionals have a responsibility If we're working with families, if we're a mandatory reporter, to learn how to work with men as parents and even people who are perpetrating domestic violence as parents, how to have the conversation about their parenting, how to assess their behavioral patterns, how to talk about how that impacts child functioning and child development, child safety, stability all of those different things.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And there's a lot of evidence that men who are violent and coercively controlling because we're not just concerned about violence physical violence we're also concerned about coercive control, where people's personal liberties are removed and we have a lot of evidence that shows that when we approach those people around their specific patterns of behaviors and we tell them and we show them how that's impacting their children, that a certain percentage of those people are really willing to make a change for their child, where they may not be willing to make a change for their child, where they may not be willing to make a change for their partner or their ex-partner, and that's a really important key piece of information. And the other piece of that, the other side of that is that when we ignore those parents, that the children always express that what they want for that parent is they want them to get help, they want them to do better, they want them to be better parents, they want them to be more involved, and that they also want to be safe, and that's a really important thing, that this is kind of a universal desire. And there's one more piece of this and that is that and I really feel this. What a universal desire.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And there's one more piece of this and that is is that, and I really feel this, what a terrible injustice and a terrible thing that, if we know the behaviors that are nurturing and are good parenting, to not teach them to men and boys, to help them in their relationships, because it is impactful to men's mental and emotional health and well-being for them to be violent, for them to be so controlling that they feel like they must control every aspect of their partners or their children's lives, in order for them to feel comfortable and safe and happy.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

That is very impactful to their long-term well-being, to their mental health, to their physical health. Even so, we really all need to do better and I really feel like it's all of our responsibility. We shouldn't have a special mandate to work with men as parents. We should just, by default, know that we have to work with men as parents, that we have to work with men as parents. We should just, by default, know that we have to work with men as parents, that we have to work with boys and men, that we have to improve the quality of their relationships, that it's impactful to them and their well-being as well.

Chris Brown:

Yeah it is and that's one of the things that we talk about again from a strengths-based perspective is that you know the impact of father involvement doesn't just affect child well-being.

Chris Brown:

It affects the well-being of mothers in the prenatal period, that it has massive benefits for the outcomes of pregnancy, for both mom and child and long-term involvement of the father throughout the life of his child. We also know that when men become fathers and they become involved fathers in all the ways we talk about that being healthy involvement that they benefit in many ways in terms of their mental and physical health. So it just has these massive benefits and one of the key structural elements in our fatherhood programs to your point, ruth is that we bring every topic of every session back to the impact of the father improving in this area on his children. And that really motivates these men to do better is when we keep the focus on child well-being, because, at the end of the day, when we're talking about working around strengthening families and parents, ultimately we're doing that to benefit the next generation and generations after that.

David Mandel:

Yeah, so I have one more deep dive before we kind of you know, kind of move to wrapping up, but it's off of Ruth, your comment, and Chris, your excellent points. You know is one of my observations and it's not just to me, it's a lot of people see this and people live it is that we've culturally and this has been across cultures and communities and you spoke this a little bit when you talked about how we're not training boys to be fathers right, and I completely agree with you. And I've talked about male parental development and how we don't. We don't talk to boys about becoming dads. We we give girls dolls and we expect them to babysit and there's lots of things. And boys, the only talk about kids is about don't get somebody pregnant or don't get an sti, and that's when boys.

Chris Brown:

When boys play with dolls when they're young, we don't like that. Yeah, we take the dolls and give them a trough.

David Mandel:

That's right. That's tied to homophobia and all these things very rigid gender roles and culture. I find the underlying some of this, for me at least, is that we have very differing expectations of men and women as parents, and it really has lots of implications across the board, and one it speaks to what Ruth's saying about sort of expecting mothers to be the primary caregivers right, and building up this infrastructure around that. But then the other thing is it often means that we don't look to support men and boys to become dads, but also when they do things, we often have an outsized reaction to them, which is sort of a man who changes a diaper or a man who shows up in time for supervised visits.

David Mandel:

I've seen this and I've seen this repeatedly and I've seen this across cultures and communities, by the way, which is that we kind of go oh my God, look at him, he showed up for the appointments and we don't look at the quality of his parenting and we don't look at his, or we give him access to his kid, but the really not so subtle kind of expectation is he's actually not going to do the caregiving, it's his new girlfriend, it's his mother, his sister, and I guess the example for me is where are we in our capacity building amongst professionals, our education and our systems to help people discern between the father who shows up for all the perinatal visits because he's deeply actually engaged and positively engaged, and the difference between that and somebody who's showing up to all the perinatal visits to make sure his girlfriend doesn't talk about the domestic abuse to the medical provider?

David Mandel:

And especially when we go, oh my God, we don't see men show up. This is so great that this guy's showing up and we have this sort of rah-rah look at this great dad kind of reaction, sometimes because of low expectations, right, yeah, no-transcript.

Chris Brown:

And they also don't think about the consequences of those consequences. So they don't think forward enough about the possible implications of what they do. So the more our culture essentially rewards the dad showing up as some revelation versus the dad who is consistently there, the more we reinforce this notion culturally. That it's a surprise when dads are involved, and we're less likely to institute cultural norms that expect dads to be there on an ongoing basis. I'm an anthropologist by training and so that's professionally.

Chris Brown:

What brought me to this work was, in addition to the personal experience around father absence, was the work that I was starting to do that kept leading me toward this broader issue of the lack of father presence and the lack of work that we're doing as a culture to raise our boys to be parents as well as to succeed in other roles that they happen to have.

Chris Brown:

And so that's where I see the next kind of evolution, if you will, of the work that we're doing. Going is to go even farther upstream, so to speak, where we are raising our boys, where we have programs and activities in place that encourage them to be good parents, to help our boys see that being a good parent, see that being a good parent, being a good father, is just as important to being a successful CEO or a great athlete or any of the other things that we drive our boys towards in this culture. And on the flip side, we still need to do a much better job of raising our girls to succeed in roles other than being a mother. There's that dichotomy where and I've raised two girls and I just became a grandparent of a girl.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And so congratulations, thank you.

Chris Brown:

And so I'm steeped in what we've done well and not well in raising our girls raising our girls. When we start to talk about domestic violence, the one thing I'll leave you with is it's important that we raise our daughters to expect a lack of violence in their relationships, that, when violence is present, to address it and to leave if it can't be addressed.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And we need to support that.

David Mandel:

All of us.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah, we need to support that ability. You know, because it's so. There's such an ecosystem of habituation that and it's years and years of narratives a little bit prickly about fatherhood initiatives. Years and years of narratives about it's better to stay even if there's this happening in the home, that keeping the family together is the most important thing, and I know that I held those narratives. Those were deeply ingrained in me.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

But I was also a family-separated, institutionalized child and I really wanted my children to grow up in a home that wasn't broken like.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

That was really a motivating factor for me and it took me a long time to really learn and understand, because I'd grown up in such violence that it wasn't the mere togetherness that was the important piece together as a family, and how we were supporting the children and modeling to them, together as a family relationship, behaviors which will would form them for the rest of their lives.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So I think we have a long way to go to being a real ecosystem of support for those people, to making sure that there's real, true pathways to to freedom which don't mean that women have to undermine their financial stability, they don't risk losing their home, they don't risk losing their children for reporting domestic violence because that's still happening really prevalently, and even recently, you know, because I hear a lot of survivor stories, hearing about a survivor going to a mental health practitioner to talk about domestic violence that happened years ago to their children and that mental health practitioner starting a child protection report on that survivor even though the domestically violent parent wasn't even in the home anymore, was not even in contact with the family and that was abuse that had happened years ago.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So these things are still happening by professionals which make it really difficult for women to get the mental health assistance, the financial assistance, the ability to leave assistance, and a lot of us if we grew up in cultures where that was even made more difficult by the environment around us, if we were in a small town, if we were isolated, if we grew up in a religious community and we would lose our whole family for leaving. So we all have to do better to make sure that people who are experiencing violence in their family have the pathways to safety that are really going to sustain them in their family togetherness and that really address the person who's choosing that violence from a parental, formative responsibility standpoint, not just from an adult-to-adult relational standpoint, but you have a responsibility to your children, and here's how you're harming them by engaging in those behaviors.

David Mandel:

And I want to connect the dots between what you're saying and what Chris just said and then move us to wrapping up, which is that education for boys that, chris, you spoke to before, which is about this cultural stuff that you're talking about, about supporting women and girls' safety and teaching boys what it means the value of being a dad. Dad means treating your, your kids, other parent with respect, and and and supporting their relationship with their kids and and wanting them to be a strong person in their own right, and and and and nailing that into the definition of fatherhood. I think it's.

David Mandel:

I think a lot of times we we don't always nail that, we don't always say this is, you know you? You know you, we want you to be a good dad and we want you to nurture your kids, but you can't do that if you're treating your partner with disrespect, Even if you don't get along with them. To be a good dad, you have to co-parent, and I've watched really good dads go through divorce and commit to co-parenting in a positive way, commit to putting their kids first, not nurturing grievances or trying to control somebody else, and I think we need to square that circle constantly, given our culture.

Chris Brown:

We do, and I know I said I'd leave you with something just a minute ago, but given that you brought up the co-parenting point, I'll leave you with this. So we didn't get an opportunity to talk about the core of our fatherhood programs, and they focus on five cross-cultural characteristics of effective fathering. One of those is relationship skills. So our programs come at this work from that whole family approach that I mentioned and also family systems dynamics, so that relationship between the parents is the blueprint that children look to for their own relationships, not just romantic relationships, but all sorts of relationships.

Chris Brown:

And so if there is disrespect, violence, any unhealthy behavior of any kind. Our programs address that particular trait of what we call a 24-7 dad or an inside-out dad. It's a very important. Part of our programs is helping fathers develop those healthy relationships and understanding the impact that that has on their children.

David Mandel:

So that's a great thing to end on, you know, and we want to offer you a chance to give a message to any practitioners who are listening first and then we'll ask you about anything to domestic violence survivors and then resources. So what message do you want practitioners to walk away from this podcast, listening to you and the work you're doing?

Chris Brown:

Sure, I would say you know, reach out to father involvement advocates in your community and there are many around the country, and particularly if you live in an urban area, in many rural areas there is bound to be a fatherhood program somewhere near you because they need your expertise and many of them want your expertise. So reach out to them, particularly if you are skeptical. Start a dialogue, start a discussion about ways that you can potentially work together, and I think that you'll find, by and large, that father involvement advocates are very welcoming to the expertise that domestic violence prevention advocates and those who are treating individuals who perpetrated domestic violence can bring to the table.

David Mandel:

And one of our standard questions, to wrap up, is also because one of our big audiences is domestic violence survivors. You know who you know, by definition, in many ways will have had very difficult relationships with the father figures. You know their kids. Is there a message that you have the takeaway you want to?

Chris Brown:

share with survivors who may have a complex relationship to the fathers of their children. Well, absolutely, and I think that the primary message I would say is trust your instincts. Trust your instincts. If you really believe deep down that you should not be involved with the father, the father should not be involved with your children, trust those instincts. At the same time, try as much as possible to have compassion toward that individual, because the background that he likely came from or she came from contributed greatly to perpetrating that violence. That does not in any way excuse their behavior, but by better understanding where they came from, that can lead to potentially repairing the relationship or relationships, but also help you to better understand, even if that relationship is irreparable or relationships are irreparable, where all of that came from.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah, and how to navigate it and have conversations with your children, because that is part of the responsibility of the parent who's left in that situation is having to address those behaviors, often in their children as well, because children really learn those behaviors from the parents in the home. Well, I'm a big fan of more fatherhood initiatives, more initiatives for men and boys around, not just fatherhood but healthy relationships, but healthy relationships. And you know, having grown up and seen boys habituated into violence and experiencing violence themselves in order for them to be habituated into it, I know that men and boys are full human beings who are empathetic, who are capable of good parenting, who can be involved in child rearing and all sorts of family dynamics that currently many cultures discount men and boys in. So we need to do better.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

We need to do a lot better.

David Mandel:

Yeah, chris, thank you so much for your time, and we're going to include information about the NFI on our show notes and we'll kind of make sure people know about how to reach you and so forth.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So thank you very much, thank you very much. Okay, and so we are out.

Chris Brown:

Okay, take care of you too. Thank you.