Pivoting Health Promotional Efforts Among Fathers

The ideas of “father” and “family” as they are traditionally defined may possibly limit the effectiveness of parenting interventions among certain groups of contemporary fathers. Strongly held normative beliefs portraying men as daft caregivers and/or characterizing most families as traditional with mother serving as primary caregiver may not be appropriately addressing the needs of many modern American families. Each father has his unique needs and sets of skills that must be taken into consideration when developing health outreach programs. Essentially, effective parenting curriculum should be tailored to specific types of fathers. Health promotion and health education professionals need to become aware of these newly emerging fathers in order to create more relevant and effective educational programs. This discussion is an attempt to bring awareness to this issue and help facilitate a transition from a singular approach to fatherhood outreach rooted in traditional characterizations of “family” and “father” to a more diverse, multifactorial approach addressing more unique populations of fathers, hereby called Generation F. A pedagogical guideline to assist in developing more effective interventions targeting fathers is presented