Over the recent years, there has been a significant decrease in fatherhood involvement in early childhood for most of the father were out working overseas or were on business trip more than fifty percent of the time in a year. Children growing up without father’s care and guidance are common today, in fact it is showing a significant increase in the US and Asian families with a rate of 10% every year.
Studies by child psychologist cited that young children who have grown up without the involvement of responsible and complete father nurturing and supportive role are more likely to be performing poorly in their studies, engaged with the wrong gang in school, abuse in drugs and alcohol use, experience early adolescent with poverty.
Involvement and engagement of father in their children early development and learning process is significantly important that they help in shaping their children’s gender development, where boys tend to grow up like their father who is gentle, manly, caring and bold if this is how their father had portrayed to them. On the contrary, children lacking of good relationship with their father throughout their up-bring phase will tend to be less effective in their academic achievements and less likely to get expelled from school , with anti-social behavior, and involved in criminal social activities.
Today, there are about 24 million children don’t get to live with their biological father, with 20 million of it are of single parent, mostly lacking of fathers. These children tend to grow up with low esteem, and are likely to get into depression with emotional issues more often than their peers, at the same time, they are more likely to get into violence and drugs at a young age.
Society is well aware of this urgent trend in the society today and during the past two decades, considerable contributions have been put forward in recognizing the importance of responsible fatherhood at both the national and state levels. The formation of strong organizations by local and private authorities such as the National centre for Fathering, and local community groups as well as some of the community-Based Outreach program had been here with the main objective to strengthen the father-children relationship in families, to develop key strategies to integrate fathers involvement into educational, children development, health care, social care, adolescent issues and families affairs.
However, in families where separations and divorce are inevitable, mothers tend to win their children’s custody because of the deteriorated relationship between father and child and their lack of financial ability to support their child which had put these fathers away. Local authorities are fully aware of this issue, thus related child transfer centre are setup where both the parents can routinely visit their kids under good surveillances.
Effective fatherhood programs are designed to help these father’s specific needs, identify each of their challenges and work through with a plan of actions for the best of their families and young generations.