Supporting Father Involvement in Canadian Indigenous Communities

What happened earlier in your life doesn’t have to determine the rest of your time on Earth.

Supporting Father Involvement in Canadian Indigenous Communities The Supporting Father Involvement (SFI) program, developed by Associate Dean Marsha Kline Pruett and her colleagues, has proven effective in many contexts since it began a decade ago. Most recently, it’s been successfully implemented with indigenous communities in Canada.

The SFI model aims to reduce child abuse and neglect and enhance family well-being through a curriculum that encourages father involvement and co-parenting. An important characteristic of the curriculum is that group leaders do not prescribe specific behaviors for parents. Instead, they offer a group environment in which partners can explore their own goals and ways of relating to each other based on their culture and values. This adaptability has been key in its welcome among First Nations communities.

Pruett and colleagues have worked with groups in Alberta—University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills (formerly Blue Quills First Nations College) and Family Centre in Lethbridge— training practitioners to run the program. They have found that the approaches of SFI align well with the communities’ cultural values. “They come at it from a deeply rooted family tradition and so the kinds of values we ask them to consider and questions we ask feel very familiar to them,” Pruett said. “The values of the program are not to teach people how to parent, but to teach partners and family members how to talk to each other about the ways they want to parent, what they want to learn from elders and what kinds of support they need. Always, the program keeps inclusion of positive, engaged fathering as a main principle from which families are strengthened.”

Pruett was struck by the way the values of SFI match those outlined in Indigenous Social Work Practice, published by Blue Quills. “They had a wheel of indigenous values that almost perfectly overlap with some of the same concepts that we introduce,” she notes. Specifically, the four dimensions of holism—mind, body, spirit and emotion—fit well with important curriculum components such as being aware of depression and stress, and finding healthy ways to reinvigorate mind, body and heart.

The communities’ priorities of caring, honesty, determination and sharing also fit well with the SFI approach. As Pruett describes it, “Caring for your child and sharing it with other people in your community, being open with each other, determining your own directions as parents, and feeling like what happened earlier in your life doesn’t have to determine the rest of your time on Earth.”

The intervention has been particularly relevant for communities in which ties to parents and grandparents were severed when children were sent to residential schools. “Many of the fathers—because of the generation of residential schooling—don’t feel like they know what it means to be a parent,” Pruett said.

In these areas, men can also be relatively scarce, due to incarceration, addiction or the need to work in distant urban areas. “One of the things we’re trying to do is make men a strong presence and help the men and women find each other again in parenting, because many of the men say they find their cultural roots again in the love of the next generation.” —Megan Rubiner Zinn