UofL social work professor focuses on importance of fatherhood

Early in his career when Armon Perry was a social worker in Montgomery, Alabama, he identified an important element not considered in policies and procedures for removing children from a home to go into foster care - fathers.

"Many of those kids were in foster care for much longer than they needed to be, because as an agency, we weren't doing anything to reach out to the children's fathers," Perry said. "All the caseloads were in the mother's names, and dads, if anything, were an afterthought."

Perry said once he understood it was just about "checking off a box" so the system could move forward, it was a gamechanger for him. "It was deeply impactful to me because it set the course of my professional life for the next 25 years."

It set the stage for his interest and focus on fatherhood within his professional life for the next two plus decades, most of which he has devoted as an associate professor at UofL's Kent School for Social Work and Family Science. Perry works with agencies and organizations trying to help them improve capacity for helping dads to take more active roles in their children's lives.

In 2015, Perry was involved in a five-year federally funded fatherhood program for nearly 1,500 non-resident dads that featured 28 hours of parent education and up to six months of case management services. "The program's aim was to help connect dads to places and spaces that might be able to assist them in removal or reduction of whatever barriers were standing in their way to becoming the type of active and involved fathers that they wanted to be," Perry said.

The 28 hours came from a curriculum called 24/7 Dad, developed by The National Fatherhood Initiative, along with four additional hours of a co-parenting curriculum called Together We Can. "When people share children but don't necessarily have a romantic connection or relationship, they need to determine how they can set their differences aside for their children," Perry said. Outcomes from the fatherhood study included statistically significant improvements in parent education, parenting knowledge and resolution skills.

Since that time, Perry has shared his recommendations and implications for best practices through dozens of conferences, workshops and presentations throughout the country.

"Equipping moms and dads with the necessary skills and knowledge to be able to contribute to the children's healthy growth and development is what I'm all about," Perry said.

According to Perry, one vital factor for fathers is to engage with their children early in life. "We can't expect dads to be the fathers that we want them to be and just flip a switch when the child is four or five years old, if we haven't adequately prepared them and provided them opportunities earlier on."

Perry said ideally children need a balance of the two diverse types of development offered by mothers and fathers. "Fathers have the capacity to uniquely impact their children's development in what they call rough and tumble play," he explained. "That type of parenting promotes competence and confidence because it teaches children that they can gain mastery over the world."

In addition, Perry said research indicates when children have active and involved fathers in their lives they tend to do better academically, they're much less likely to have mental health concerns, less likely to get involved in juvenile delinquency, much less likely to have an unwanted teenage pregnancy, and much less likely to grow up in poverty.

While there are still many challenges to making these paradigm shifts in the role of fatherhood in our society, Perry is proud to have contributed to this work over the years and to see the meaningful growth that has transpired.

"The type of work that I do now, I could not have envisioned 20 years ago," he said. "So much progress has been made to bring these issues related to fathers and the role that they play in their children's growth and development to the forefront, so I'm excited about that."

Perry said he believes being a father is the "highest calling a man can have on earth. Their role is unique and irreplaceable, and that's the message I send every single day to the men that I come across," he said.