Ongoing
A community of practice for Head Start and Early Head Start supervising staff working to elevate Father Engagement Strategies advancing the health and wellbeing of children and families.
Families benefit most when all members — particularly all parents — are actively involved in the care and development of their children. When we support all parents to feel more competent and confident as caregivers, individually and as a family, they can better nurture their child’s growth. While many systems and services highlight these benefits, they focus on just one parent, usually the mother, downplaying the interdependence among family members and limiting their positive impact on families. As a result, fathers participate in home visiting services at very low rates. You can’t leave out a parent if you are supporting a family.
Research shows that fathers play a critical, often overlooked, role in promoting family resilience, child development, and the support of maternal wellbeing. However, for various reasons, many men enter fatherhood without the knowledge, confidence, and competence to care for their children. One significant barrier to effective father involvement is paternal perinatal mental health challenges, as ten percent of new fathers experience mental health challenges. This rate increases to up to 50% when a mother struggles with her mental health. No one in a family is well until all are well. Fathers with untreated mental illness struggle to promote their child’s development, increase the risk of child and maternal psychopathology, and jeopardize housing and employment. This makes abundantly evident the need for whole family support.
About our Facilitators – In 2019, Love, Dad was founded when Kevin Gruenberg, PsyD, and Richard Cohen, Ph.D. recognized the need to include fathers in home visiting services which often focus on children and their mothers. By including all parents, these services could realize the benefits of the whole family approach, including parental mental health, family stability, and child wellbeing.
Kevin Gruenberg PsyD, Executive Director and co-founder, is a clinical psychologist focused on developing practices and policies that integrate fathers into perinatal and early childhood programs. Dr. Gruenberg co-developed, piloted, and researched programs that promote paternal family engagement, mental health, and family well-being including Home Visiting with Dads and Supporting Fathers Towards Whole Family Health: Screening in Context. He also provides consultation and training on fatherhood, paternal perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, and building parent-child relationships. Lastly, he has two children and provides psychotherapy to children, families and adults in private practice.
Richard Cohen, PhD, Policy Director, and co-founder, is an educational psychologist with over 50 years at the intersections of early childhood, child welfare and infant mental health. Grounded as an ECE teacher, Richard’s experience includes service as a Head Start director, agency executive director, federal grant administrator and college faculty member.
Richard’s advocacy and policy work includes a term as President of the California Association for Infant Mental Health, Chair of the L.A. County Child Care Planning Committee, membership on the L.A. County Policy Roundtable for Child Care and Development. He was on the Steering Committee for the development of both L.A. Universal Preschool and Help Me Grow LA. At the State level, Richard Co-directed Advancing Careers in Child Development and was staff for the School Readiness Task Force’s Here They Come, Ready or Not. Currently, Richard is co-convener of the LA County Consortium’s Father Engagement Workgroup.
The father engagement fellowship to cultivate champions and leaders. The fellowship will meet monthly for 10 months to develop the core competencies in father and family engagement through Zoom lectures, group activities, and reflective practice. This will prepare the participants to support staff within their agencies to promote whole-family development and build future leaders to maintain and further develop this work. Structural change requires champions who understand the work and system from the ground up.
Examples of topics covered:
I have been to management workshops, not leadership training. This has totally changed my perspective and encouraged me to propel forward in developing my skills.
I am honored and humbled to be a recipient of the Region 9 Head Start Association’s Legacy Scholarship. The scholarship helped me get one step closer to achieving my goal of becoming a Head Start Director.
I took part in The disproportionate impact of COVID 19, and how to provide “real” support for black/brown children and families and I just want to say this was an amazing webinar. I hope we can look forward to further conversation on this topic.
Thank you so much for making events like this! I really enjoyed and learned so much teaching strategies to implement STEM in the classroom.
The HR Network was an excellent opportunity to network and learn the best practices from other HR professionals within Head Start programs. You will be amazed by the level of talent and experience of the participants.
The Summer Camp training was powerful and inspiring! Each presenter was very engaging, it’s hard to even pick a favorite session!
The Leadership Challenge training was very relevant to my work as a Head Start leader! Great facilitation; stayed with the program yet allowed time for individual and small group reflections.
Regular price $12.00
Regular price $39.00
Questions? Contact us at headstartr9@region9hsa.org.
