RETOOLING: EVOLUTION IN RESEARCH ON FATHERS - A COMMENTARY

A Cycles-Breaking Framework to Disrupt Intergenerational Patterns of Maltreatment and Vulnerability During the Childbearing Year

We propose a cycles-breaking conceptual framework to guide perinatal research, interventions, and clinical innovations that can prevent or disrupt intergenerational cycles of childhood maltreatment and psychiatric vulnerability. The framework is grounded in literature, clinical observations, team science collaboration, and empirical research from numerous disciplines and is specific to the childbearing year. Adoption of the framework has the potential to speed the progress of research on the social problems of intergenerational childhood maltreatment and psychiatric vulnerability.

Forward progress of scientific inquiry into the early father-child relationship: introduction to the special issue on very young children and their fathers

Research on fathering and the father-child relationship has made substantial progress in the most recent 15 years since the last special issue of the Infant Mental Health Journal on fathers and young children. This special issue on fathers and young children contains a series of papers exemplifying this progress, including advances in methodology-more direct assessment and more observational measures-in addition to the increasing dynamic complexity of the conceptual models used to study fathers, the diversity of fathers studied, and the growth of programs to support early father involvement. In assessing the current state of the field, special attention is given to contributions made by the papers contained in this special issue, and two critical areas for continued progress are addressed: (1) methodological and measurement development that specifically address fathers and fathering relationships and (2) cross-cultural and ecologically valid research examining the diversity of models of fathering.