After he was separated from his wife and children last spring due to abuse charges, David, a 32-year-old man from Olds, was desperate for a way to rejoin his family.
An Olds-based representative of Central Alberta Child and Family Services recommended he participate in a new pilot project in Olds called Olds Caring Dads geared towards helping men develop better parenting skills.
"I jumped all over it,î said David, who asked not to have his real name used for privacy reasons.
Adapted from the Caring Dads program in Ontario, the pilot project focused on teaching men the behaviours and attitudes that lead to healthy relationships between fathers and children.
David, whose children are under the age of 10, was one of five participants in the program.
He said he walked away from the 10-week course, which started in the early fall, with an entirely new set of parenting tools.
"We learned a lot about child developmental stages,î he said. "Before, I was putting a lot of pressure on my children that they weren't really old enough to understand or to handle.
"And so now, with me understanding more about the developmental age that they're at, it makes it easier on everybody.î
Although David moved back in with his family as the program began, he continued attending the sessions and found his parenting behaviours improved.
Even his wife was excited for him to remain in the program, as he was able to share many of the skills and tools he learned with her.
Neither of them, David said, had come from homes where they had learned healthy ways to parent.
"As I was raised, my parents had a really poor style of parenting so you never really learned the tools and if you don't get them from your parents, where do you find them? You just have the bad ones.î
When the project wrapped in January, David said he was actually "upset.î
"It had helped me so much, it was hard to believe it was over and you're not going back the next week to try to learn something else,î he said, adding it would be "amazingî if the program became a permanent fixture in town.
"I would take it again, repeatedly.î
Katharine Doyle, the Town of Olds' community facilitator, said the town also wants the Caring Dads program to become a regular community service and is hoping a community organization might step in to run the program since there is a lack of services available here to address "men's issues.î
It is because of that need, she added, that the town facilitated and paid for the one-time project, using Family and Community Support Services funding.
"It was a recognition that the fathering, or lack of fathering, in many families is problematic and that there were very limited resources for assistance to these dads to learn some new, more positive ways of parenting,î she said. "We have resources for women. We don't necessarily have resources for men in the area of fathering.î
While many of the men were reluctant to engage with each other or the program's two facilitators, Paul Jacques and Corrie Monk, Doyle said the participants eventually bonded and became more willing to share.
Jacques, who helped develop the Olds Caring Dads program and is also an employment specialist at Olds' Careers for Everyone, said the success of the program came from pushing the men to get in touch with their "thoughts, feelings and actionsî while learning a "child-centred parenting approach.î
"It's about the focus on the child, the child's behaviour and the child's interaction and the child's response to their behaviour, rather than a parent-centred approach,î he said.
During the sessions, the facilitators and participants explored ways to assess situations when they find a child doing something wrong.
Instead of yelling or using sarcasm, Jacques said, parents need to look at why a child is doing what they're doing and then seek alternatives to those behaviours.
Like David, the participants were referred to the program through family service or probation organizations.
Bruce Herzog, an Olds-based probation officer with the justice and solicitor general ministry, said he immediately saw the program's value after Jacques and Monk approached him with the outline for the course more than a year ago.
Courts will refer offenders to Herzog who are directed by a judge to receive counsellingóoften related to domestic violence issuesó and he determined Caring Dads would be ideal for a number of men who had come to him with such conditions.
He said he referred five men to the program, four of whom had counselling orders, and directed them to attend.
Since the program emphasizes concepts of responsibility and provides tools for healthy parenting, and because so many of his referrals come from homes where poor parenting is prevalent, Olds needs to offer a resource such as Caring Dads on a continuous basis, Herzog said.
"It really fills a void. To me, once the program was presented, I started thinking wow, why didn't we come up with something like this 30 years ago.î
Overall, Jacques described the changes he saw in the participants at the end of the program as "promising.î
"We started to see that their own involvement and their own over-involvement or overreactions, they started to check. And a lot of that had to do with them understanding first of all, the idea of questioning why is this person behaving the way they are and then using that child-centred approach.î
"As I was raised, my parents had a really poor style of parenting so you never really learned the tools and if you don't get them from your parents, where do you find them? You just have the bad ones."David, Caring Da
