Building the capacity of young South African men in responsible, loving and nonviolent fathering

Abstract

The majority of South African children are growing up in households where the father is dead or absent. As a result, unless there is some other father figure in their lives, they do not experience fathering directly and so have a limited education in what it means to be a father. Given the extent of violence of various forms throughout the country, there is an urgent need to bring up children who are educated in values such as nonviolence and who will model and impart such values to their own children.

The overall aim of this research is to investigate how to build the capacity of young men to be responsible, loving and nonviolent fathers. The research design included three components (exploration of the experiences and attitudes of young men regarding their own fathers), action research (in the form of devising a training programme in responsible, loving and nonviolent fathering, and implementing it with three groups of young men) and evaluation (of the effects of the training on attitudes which, it is hoped, will translate into positive fathering behaviour in the longer term).

The short term outcome of the training indicates that changes in attitude in positive directions did take place for a significant minority of the trainees and suggests that training programmes of this type can be socially beneficial.