Don’t Give Up on Dads: The Successful Involvement of Syrian Refugee Fathers in the Caregiver Support Intervention in Lebanon

• In Event: What happens to family dynamics in a protracted refugee situation?

Abstract

A growing number of researchers have been calling attention to the problematic exclusion of fathers and other male caregivers from parenting interventions. In an excellent review in 2014, Panter-Brick and her colleagues first discuss the robust evidence showing the positive impact of father involvement on their children’s psychological, social, and educational development; they then note with concern the widespread failure to include fathers in parenting interventions despite the importance of fathers to their children’s wellbeing and ongoing development. In developing the Caregiver Support Intervention (CSI) in Gaza and Lebanon, my colleagues and I at War Child Holland made a commitment to ensuring the engagement and retention of fathers in all phases of the intervention development and evaluation processes. This included our formative implementations in Gaza and North Lebanon, a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Lebanon, and a fully powered RCT, also in Lebanon, in which we recruited 240 families in which both parents/caregivers participated. In this presentation, I discuss the strategies we used to successfully involve and retain fathers and share findings from our recent trial of the CSI illustrating the positive impact of the CSI on men’s mental health and their parenting. Key quantitative findings from the trial include a significant reduction in distress and in harsh parenting. Qualitative data from focus groups with male participants elaborate on these findings, and illustrate how the CSI, and specifically its focus on mindfulness and anger management practices, helped lower negative arousal, and contributed to a reduction in harsh parenting and an increase in positive father-child interactions. The impact of extreme adversity on the impact of the trial is also considered, including the collapse of the Lebanese economy and the COVID-19 pandemic, both of which had a particularly harsh impact on Lebanon’s Syrian and Palestinian populations.

Authors

• Kenneth E. Miller, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Presenting Author

• Maguy Arnous, War Child Lebanon

• Fadila Tossyeh, War Child Lebanon

• Alexandra Chen, Harvard University

• Ahmed El Hassan, War Child Lebanon

• Ahmad Saleh, War Child Lebanon

• Mark J. D. Jordans, University of Amsterdam