Guest blog: Trauma-Informed Father Inclusion in Scottish Family Support

Trauma-Informed Approaches to Father Inclusion: A Framework for Family Support in Scotland, by Douglas Guest.

Most people would agree that fathers matter to children. Yet across Scotland’s health, education, and social work services, fathers are routinely invisible — present in their children’s lives, but absent from the professionals who support those children. When they do appear, it’s often through a lens of risk rather than resource.

This reflection looks deeper into the why? — and not surprisingly finds the answer is more complicated, and more revealing, than you might expect.

Drawing on fifteen years working across Fathers Network Scotland, Home-Start Scotland, and Circle, Douglas traces how a particular knot of history, culture, and institutional habit has kept fathers out of the frame. Patriarchy excluded men from caring roles; feminism rightly challenged men’s violence and absence; and the services that grew out of that struggle were largely shaped around mothers and children. The result is a quiet paradox: services designed to protect families can end up reinforcing the very absence they were created to address.

But this reflection goes further than mapping the problem. It argues that what looks like a policy failure is also a trauma story — one that runs across generations. Many of the fathers who are hardest to reach carry wounds from their own childhoods, wounds that services rarely recognise or respond to. Without that recognition, cycles of disconnection and trauma repeat.

Challenging, generous, and grounded in real experience, this is a paper that refuses easy answers. It wrestles honestly with questions of accountability, male violence, race, and class, while making a compelling case that including fathers isn’t a “men’s issue” — it’s a children’s rights issue, a poverty issue, and a question of what kind of families and communities Scotland wants to build.

The ultimate goal of father inclusion extends beyond fixing current services. It requires supporting boys to become healthy, emotionally literate men who can be the fathers they wish to be. This is inherently intergenerational work, seeking to interrupt cycles of trauma and to create conditions where the next generation can thrive.

The path forward requires several concrete actions:

• Systematic inclusion of fathers’ voices in service design and evaluation
• Workforce development to build skills and challenge biases around father engagement
• Reform of perinatal, health, education, and social work services to be genuinely father-inclusive
• Investment in preventive work with boys and young men to support positive masculinity
• Development of trauma-informed services that can engage fathers who have caused harm
• Research to document what works and to build the evidence base
• Leadership from policymakers to maintain focus and accountability

Perhaps most fundamentally, change requires recognizing that father inclusion is not a special interest or niche concern but a matter of social justice and children’s rights. Every child deserves relationships with parents and family members who are supported to offer their best. Creating conditions where this becomes possible benefits us all.

Click here to read the full paper.