There’s a lot for any couple or single parent to prepare for when adopting a child, but for fathers, who are often not seen as the primary parent, there can be unique challenges to navigate.
Here are some tips from adoptive fathers on how to find support and what to expect.
Active Involvement
As absent fathers are a reality in many families (The National Fatherhood Initiative cites U.S. Census Bureau data that shows nearly one in four children live without a biological, step or adoptive father in the home), men looking to adopt a child may face the stigma of limited father involvement.
A good way to reduce this stigma is to parent with intentionality.
“Don’t be in the background and just be a support person,” says Ryan Senters, who has a Ph.D. in psychology and is a parent to 11 children—nine of whom are adopted. “You need to be an active and intentional father.”
Senters is also a mentor and support system to 500 more children though Ohana, his nonprofit for foster children.
Being an active and intentional father, as Senters calls it, is about taking the honor and responsibility of being a dad seriously and creating activities in which you and your child can spend time together playing, exercising and learning.
“Intentionality means you have a plan of how you’re going to give them instruction and structure, but then you give them opportunities to do that,” Senters explains.
Senters says he does this in his own home by making a family breakfast with the kids on Sundays. More than a year ago, Senters began teaching the kids how to do basic breakfast tasks like make pancakes, make bacon and fry eggs. Now, he says the kids can do it all on their own.
Avoiding Isolation
Despite being up to the task, some fathers might find parenting isolating. Neil Tift is a father of three, grandfather of 12 and a foster father of many.
While Tift says things are improving, people working in family-centric organizations may not be prepared to see men as caretakers, which can lead to dads feeling like they don’t belong in a care environment or can’t access the same resources as moms can.
“Both foster dads and adoptive dads can feel isolated at times, and it’s usually not intentional—it’s just that’s sometimes with how the system works,” Tift says.
Tift’s children are now adults, but his experiences with adopting two of his children and parenting led him to embark on a lifetime of advocacy including authorship, founding a nonprofit and more. Today, Tift is the training director for the Native American Fatherhood and Families Association.
Finding Support
Talking to other parents who are in similar circumstances can help parents find solutions and understanding from someone they can relate to.
After families adopt, Kathy Santangelo, an adoption counselor for The Cradle—a nonprofit adoption agency which provides counseling and educational support—asks each family if they’d be willing to take part in the agency’s mentorship program. When future families are looking for guidance in a specific area, The Cradle can connect them with someone who understands what they need and where they’re coming from.
Recently, Santangelo says her organization was able to connect a single man who was looking to adopt with another “Cradle dad” who had adopted a child as a single man and previously signed up as a mentor.
In Tift’s experience, both as a father and as an advocate, he says he’s found that men can have a harder time reaching out for support.
He’s found it helpful to build social activities around a common interest.
“We play poker, and while we’re sitting around playing poker, we’re talking about our hopes, and our fears, and our dreams, and our jobs, and our kids and our grandkids—but if we just say, ‘Let’s get together in Manny’s garage and talk,’ guys wouldn’t show up,” Tift says.
Tift also encourages fathers looking for support to be willing to make the first move.
When he first adopted his eldest daughter, he built a network by giving his contact information to her school and asking the school to give his number to other fathers of children with disabilities or children adopted internationally. After hearing from three local dads with similar experiences, Tift initiated monthly lunches with them.
“It really helped with some of our concerns, some of our fears,” Tift says.
Tips for Adoptive Parents
Senters advises parents to be ready to be flexible and adjust their expectations to where a child might be developmentally.
“Our eighth-grade son came in at a second grade reading level, and after two years, he has caught up,” Senters shares. “If we would have come in with the expectation that, ‘Hey, you need to be doing all this homework or you’re not going to play sports,’ that’s not fair to them. You have to meet the child where they’re at.”
Senters and Tift also recommend talking to the child and educating yourself independently about the child’s background and cultural differences between your own upbringing and the child’s experiences.
Tift, whose eldest daughter had experienced food insecurity before she was adopted, shares that it took almost a year for her to not feel the need to hoard food.
“If it (the adoption) is cross-cultural, you are going to need to be really sensitive to [understand] and support that,” Tift says.
