Researcher Spotlights are Q&As that shine a light on School of Human Ecology faculty members’ unique scholarship and research interests.
Alvin Thomas, an associate professor of Human Development & Family Studies and the Phyllis Northway Faculty Fellow, is a clinical psychologist who studies fatherhood and adolescent outcomes. Thomas’ scholarship focuses on the challenges fathers face around engagement and involvement with their children, and especially in rewriting the common narrative around Black fathers. He is interested in understanding how fathers affect the outcomes of children, adolescents, families and themselves.
Thomas also studies racism among youth on social media and how online spaces can affect the development of adolescents, particularly those who are Black and racially marginalized. He examines the types of support available to these youth in an effort to make their experiences with social media as meaningful as possible.
How did you become interested in your area of study?
During graduate school, I attended a seminar led by Cleopatra H. Caldwell, who was presenting on the Fathers and Sons Project in Flint, Michigan. She was conducting a 10-week-long, culturally relevant program connecting 8- to 12-year-old Black boys with their fathers. As she was talking, I thought to myself, “Oh my god, this is awesome. That’s what I want to do.” Apparently my mentor at the time, Laura Kohn-Wood, had been one of Cleo’s grad students years before, and she connected us. The rest is history: I started working with Cleo, she became my mentor, she’s still a very close friend of mine and she’s one of my heroes. Her work is phenomenal, and she’s just as wonderful a person.
What’s your motivation for doing this type of work, and how does it impact human well-being?
In the old phrase, “it takes a village to raise a child,” or in saying that the family is a microcosm of society, I think one piece we often miss is that the family system is a system, and every member of that family system is important.
When I was doing my clinical practice as a graduate student, I noticed that it was almost always a female relative bringing children in for therapy — very rarely did we see fathers or male relatives. It was mind blowing to me that we had fathers in the home or who were involved, but we as therapists were not the least bit interested or concerned about bringing them in unless the child or another family member raised a concern about the father.
But there was one case I remember that really blew my mind. I asked a mom, “Where’s dad? Can I speak to dad?” She said something along the lines of, “No, he’s not interested. He doesn’t want to be part of this.” And I thought, that can’t be true, because the kid talks about splitting time with his mom and his dad, so he’s an important part of the child’s life. So I said, “That’s OK, just give me his number. I’ll call him.” We called the dad and he came in immediately, didn’t have to coax him or anything. When he came in, I noticed that he was a physically imposing guy. We started talking about him and his son and how he wants to be involved, but he doesn’t have money because he can’t find a job and he can’t buy the things that he wants to buy for his kids. We talked about other things he could do that don’t cost money, like going to the park, which his son loved. The dad was surprised, and I reassured him that his son just wants to spend time with him. As we’re talking, the dad breaks down. He says, “I don’t know what to do with all of these soft things between myself and my son.” And that, to me, was the gift. He didn’t know what to do with those things, but that’s exactly why I was there as a therapist — to help him figure out how to manage those soft things.
About three weeks after that, his partner told me that things had improved, and in about 10 visits, mom and dad, who previously could not be in the same room together, were now both coming to sessions with the kids, and we had a final party to celebrate the end of therapy. That told me in no uncertain terms that if we can find ways to meet fathers as men first, as human beings first, we can support them in doing the work they want to do as fathers.
Where do you see an opportunity to shift a conversation?
I think it’s easy for us to dismiss certain groups of people as deficient because it lets us avoid difficult conversations about how we provide resources for people in need. If we assume men are not taking care of their families, we can just write them off and not have to worry about funding — we can punish them with policy, tarnish them with stereotypes and say they’re bad people.
We need to understand that, unless there’s some kind of psychological issue going on, no human being leaves a hospital with a baby thinking, “I am about to abandon this kid.” They’re all thinking, “Wow, look at this. This little person depends on me, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure this child has the best.” But some fathers, some mothers, some families are under chronic stress for so long that it depletes their motivation. It depletes their ability to cope and to connect correctly with their children so much that they believe their children are better off without them. If we can redirect the conversation to be more empathetic and think about how to support fathers and families, we can make some pretty deep inroads.
What has surprised you about working in your field?
About two years ago, I worked with Tova Walsh from UW–Madison’s Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work on a study with the African American Breastfeeding Network in Milwaukee. We were hosting focus groups with new and expectant Black fathers and mothers, and we came across a young father who did not reflect the prevailing narrative. The common assumption of someone in his situation might be that he’s a 20-something-year-old man who “knocked up” a Black woman, the baby would live with its mother after it was born, and that pattern would repeat with several other women.
Instead, the story we heard was of two young people who decided they were both going to finish high school. Then, the mother was going to stay at home with the child while the father worked on his college degree and held a couple of jobs at the same time. When he was done with his degree, they would switch — he would take on the stay-at-home tasks and most of the child care while she focused on her education, meaning the two of them would both end up with degrees. That’s the kind of sacrifice and careful thinking that I hear very often among fathers, among families, that we don’t typically hear in conversations about fatherhood. So, that makes me excited, but it also makes me angry that it is not the common narrative.
Who are some individuals who have influenced your work?
I think of people like Cleopatra H. Caldwell; I think of people like Ronald Mincy, who was one of the original co-principal investigators who started the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which has been going on for more than two decades and is one of the most renowned data collections on families, especially low-income Black families. I think of people like Alvin Poussaint, Phillip Bowman, Anderson J. Franklin, Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Vivian Gadsden, Harriette Pipes McAdoo, John L. McAdoo and others who set up the work for people like Cleo and others to follow. I think of E. Hill De Loney, who spent decades with Cleo doing work in Flint, Michigan connecting fathers and families. I think of those people and how their passion and desire for strengthening the community, strengthening Black families lived in their work and how it fed me and my interest. I think of some of my students who are coming up, like Eric Crawford, who is doing fatherhood research in his own right.
What’s an example of societal progress in recognizing the role of fathers?
Within the past couple of years, I have attended two international conferences where we discussed fatherhood research in prenatal and perinatal contexts. You can read how doctors in the 1950s and 1960s spoke about bringing fathers into maternity wards as the most abysmal thing that you could do, using horrible and demeaning language to describe the idea of allowing fathers into birthing spaces — it’s amazing that that’s where we were then and this is where we are now. I met some young scholars at these conferences who were from very disparate cultures, such as the U.K. and Malaysia, but they, too, are thinking about how important it is to bring fathers into prenatal and perinatal spaces. That tells me that although the field may not be moving as quickly as we want it to, it is moving, and that gives me hope.
What else should the Human Ecology community know about you?
I am interested in shifting policy. I want to be in spaces where I can remind policymakers to include the voices of fathers in their decision making. For example, I’ll be attending the annual meeting of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in Washington, D.C., where they’re going to hold a special meeting on fatherhood. I also recently spoke with the Office of the Surgeon General, which released an advisory on parents’ mental health, and they invited me as part of a select group to review that statement before it was made public. I write commentary and opinion pieces, such as my policy statement on fatherhood for the Scholars Strategy Network. And then there’s my work as the creator and host of The Black Fatherhood Podcast, along with a forthcoming show, The Black Fathers’ Pulse, which moves away from research and talks to fathers at the grassroots level. To me, these are the three key pieces that are important for redirecting the common narrative around fatherhood.