Male Involvement

"It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
    Fredrick Douglas

The focus of Male Involvement at UMCHS is to increase male and family involvement through leadership training, parenting classes, literacy involvement and other activities men enjoy.

Goals

Programs

  Family Reading Night

Family Reading Night is a collaboration of Umatilla-Morrow County Head Start (UMCHS) and the Elementary schools within area. The schools invite Head Start and Early Head Start families to participate in Family Reading Night while UMCHS provides books for the pre-school youth that attend. Seven Elementary schools work with UMCHS on this joint effort. The majority of the Family Reading Nights take place once a month. During Family Reading Nights, a nutrition snack or dinner is usually provided for families to enjoy.  After refreshments, families take time to read to each other.

Besides reading, certain schools offer other activities such as puppet shows, arts and crafts booths, story tellers and family board games.  Other schools have theme nights were children and parents dressed for the theme such as pajama night, camping night and cowboy night.

The Family Reading Nights are quite successful and lot of men attended these reading events. Before UMCHS was involved in Family Reading Night, schools only had enough books allocated for elementary students.  Now that UMCHS is involved, all the children received a free book and the pre-school youth left with a smile!

  Doctor Dad

The purpose of Doctor Dad is designed to help fathers learn basic health, identify and treat illness and prevent injury in their infant or toddler. Doctor Dad also helps men realize the unique role they play in the lives of their children. Children need their fathers to be involved in every aspect of their child’s life. Research shows that father involvement is critical to a child’s health and development. When dads are involved, their child is much less likely to suffer from an injury and more likely to got to their regular check ups.  The Doctor Dad workshop is offered periodically throughout the school year. The workshop typically takes three sessions to complete. Group time usually runs two hours.

  Preparing for Successful Fathering

The Successful Fathering parenting class generally runs from 10 to 12 weeks. Each session usually takes an hour or two. In this group men will explore and discuss topics that include the following:  Unique parenting style dad’s offer, creating a vision for ones child, bonding through play, father as a role model, spending alone time with your child, helping parents see eye to eye and creating a change plan. At each session parents will be provided practical handouts to use and watch actual case studies of father’s working with their children.