This video course pack brings together two insightful and comprehensive seminars aimed at helping practitioners navigate the evolving roles of men in contemporary society. It offers an integrated exploration of the intersection between modern fatherhood and masculinity, focusing on the deep shifts in gender expectations and the psychological dilemmas that men face today.

The first course, “Modern Fatherhood: A Balancing Act of Traditional Expectations and Changing Gender Norms,” delves into the critical role fathers play in family dynamics and attachment theory. While traditional views of fathers often emphasized financial support and protection, contemporary research now underscores their importance as both emotional and practical caregivers. This course offers a deep dive into the changing roles of fathers across diverse family structures, including LGBTQ+ families, and explores the impact of societal, cultural, and intergenerational expectations. Through case studies, participants will learn how to address attachment issues and familial challenges in therapeutic settings.

The second course, “Masculinity & The Dilemma of Vulnerability: Working Affirmatively with Male Clients,” focuses on how traditional masculine norms affect the mental health of men and boys. Participants will explore the challenges men face in expressing vulnerability, often exacerbated by societal norms that equate masculinity with stoicism, strength, and emotional detachment. Using practical therapeutic approaches such as Compassion Focused Therapy and Internal Family Systems Therapy, this course provides strategies for working with shame-prone male clients, enabling them to confront the emotional and psychological blocks caused by toxic masculinity.

With a combination of theoretical exploration, case vignettes, and actionable therapeutic strategies, this video course pack equips practitioners with the skills necessary to work effectively with male clients, addressing the complexities of both fatherhood and masculinity in today’s society.

Learning Objectives Across Both Courses:

By completing both video courses, participants will be able to:

• Discuss the relationship between perfectionistic ideals of parenting and its relationship to mental disorders such as anxiety disorder, personality disorder, OCD and depression
• Explain anankastic (perfectionistic) Personality Disorder and its influence on parenting
• Explain how to develop a therapeutic action plan when helping clients plagued by maternal anxiety and overwhelming feelings of shame, guilt and inadequacy
• Discuss the gender role socialisation and how the dominant ways of demonstrating masculinity and maintaining male privilege in our culture are created, acknowledging that these dynamics are often used as a means of disconnecting from others
• Describe the ways these stereotypical behaviours can lead to avoidant ways of coping and how might this affect our work as mental health professionals supporting men
• Identify ways of working with shame-prone male clients who may be trying to avoid vulnerability and who may be extremely sensitive to power dynamics in the therapeutic relationship

This video resource pack contains two complete workshops (CPD/CE credits: 6) that cover:

Part 1: Modern fatherhood: A balancing act of traditional expectations and changing gender norms (Dr Gwen Adshead & Tom Higgins, CPD/CE credits: 3)

Traditionally, the template for a stable family has comprised of two neat compartments: fathers take care of physical needs (finance, safety of family) while mothers provide the nurturing and emotional anchor. This compartmentalisation has meant that parenting as a domain of therapeutic study has tended to focus on mothers and mothering while focus on the role of fathers has been negligible. Fatherhood has practically been relegated to the background as a peripheral component of family life. This relative absence of attention is also present in the literature on parent-child attachment which centres on the mother as the primary caregiver.

However, a lot of contemporary research has now focused on the role of fathers in creating secure attachment in children. Our understanding of the crucial role of fathers has evolved tremendously since Bowlby’s research, which focused on the mother as the bond of attachment that nurtures and keeps children safe from danger while the attachment bond with the father promotes exploration and gives confidence to venture forth into the world. In today’s families though, the father is not a distant figure but an equal partner who provides both financial security and emotional anchor, just like the mother, and shares the responsibility of raising a family equally. In many blended and non-heterosexual families especially, fathers are not just the breadwinners but also the nurturers and primary caregivers.

In this seminar, we explore more recent studies of fathers and fathering from the perspective of Attachment theory; but also in the context of debates about sex role stereotyping, gender norms in different cultures, and changing ideas about the binary nature of sex and gender in terms of family structures and divisions of labour, both physical and emotional.

At this intellectually stimulating webinar, which will be of interest to psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors across modalities, Dr Gwen Adshead will:

• Review the origins of Attachment theory in terms of ethology and psychanalysis and discuss the gender exclusive nature of early work on the topic
• Review later and more recent studies of attachment between fathers and their children; and the intersection with gender role stereotypes and cultural expectations of different sexes
• Discuss the importance of the fathering role in terms of attachment security

In addition, in recent decades there have been enormous changes in gender roles with men no longer seen as the career-focused breadwinner and women confined to a role of homemaker and caregiver. Alongside, there have been significant legislative and societal changes in the lives of people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Fertility treatment and gay couples adopting children have changed what a family traditionally looks like.

Using this as the starting point, in the second part of the webinar, Tom Higgins will use three case vignettes and examples to discuss how modern conceptions of parental role manifest in the context of therapy seeking and childhood trauma. The three vignettes will examine some of these societal changes and explore what this means for fatherhood. We will explore:

• The impact on both parents in a heterosexual relationship of parenting roles that differ significantly from traditional gender norms
• What fatherhood means in a family for a gay male couple and their children
• Parenting roles in a family for a lesbian couple and their children 

Some of the pertinent themes in contemporary family settings explored in the three vignettes will include:

• An examination of attachment relationships in the family
• Inter-generational and cultural expectations about parenting roles
• The impact of societal pressure on families
• The impact of childhood trauma and other difficulties that lead members of each family to seek therapy
• Reflection on changes that came about for the three families (in these vignettes) during therapy

Learning objectives:

• Explain the construct of fatherhood in three different family contexts/ constellations, using case examples
• Discuss questions about attachment security and sex role stereotypes
• Discuss the difficulties in attachment, parenting and perception of gender roles that lead members of the three families in the case vignettes to seek psychotherapeutic support