For the first time since becoming a single father, Cole Balfour will spend Christmas without his son.
Normally, Balfour spends Christmas with his son and his son’s mother, whom he separated from two years ago. This year, they’ll be visiting his son’s maternal grandparents in Ontario while Balfour stays in B.C. with his family.
Balfour will miss his son, but he is happy with the plan. It shows he and his son’s mother are finding ways to work together post-separation.
The couple has always had a 50-50 custody arrangement. But at the beginning, Balfour was unsure of himself. He did not know what activities to do with his son, or how to balance work and parenting. His self-reliant tendencies turned into self-isolation.
“It’s so easy to not know how to reach out,” he said. “I wish I would have done more of that at the start. I think it really would have helped.”
Balfour ultimately found support through the 1Up Single Parent Resource Centre in Victoria. There, he met other fathers who have helped him gain confidence as a parent.
Balfour is lucky. Those who work with single fathers say support for single dads is scarce, and that single fathers deserve more attention, especially as fathers become increasingly involved with child care.
‘Invisible category’
According to census data, nearly one in five Canadian children under the age of 15 lived in a single parent family in 2021.
Most of these families are headed by single mothers. But the number of single-father families has grown from 17 per cent of single-parent families in 1991 to nearly 23 per cent in 2021.
Single fathers are an “invisible category of the population,” said Shawkat Shareef, a sociology professor at Yukon University in Whitehorse.
But single dads often make themselves invisible, says Shareef, who is a single father himself to three sons.
“Even single fathers themselves don’t talk about themselves that much,” he said.
Shareef recently surveyed single fathers in the Yukon about their social, legal and economic needs — the first Canadian research survey to do so, he says.
All the single fathers in his research said there needs to be some government financial programs specifically for single fathers. Provinces regularly fund programs for single mothers, including social groups and legal navigation services. But single fathers do not get the same resources, he says.
“If you have resources for single mothers, you should have resources for single fathers as well,” he said.
‘Equally important’
Dante Tomada sees these concerns everyday with the single fathers he supports. Tomada founded the Modern Man Family Project more than six years ago to help fathers, particularly those going through a separation or divorce. When he went through his own separation 12 years ago, he struggled to get legal and financial help.
Each month, he meets with approximately 80 Canadian and American men, some in-person and some virtually.
Men need a place to learn about parenting, Tomada says. “How a woman parents and how a man parents, I think, are two different things,” he said. Women are often more noticeably nurturing and affectionate, while fathers may be more inclined to show their care by teaching their children practical skills, he says.
“They’re both equally important.”
In general, fathers want to be more actively involved with child care than fathers in past generations, says Drew Soleyn, director at DadCentral, a Canadian organization that produces resources and mentoring for fathers and trains organizations to deliver its programs.
Data back this up. According to Statistics Canada, about half of Canadian fathers reported helping with child care in 2015, up from a third in 1986.
Soleyn has seen more single fathers using the organization’s resources in the past five years. He attributes this partly to relationship breakdown during the pandemic and partly to fathers’ desire to spend more time with their children.
“The number one criterion for satisfaction of fathers is seeing their children grow and overcome difficulties or challenges,” said Soleyn.
“When dads are not given the opportunity to engage with the child throughout their developmental age and stages, they actually miss out on what’s one of the most satisfying aspects of their fatherhood role.”
Need for ‘validation’
For Jody Chandler in Vancouver, not being with his seven-year-old son is like “losing part of [his] soul.”
Chandler sees his son and his son’s mother regularly and they often spend holidays together. But the distance is hard. He worries his son will think that he has been abandoned, and he does not want his son to feel like he has to choose between parents.
Chandler, who is mentored through DadCentral, says there needs to be more spaces where fathers can speak honestly about parenting challenges and more educational resources for fathers.
“When shit hits the fan, it would be nice to have another dad or somebody that’s been through it or knows how to stay emotionally regulated,” he said.
Shareef, from Yukon University, says that when single fathers are supported, everyone in the family benefits.
“Men can take care of the children almost as much as their mothers can, given the opportunity and the resources and the attention they deserve from society.”
Children typically do better in two-parent families where there are no major conflicts, he says. “Single parenthood should not be [a] desirable future plan,” he said.
“But if you cannot avoid it, try to make that separation, that divorce, that isolation, as kind, as benevolent, as supportive for the children and for your ex-spouse. After all, forgiveness is divine.”
In Victoria, Cole Balfour says he can see how his son benefits from having parents who are learning to work together while living separately.
“I’ll always fight for my son, but I don’t want him to see me fighting,” he said.
He has grown as an individual, too. He and his son have established routines. And he’s taking a master’s in counselling online.
In the fight to become a better father, he has found strength from the dads he’s met.
“I know I’m a great dad,” he said. “It’s just sometimes that external validation helps, even if I don’t want to need it.”
