Faces of Risk and Resilience: Fathers and Their Families

The global Covid-19 pandemic and heightened focus on systemic racism in the USA provide differential lenses for considering contexts of risk and resilience as they apply to individual fathers and their families. Intersections of race, class, culture, personal characteristics, and access to resources uniquely shape fathers’ resilience as they navigate risks to themselves and their families. The interdependence of families with other community members, family work, role enactments, gender, and policy highlights the centrality of fathers’ executive function in conjunction with available resources to shape the quality of individual father–child relationships and the overall wellbeing of fathers and their families. This commentary focuses on the current pandemic and racism as risk factors for families, the ways in which fathers are uniquely affected by these risks, the ways in which fathers exhibit resilience in the face of these adversities, and implications for future research about the ways in which fathers’ gendered behaviors and attitudes may ultimately change as a consequence of the pandemic and systemic racism.