For more than a decade, Ron Hauenstein has been teaching young men how to be better fathers. Hauenstein is the founder and executive director of the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative, which recently marked its 10th anniversary.
This article has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Ron Hauenstein: I grew up in a little farming town of Reardan, 20 miles west of Spokane. Graduated high school there in 1970. Reardan was like Mayberry RFD, a town very committed to its youth. And in the 1960s, it was very isolated from a lot of things going on in the world, including teen pregnancy and divorce. Growing up, everybody, in my experience, had a mom and a dad. Families all stayed together. And if a guy got a girl pregnant, he married her, sometimes the next day. It was a code of honor among men. And sadly, it seems to have been lost.
I became a volunteer at the women's shelter, homeless shelter for women and children, run by the Union Gospel Mission in 2008. I did it for 10 years. And it was a fascinating experience that taught me a lot about homelessness, addiction, single parenthood. And I saw all these moms with two and three and four kids, sometimes two and three and four different dads, quite different than Reardan. I eventually came to the conclusion that fatherlessness was the solution to this problem.
DN: Hauenstein says two events in 2016 led him to believe that he needed to take action.
RH: The first was a sex sting. The Washington State troopers posted an ad on Craigslist and the trooper that was writing this ad pretended to be a mother of three children, ages 12, 11, and 6. She offered sex with these children in exchange for gifts. A thousand people responded to that ad. It was horrible. And they began luring these people, basically, to a moment where they could meet these fictitious children. Thirteen people got arrested. These men showed up with condoms and candy bars. It was just staggering to me that men would do this to children and it really was an experience that stuck with me.
Then, beginning August 29, 2016, in the next two weeks, three toddlers died at the hands of their mother's boyfriends in Spokane. Totally unrelated incidents, but a two-year-old, 16 months old, and 24 days old all died from abuse or violence. There was a candlelight vigil in Riverfront Park that I went to. I got connected to an organization called Our Kids, Our Business, as a result of that. Those two tragedies, combined with what happened January 20, was really what drove me to do all this.
DN: He and his wife created their new organization, the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative.
RH: In early 2018, we purchased a curriculum from the National Fatherhood Initiative called 24:7 Dad. It's an evidence-based curriculum, which means there's social science data that says if dads take these classes, they change their behavior. So we had researched other options and felt this was the one that seemed to be the best, most strongly supported.
And I got connected to a church in northwest Spokane, a recovery church called Family of Faith, Pastor Danny Green. He helped us recruit 12 students for that class. We graduated 11 out of 12. This is a comprehensive training. It's 12 sessions, two hours each, so 24 hours of training. Not many dads get any training, let alone 24 hours.
The classes are a great combination of introspection, character change and growth through group conversation, asking some questions, getting men to reflect, and deciding to make some changes in themselves, combined with a lot of parenting tips, fathering suggestions. The men that take our classes tell us the thing that keeps them coming back is the camaraderie. We put a lot of emphasis on making them feel welcome, honoring them by listening to their stories. We feed them. We have taught that class now 96 times. We've issued 832 certificates of completion with a 93% graduation rate. Blows my mind. It's a real tribute to the men.
And to our donors, we couldn't do this without financial support. Becky (his wife) and I put $200 in the bank in the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative checking account to start this in July of 2017. Our budget today is about $450,000 a year. I think that's a better rate of return than Bitcoin.
DN: What is the selling point for these young men, and I guess sometimes older men, to come and take the 24:7 Dad program?
RH: Nearly all the dads we deal with today are non-custodial. They're not living with their children or they have a shared parenting arrangement. Many are court ordered to take a parenting class. We also have a lot of men coming out of prison on work release, guys wearing ankle monitors, and I'm not sure what they expect, but they know they need something in their lives. That's really encouraging that these are men who want to change, which I think is a very strong factor in our 93% graduation rate, that they are willing to look at themselves.
Many dads are very remorseful about their past and they're willing to change. A quick example: One dad is in divorce court, holds up his diploma, and his ex-wife says, so you took a fathering class, big deal. He says, "You know what our four-year-old daughter says to me now? She says, daddy, you don't get mad at us like you used to. You don't yell at us anymore." And he said, I made that decision at the end of the second class. He was in our classrooms just four hours, something about that atmosphere, that reflection. How did my dad treat me? How have I treated my children? Listening to other dads, their stories. He said to himself, I'm not going to yell at my kids anymore. We don't teach that. We've never said, don't yell at your kids. We don't think we have to. And it's really, really significant when a man makes an internal choice like that, on his own, unprompted, and not forced on him by a government or a court. That decision will stick.
We think what we're doing is proactive, preventing a lot of problems, and generational. His children are going to likely parent the way they were parented.
So we believe we're breaking cycles of abuse and neglect in parenting models in Spokane.
DN: How would you counsel us to do a better job of teaching men to be fathers?
RH: I think in our culture today, men are lost, confused, scared, intimidated. The whole male-female relationship has gotten wacky. They don't know what's expected of them. The suicide rate among men is four times that of women. The whole world of work is upside down. So I think someone who will simply listen to a man. Give him an opportunity to share what's on his heart, what his fears are, what his concerns are.
There are very few places in society today where men can come and have the conversations they have in our classrooms. Many times, dads are connected to a government agency, CPS, for example, and they just obviously are not going to speak as freely and openly as they could if I'm not talking to somebody in the government. So it's a safe place and it's very therapeutic.
We don't allow mom bashing, okay? Guys tiptoe up to that door. But to have a chance to tell my story in context, to not be judged by what I've done, to be welcomed with a friendly face, to have a curriculum that is flexible enough to orient to my needs, to hear my questions, respond to my concerns, that's the sense of community that we have developed here. And it's what keeps dads coming back. And it's very, very vital in a man's life. Men rediscover purpose taking our classes. A man who loses his purpose is at best an unproductive man, at worst a dangerous man.
So many of these men have lost connection to their family, many times through their own behavior. But they want it back. They want to get back in the lives of their children again and they're willing to take great steps to do it. We're a voice of encouragement and hope and content to help them do that. We're in a world where a lot of young men are acting out and shooting people and doing a lot of these things.
DN: How do you view a lot of these things that are going on, done by young men?
RH: Well, there's data that says the overwhelming majority, like 90% of school shooters, grew up fatherless. So what went on there? I think the issue is one of identity, that they were never taught what it means to be a man. They never got to be heard. I think most of these cases, there is pent-up anger, and through bad fathering, bad parenting, bullying, whatever experience it was, they've been shoved aside in society. And now that they've had it, I'm going to make a statement and you're going to know who I am. I think it's a tragic, tragic situation. And it's preventable. We're not going to stop 100%.
A question I asked in trying to come up with solutions to community problems was these issues seem so big. How do you reach people who don't want to hear your message? The piece that I've come to is I can do something one person at a time and that's about as good as anybody can expect. Now I have the privilege of leading an organization one person at a time.
