Abstract
Religion and spirituality are important areas of fatherhood. This chapter provides an overview of how religion and spirituality might influence fathers and the impact on fathering their children. In particular, we highlight how children’s moral development may be situated within religious and spiritual contexts and how fathers are well-positioned to teach their children perspective-taking, social negotiation, scaffolding, self-regulation, and to become more attuned to their conscience. The chapter provides clinical applications of how religious and spiritual factors can be integrated into clinical assessment, individual, couples, and family counseling. Ample future directions of research are provided given the current state of the literature, such as obtaining updated descriptive national data on the religious and spiritual practices of fathers, correlational studies that examine paternal religiosity in relation to child outcomes, and developing new theories of father’s love that deepen existing frameworks of father involvement.
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Isacco, A., Delany, J.J. (2022). Religion, Spirituality, and Fatherhood. In: Molloy, S., Azzam, P., Isacco, A. (eds) Handbook of the Psychology of Fatherhood. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14498-1_20
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