DadTime™ Influence: Urie Bronfenbrenner

Dec 8

DADTIME INFLUENCE

Urie Bronfenbrenner

Urie Bronfenbrenner is the father of Ecological Systems Theory, which posits that a child can only be understood by looking at the world around them.

Before Bronfenbrenner, scientists often studied children in sterile laboratories. He pushed back against this, arguing that child psychology had become "the science of strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults."

Instead, he visualized the environment as a set of nested structures, comparing it to a set of Russian nesting dolls, moving from the most intimate setting to the broadest:

The Microsystem: The immediate environment where the child lives (family, school, peers).
The Mesosystem: The connections between these immediate environments (e.g., how a dad’s involvement at home impacts the child’s success at school).
The Exosystem: Environments the child doesn't enter but that affect them (e.g., a parent’s stressful workplace).
The Macrosystem: Larger cultural values, customs, and laws.

DadTime™ positively impacts across all four of Bronfenbrenner’s systems:

Strengthening the Microsystem: In this weekly third space, dads create a secure base where the child feels safe to explore, enhancing the quality of their most critical immediate environment.
Building the Mesosystem: Dads spend intentional time outside of the home with their kids. When they bring new habits home, they create consistency across the mesosystem.
Supporting the Exosystem: Dads gain a community of other dads, combating isolation and positively impacting the emotional environment.
Shifting the Macrosystem: DadTime actively advances new realities of modern fatherhood, creating dad-centered spaces that give kids essential social and emotional learning.