Currently, Western European societies are experiencing in-depth societal changes in favour of women career and autonomy. These transformations are inevitably affecting families. As a result, fathers can sometimes feel isolated or a bit lost when confronted with child or children under 16 years old. Fathers find themselves with questions, difficulties and sometimes issues remaining unanswered. They often feel powerless and some seek out points of reference, information and even support. As defined by the Council of Europe in 2006, "parenting involves a set of mental and emotional rearrangements that allow adults to play their role of parents, that is to say, to meet the needs of their child on the physical, emotional, intellectual and social". Parenting satisfies the children's development needs, provides material and emotional resources, basic care and safety of the child to become a complete and autonomous grown-up. Actions to support parenting are conducted, but support for fathers should be strengthened in rural areas. Indeed, institutional solutions from the country partners are going in the right direction but have shown their limits. Because support should be based on a variety of initiatives from different actors, PPE project gathers a number of different European non-profit organizations willing to contribute to the empowering and engagement of the new generation of fathers in Europe. PPE project aims to renew the family-oriented support activities in a ludic way. To do so, the professionals and project developers will be trained to reinforce social and innovative competences in order to collectively create an escape game for fathers willing to develop their knowledge and skills as parents. This collective and innovative game including digital devices about fathers’ role will trigger their knowledge, motivation and willingness to take a leap into the other already-existing family-oriented activities. PPE project will deal with the diversity of families from rural areas without stigmatization (single-parent, lone-parent, divorced and recomposed families, etc.). The transnational approach is essential for this project as a comparative approach will be made depending on the field of activity of the country partner and their national context, and the Norwegian context will shed light upon the best practices and policies in favour of fathers. The PPE project reflects the diversity of the European regions: France and Ireland (Western Europe), Spain (Southern part), Lithuania and Norway (Nordic and Eastern part). The implementation and completion of this project will contribute to social inclusion by offering to women and men, through their balanced roles of parents, same power to shape society and their own lives. It will ensure that everyone including the fathers enjoy the same opportunities and rights in all areas of life, most particularly in the family context. The results of this project will be integrated into the training program offered by the partners and/or selected stakeholders and will be available at local, regional, national and European level on open data to be replicated and adapted to other territories in other countries. The immediate impact will be the new impulse for professionals/project developers to initiate and develop more relevant family-oriented activities answering the fathers' needs with an innovative perspective. Hopefully, this new dynamic will be shared in the project partners and disseminated throughout Europe. The creation of a shared platform will ensure long-lasting effects by offering to the participants (the two target groups) a place to share experiences related to fatherhood, promote the innovate escape game and conduct further activities in the field at national and European level and to enable the development and the prosperity of new father-oriented activities.
Based on the observation that many parenting support actions in France and in other European countries are mainly addressed to mothers, and that fathers do not always feel legitimate in carrying out this participatory process aimed at increasing their skills and parental knowledge (for lack of information, for fear of being the only father, etc.), the regional federation of Rural Families wanted to try to provide a concrete response, through the establishment of a European project making possible for fathers of children the opportunity to fully assume their role as parents. The objective is to develop the degree of involvement of fathers in the life of their children and thus promote the family well-being and the development of each of its members. The originality of the approach lies in the playful format used in the context of this project. Indeed, the project aims to design an Escape Game for educational purposes intended for fathers, adapted to the content of the training to reinforce the constitutive skills of parenthood and to the stakes of this one. As the leader of the project, the regional federation of Rural Families of Pays de la Loire collaborated with the following organizations, from 5 countries of the European Union which represent, by their geographical distribution, the cultural and political diversity with which are addressed family issues: VsI Skudutiskio akademija - Lithuania, Formacion para el desarrollo e inserción - Spain, Brainlog - Norway, I and F Education and Development Limited - Ireland. The European “Positive Paternal Engagement” project pursued the following objectives: identify the needs and/or difficulties of fathers in their daily role in rural areas, define the parenting skills to be developed, particularly with fathers, design and test Educational escapes games on these specific skills. This project took place over 30 months, between October 1, 2018 and March 30, 2021. In accordance with the provisional project, and despite the health context of the year 2020, the PPE project was able to take place and achieve the objectives initially set. A kick-off meeting was held in Angers on November 26 and 27 2018 to officially launch the project activities. This meeting made it possible to get to know the participating organizations as well as the interlocutors better, thanks to multiple icebreakers and networking games. 15 project developers met during the training week in Norway from June 17 to 21, 2019 in Flåm during which project developers from 5 countries were able to train in the exercise and challenges of gamification (also called gamification ). The participants, made up of professionals or volunteers interested in the theme of parenthood - more precisely, fatherhood - were able to familiarize themselves with the policies and actions to support parenting that existed in the consortium's partner countries. The training week was an opportunity to experience an Escape Game and then to start thinking about and preparing the Escapes Games to be carried out in each partner country, according to the contexts and specificities of each country. The participants learned from each other's mutual experiences, while discovering the social and societal realities of other European countries. They also developed linguistic and intercultural skills, validated by the delivery of a Europass passport. Once the training was completed, these parenting experts got down to the preparation (from the design phase to the phase of realization and experimentation of the game with an audience) of the Escape Game deployed in each country with families interested in spending a fun and enjoyable time together, while developing parenting skills. These experiments were thus able to bring together around 100 families in total, coming from predominantly rural areas. Finally, a final coordination meeting was offered via Teams on October 15, 2020, replacing the trip initially planned to Dublin (Ireland). This meeting made it possible in particular to finalize the production of the project result: the methodological guide aimed at compiling the experiments and knowledge acquired thanks to this project. The latter is aimed at parenting professionals who want to know more about the opportunity to use games to boost parenting skills in a more fun and innovative format. It is accessible in each language of the countries making up the consortium. Ultimately, the consortium was able to integrate these games into their program of activities for families, and disseminate this opportunity to their networks of local and associative partners (social services, associations, NGOs, European networks, etc.).