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Gabriel Carazo
ACA-Accredited Relationship Counsellor & Family Therapist · Founder, RAD DADS · Victorian Father of the Year
Identity doesn't arrive with the birth. It builds — through experience, through community, through a framework that names your distinct function. Most fathers never receive that framework. So their identity develops incompletely, or not at all, or along the wrong lines — defaulting to "helper" when they were built to be a world-opener.
The Six Stages of Father Activation Identity Development is a model I developed from clinical practice and from the research base of Paquette, Grossmann, and Pleck. It maps the journey every father is on — whether he knows it or not.
The Six Stages
Stage 1
Anticipation
The news has landed. Something is shifting — biologically, psychologically, in the background of every day. But there's no framework for what's happening. No language. No community. Just the anticipation of something enormous, with no map for it. This is where the Invisible Start begins.
Stage 2
Encounter
The baby is here. Everything is immediate and overwhelming. Competence is wildly uneven — she knows things you don't, she can do things faster, the system supports her learning and not yours. Deferral begins here. This is the most critical intervention window — the gap between Encounter and Engagement is where the Passenger Parenting Drift is formed.
Stage 3
Emergence
Something is starting to show up. You notice your child responds to you in a specific way. There are moments — usually in physical play, in adventure, in the bush — where your engagement lands differently than anyone else's. The activation relationship is beginning to emerge, though you don't have language for it yet.
Stage 4
Engagement
You have claimed something. A domain, a practice, a way of being with your child that is specifically yours. You're not helping anymore — you're parenting. You understand, at least intuitively, that you offer something different from your partner. You are somewhere on the spectrum between Passenger and Pilot. Most RAD DADS participants arrive here and accelerate through it.
Stage 5
Integration
The activation relationship and the attachment relationship are working together — in you, and in the family. You understand your distinct developmental function. You and your partner have a shared framework. Your children have two functional relational systems. You are a genuine co-pilot. This is the outcome RAD DADS programs target.
Stage 6
Generativity
You are now giving to other fathers what you found your way to. You mentor, model, hold space, share the framework. This is Generativity in Erikson's sense — the care that extends beyond your own family. Every man who shows up to RAD DADS programs and becomes a regular presence is performing Generativity for the fathers around him.
Where Are You?
Most fathers in Australia are sitting somewhere between Stage 2 and Stage 3 — not by choice, but by circumstance. The system left them without the framework that would have moved them forward. The communities that would have reflected their identity back to them don't exist. The validation they needed never arrived.
The stages are not a judgement. They are a map. And a map is most useful when you know where you are on it.
"You can't move toward what you can't see. The father identity you're looking for already exists — it's just not being reflected back to you. Community is the fastest path from passenger to co-pilot."
— Gabriel Carazo · RAD DADS
The assessment below will give you a clearer picture of where you are on the spectrum. And if you're finding that the stage model resonates — that you can see yourself in it and feel the gap between where you are and where you want to be — RAD DADS programs are specifically designed to accelerate that journey.