Bringing home baby.

At the end of this month’s series on working fatherhood, I return to the beginning.?

Or, not really the beginning (since there are many), but a beginning; the point at which baby comes home from the hospital.?

For fathers looking to take a more active role in family life, there’s arguably nothing so confronting as the birth and post-partum period, when biological differences seem to trump every best intention and hope for gender equity.

In the long-term, fatherhood is beneficial to men’s wellbeing and mental health. But in the short term, it is a risk factor. It represents a major, potentially destabilising, change in a man’s life.

But then, have we actually done anything to prepare new fathers, or wider society, for the shock of this moment??

Sadly, men are so often working things out in isolation. Which is both scary, and risky.?

Despite this, today’s fathers are stepping up to parent in a way we just haven’t seen in previous generations. Just imagine what’s possible with a little support.

The Working Fatherhood Series

Over the past month, I've been exploring how fatherhood plays out in the modern workplace. The previous articles are: We Need to Talk About Dads, Men at Work: Making Fatherhood Functional, and In the Battle of the Sexes, Families Lose.

The men I've spoken to are senior leaders and middle management in fields such as academia, the armed forces, consulting, engineering, law, recruitment, sales, and tech. They are university-educated professionals, married or in long-term partnerships, and had children of primary school age or younger. They’re primarily (but not exclusively) UK-based, and majority heterosexual. For this article in particular, they did not include families through adoption or surrogacy.

Biology makes a difference – but we can prepare better

Basic biology has an impact on the roles that parents play in family life.

The awkward reality of human propagation is that our brains are too big and our pelvises are too narrow. So relative to other mammals, we’re born very immature (or there’s no way we’d make it out), very vulnerable, and very dependent on our caregivers. Human babies are, frankly, hard work, and it may be some time after birth before they even realise they’re not still a part of mum but a being in their own right.

And more than that, “It can be confronting,” says Sarah Sternberg, of Movember, “for couples who’ve prided themselves on their progressive values, on their equal division of labour, to bump up against a biological reality that relegates dad for the post-partum period (which is often when norms about division of labour get set), to the 'second parent''.

In my interviews I stumbled across a curious taboo. Whilst the overwhelming majority of fathers supported mum’s decision to breastfeed, many of them also found it a barrier to forming a connection with the baby. “They only want mum at first – because that’s where the food is.”

Nationally breastfeeding rates are low, but they are higher in middle class families who make up the bulk of the men I interviewed. Given that we know that fathers’ support makes a difference to whether or not mothers choose to breastfeed, there’s a lot of emphasis on having a positive attitude about breastfeeding. Having done it myself, I’ll say that for our family, I think breastfeeding was well worth it, for a host of reasons, and that yes, I definitely needed my husband to be positive and supportive about it. Still, it’s easy to overlook the fact that dads can be struggling to find their role when baby arrives. “Dad gets told he can load the dishwasher”, says Sternberg. She points out that second-time fathers are typically happier than first-timers, perhaps because they’ve already found their place in the family dynamic, and can support older children while mum deals with a newborn.?

(Side note; that might well include the dishwasher, or the laundry. My own recollection of having a rather sicky newborn is that 90% of the workload really was laundry. At least it felt like it.)?

In the hormonal overload and sleep-deprived haze of baby’s first few months, we don’t really have the ideal conditions for a calm and curious conversation about other people’s experiences. When mum is tearfully trying to get baby to latch it’s probably not a good time to say, “if we just used bottles I would feel I had a more equivalent role”. In fact, most of the men I spoke to supported mum’s decision to breastfeed and also lamented the fact that there was something their partner could do that they just couldn’t help with. And, not or. (This comes up a lot).?

My recommendation is absolutely not that families should switch to formula for the sake of gender equity. But how transformative would it be to acknowledge that fathers might find it difficult and prepare for that reality ahead of time? We could all do with the heads-up.?

It was also the case amongst my interviewees that men who’d formed very secure bonds with their own caregivers in early childhood were best equipped to find their place as a father as well as to tolerate children’s early preferences for the other parent. One dad said, “my own father was older, and he was naughty about stopping off for after-work drinks and not helping out. But I was the apple of my mum’s eye, and he was very relaxed about that – I guess he was on his second family and knew how it all worked. So when that happened for my wife, it was just such a lovely thing for me to see.”

For others who’ve not felt the same kind of security in early life, it might not seem so simple or natural. One of the men I spoke to found that fatherhood vividly recalled some of his own difficult childhood experiences. (Philippa Perry writes that it’s often at the age we found it most difficult to be a child, that we are the hardest on our own kids). He found it so difficult to bond with his daughter in the first months of her life that he began to drink heavily, dangerously – to block the whole experience out. I mention this not to rattle the prospective parents reading this but because he himself wanted to offer a message of hope. He hadn’t heard anything about men experiencing these kinds of feelings, and still less about anyone overcoming them. Reading an article from another father who had struggled, and that suggested it was possible to build that bond later on, gave him reason to hope. “I didn’t become a father until she was 8 months old.”?

Fatherhood doesn’t necessarily begin in the delivery room.

You don’t become a father overnight.

It can help to realise that patrescence – the process of becoming a father – and matresence, that of becoming a mother, aren’t necessarily simultaneous. Nor is it a single, instantaneous moment. A pregnant woman might feel like a mum from the moment of conception, she might take a while to get over the shock, or she might be a mother already who is longing for her children to arrive. Becoming a father isn’t necessarily an event that happens once and forever more in the moment of birth, either. (Blended families and families through adoption and surrogacy, of course, know this already.)

So if patrescence is more like a road to be travelled, than an event to spectate, it also has more in common with a rocky downhill bike track than a nice straight running track.??

“I think I became a dad through a series of ‘oh, shit’ moments,” said one dad. Finding out he was having twins was one of them: “there was so much extra STUFF to consider” - and that process of preparation kick-started his experience of becoming a father. Others included the moment of birth, the first time they began to smile at about 6 weeks old, the babies’ first illnesses, and so on to the present and beyond. (I can only imagine that ‘not telling dad you’re staying over’ will be one of them, too.)?

Fatherhood and motherhood have their own rhythms. There are differences, and at first, fathers may not be able to do everything for the baby that a birth mother can – but where we end up is so very much more important than who gets out of the starting blocks first.

Healthcare policy and approach sidelines men

Whilst it is possible – and necessary – to make peace with our biological reality, there are plenty of other entirely artificial barriers for engaged fathers to overcome.

Fathers have the status of visitors in perinatal services. In fact, at the peak of the Covid outbreaks, they were often banned from hospital premises.?

Every father in this study understood and supported the medical necessity to focus on pregnant women and labouring mothers. But a welcoming start for dads it is not. In particular, birth might go well (“so we went for a home birth second time around – mostly so they couldn’t shut me out, to be honest”), or it might be unexpectedly difficult. Fathers who’ve been at their partners bedside during long and dangerous labours have found that their paternity leave hasn’t been extended, and there’s been no support offered afterwards. “It took five days… so then I got a week and then that was that, back to the office.”?

Whilst a GP-led mental health check at 6 weeks has recently been introduced for mums, there’s no such automatic support for fathers. A number of participants would, as mothers, almost certainly been diagnosed with PTSD or postnatal depression. Many of us are unaware that postnatal depression affects as many as 1 in 10 new fathers.

Even long after mother and baby have been discharged, a maternalist approach in healthcare routinely overlooks or actively excludes fathers. Databases in schools and healthcare often lack the basic functionality of recording their name.

My husband had his own experience of this, when taking our accident-prone, renegade daughter to the ER while I stayed at home with our son. Nurses didn’t bother to introduce themselves to my husband, but did ask for my name – even though I was a good ten miles away at the time.?

I can sort of understand this when it’s a one-off, in the context of a busy hospital ward and a societal norm for mums to be the primary caregivers. But I was shocked to hear about it in the context of a father who had given up work to take care of his disabled son. He had formal carer’s status, was in receipt of carer’s allowance, worked with the same medical staff week in week out, and often attended multiple appointments every day of the week. Yet still, staff would routinely ask him to “put mum on the phone” to discuss follow-up from an appointment that he, not she, had attended.?

That’s downright offensive. And it obliterates the value we put it on father’s care.

Fathers’ care is profoundly meaningful.

Men playing an active role in family life is good for: gender equality, helping women back into the workplace, reducing the load on mothers, creating fair and equal partnerships in couples, improving children’s physical and mental health, providing role models, reducing the pay gap, and on, and on.

But you know what? Caring for our loved ones is profoundly meaningful in and of itself.

Fathers enormously value time spent with their children. Not just for the 'big ticket' occasions, the sports days or the weekend bike ride; some of their most treasured moments happened while loading the dishwasher (with “help”), pulling on socks, or taking the dog out. The golden moments were also… quotidian.

I mentioned the story of an outstandingly brave man who told me about his unhappiness in the first months of fatherhood. The birth had been traumatic, and his leave grossly insufficient for him and his family to recover and adjust. He had struggled to find a role in the home beyond bringing in the money. He received, and asked for, little or no support. Not only was he drinking heavily, morning and night, he was also looking up the finer points of his life insurance policy, to work out the exact circumstances in which it would still pay out to his partner.

His turning point? He stumbled across an article in which another dad shared that he’d had the same feelings too, and had overcome them. And then -?

His baby girl started to smile whenever he walked into the room.

What we can do.

Recommendations for working dads

1. If you believe you may be suffering with depression, or PTSD, speak to a GP without delay. Ensuring your own health is the best possible way you can provide for your family. Movember also offers an extensive list of support services. And as always: if you're ever worried that someone's life (including your own) is in immediate danger, call 999 or go directly to emergency services.
2. Recognise that patrescence is a process, not an event. It will unfold in its own time, which may or may not follow that of your partner. The direction of travel is more important than where, and when, you begin.
3. Read the baby books. Many of those addressed to men are (I’m told) terrible. Stick to a classic title that your partner may already have on her dressing table, and focus especially on the post-birth chapters. Information is your passport to participation, to finding your role.
4. Take baby for a walk while mum rests / has a shower / stares quietly out of the window. Most babies love the pram, but if they’re not in the mood to be pleased, screaming is far less oppressive out of doors. Exercise, fresh air, and taking charge solo, even if just for twenty minutes, will be good for everybody.
5. Discuss possible upcoming challenges ahead of time with your partner and your peers (of whatever gender; a mix being preferable). It will be easier to share difficulties if they arise if you’ve already acknowledged the possibility of them arising.
6. Do some reflection, therapy or coaching to explore the model of fatherhood that you inherited, and the one you wish to perpetuate. Prepare to review unresolved feelings from your own childhood that might otherwise catch you unawares as you embark on family life yourself.
7. Get the emotional support you need, from more sources than just your partner (who is likely to be following the same rhythm of ups and downs as you.) For myself, I was surprised and delighted by men’s willingness to talk, if only they were given the invitation.?

Recommendations for all

1. Proactively offer men emotional support when they become fathers. Make a note of baby’s due date and set a reminder to check in with them in your calendar. Do not assume that they will raise the problems they are facing unless you invite the conversation.“What changes have you noticed in your partner? What changes have you felt in yourself?”“When do you feel most connected to your partner and child? When do you feel the least connected?”“What worries you?”“What do you disagree on? What’s behind that for you both?”?“What information do you need, but don’t have? Where could you find it? How could you sense-check it?”
2. Support the expansion of workplace paternity leave policies regardless of their direct relevance to you. They benefit dads, families, their children, and everyone who comes into contact with them. Sign the petition.
3. Systems are built, not born. If you commission, operate, or build databases of any kind that handle information about children and babies (schools, hospitals, homework apps, after-school clubs…) make sure it can record at least two co-primary caregivers. Let’s not build nonsensical barriers to fatherhood because the computer ‘says no’.?

Hello! I'm Tamzin Foster. I'm an Executive Coach working with senior leaders. This includes, but is not limited to, working fathers.

This is the concluding article in a series on working fatherhood that I have published over the past month. You can check out the others, and hear what I have to say on a variety of other topics, here.

If you would like to engage a professional coach to support your own development or that of your team, I'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch at [email protected]. I am available for both coaching and speaking engagements.

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