The slow, weeks-long reckoning that followed my son’s birth three months ago was something no book had prepared me for. What crept up on me was a dawning existential realisation, somewhere between one overnight feed and the next, that everything had quietly reorganised itself while I was too exhausted to notice.
For nearly a decade I’ve been building my identity as a men’s health psychologist and researcher – testing it, recalibrating, working out how I want to operate. By the time my son, Arty, arrived, I knew that version of myself reasonably well. What I hadn’t reckoned with was the second identity that came with him: one that needed to find its place inside a life that was already fully furnished. This one didn’t come with a mentor, a peer group who’d been through it or years of iteration to draw on. It just arrived, and I was expected to know what to do with it.
Crafting this new part of my identity was especially difficult because my only guide consisted mostly of a list of what not to be. Don’t be emotionally unavailable. Don’t be just the bath-time and weekend dad. Don’t be the breadwinner who treats fatherhood as secondary. What became painfully clear to me was that new dads today clearly lack a playbook for how to tackle the often-contradictory demands of established models of fatherhood alongside modern-day expectations.
Our new report from the Movember Institute of Men’s Health grapples with this tension. Two in five of the 1,216 fathers we surveyed didn’t want to father the way they were fathered, and more than 75% said they valued being a good dad above career success.
The desire to do fatherhood differently is unmistakably there. The architecture to support it is not. From the moment my wife told people she was pregnant she received an A-Z of practical guidance, what to expect and plan for week by week, specific and actionable. I mostly got well-meaning but vague cautionary tales: “Things are about to change, you’d better get ready.” Most of us can sense good fatherhood when we see it; we’ve been lucky enough to experience it or see it in the fictional fathers from books and television we may have wished for. But sensing it and building it are different things.
Modern mothers have been navigating the complex task of balancing roles as professional and parent for decades. This conversation must remain alive in our workplaces, advocacy and policy efforts grounded in gender equality, not least because women still carry a disproportionate share of the caregiving load. But what is often missing from this conversation is considering the family as a system of inter-related individuals. One of the most effective ways to improve outcomes for mothers is to support fathers to genuinely step up as equal caregivers, not emotionally present in the abstract, but practically capable with the long nights, the cooking, the mental load. When I’m out pushing a pram or seen changing a nappy in public, the mild surprise on people’s faces tells me the bar is not just set low, in many contexts it doesn’t exist.
What I’ve learned over the past three months is that incorporating a new identity, much like a good marriage, requires compromise. Things will be lost, others gained. And in the middle of the economic uncertainty most young families are navigating today, heaping more pressure on new dads to simply do more, without any structural support to help them through the seismic transition, cannot be the answer. When we asked whether Australian society celebrates and supports involved dads, 54% of fathers responded “no” or “unsure”.
It is wishful thinking to assume that generations of fathers will absorb a new model of fatherhood by osmosis, while the systems around them remain unchanged. This is especially the case for many men – including myself – who lack their own father to turn to. The structures that surround new fathers from health services to workplaces and community programs were simply not designed with them in mind. Men are already in those spaces. What’s needed is the will to turn those systems toward them.
Of the Australian fathers we surveyed, three in five told us no health professional asked about their mental health at any point during pregnancy or in the 12 months after birth. Once mum and bub have been attended to, a few genuine minutes checking in on how dad is coping could be quietly lifesaving for the whole family. The government funds coordinated mothers’ groups that are a lifeline for many women. Fathers would benefit from the same investment. I’m grateful that my wife has been inundated with invitations for events and social groups as she embarks on this journey as I know that when she’s doing well, I am too. The relative silence on my end is stark.
We have a generation of Australian fathers who want to do this differently – more than 72% of dads told us they are already more involved in their children’s daily care than their fathers were, and 77% say fatherhood has helped them express love and vulnerability more openly. The direction is right. What these men need now is not more exhortations to show up. They need systems, check-ins, community and honest conversation to find their footing.
Dr Zac Seidler is a clinical psychologist, global director of research at Movember and associate professor with Orygen at the University of Melbourne. The Movember Institute of Men’s Health Fatherhood Survey is based on a nationally representative sample of more than 1,200 Australian fathers with children under 10
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