New dads like me want to do fatherhood differently. Where’s our support? |
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........