The main worries of dads-to-be are very practical,’ says Chris Stein, business development manager for men’s charity Future Men. ‘About 80 per cent of the time, they want to know where they park when they get to the hospital. That’s their main concern.’
But with up to 40 per cent of fathers reporting concerns about their mental health during the perinatal period, and one in ten believed to be suffering from depression, Future Men wants to help expectant fathers to also manage the emotional elements of becoming a dad.
The charity’s day-long Future Dads course aims to cover a range of topics for expectant fathers, including:
- Practical skills: Holding, feeding, bathing, changing and bonding with baby.
- Being a dad: Why dads are important and what kind of dad you want to be.
- Relationships: How having a baby can impact relationships with partner, friends and family.
- Self-care: How to look after physical and mental health and wellbeing.
‘Our programme addresses an identified need for fathers who do not receive any statutory offer of support,’ explains Chris, who is also a Future Dads course facilitator.
‘Even with parental mental health a wider societal issue, only fathers whose partners have been diagnosed with postnatal depression are eligible for a screening of their own mental health state. The course was established by assessing the needs of fathers to understand where the gaps in knowledge and skills were, to ensure activities addressed those gaps.
‘While, of course, practical care is extremely important, and competence can build confidence, they’ll have learned to hold, wind and change their baby within about 24 hours, and they will repeat those skills so often they’ll know them indelibly for the rest of their lives. People can get very caught up on the practical but not necessarily the relational side.’
MALE RELATIONSHIPS
The course offers a fathers-only environment to create a space where men are the focus in order to build confidence in emotional openness.
‘A statement frequently made by participants is that they derive benefit from being in a male-only environment to talk about fatherhood and share concerns and knowledge,’ Chris says.
‘Some guys will fist-bump each other at the end of a parenting course and then never see each other again. Women tend to be better at grouping around one another. That makes sense. They’re usually the ones who are taking significant periods of time off work to raise babies. But it means a lot of course content is not really directed at dads and they aren’t encouraged to talk about any particular questions or concerns they have about their own mental health and wellbeing.’
Course participants are encouraged to share contact details with each other and stay in touch. Chris says this social element is key to the work of the charity.
‘There have been multiple studies into male social connectedness, finding it really dips between 35 and 55, the time in which many are juggling furthering their careers with being a dad. So trying to help guys create social connections in that age range is very important,’ he explains.
This age range coincides with peak risk for suicide, with rates among men highest at ages 40 to 44. Fathers with mental health problems during the perinatal period are up to 47 times more likely to be classed as a suicide risk than at any other time.
‘We don’t talk about this on the course, but there is definitely an overlap in some of these pressures,’ Chris acknowledges. ‘They’re likely to be correlative rather than causal, but they are something that we as an organisation are very aware of.’
GOING ONLINE
The Future Dads course is typically run in hospitals or Children’s Centres, allowing participants to meet midwives and, often, tour birthing suites and labour wards.
‘Once you’re in there, dads start to ask what things are, what they do and where things happen. The stimulation of the environment triggers a whole bunch of questions, which is always fascinating to watch,’ Chris explains.
During the pandemic, however, the course has not been allowed to run in hospitals, and the charity has developed a two-hour online course instead. Delivery of 20 online sessions was funded by the South-East London Clinical Commissioning Group.
Unable to replicate many practical care aspects of the face-to-face programme, course facilitators used the new online format to focus even more on the mental health and wellbeing side of fatherhood, using interactive materials and breakout rooms to replicate the experience of in-person delivery and emphasising the Five Ways to Well-being as approved by the NHS (see Further information).
‘Online delivery isn’t ideal, but it’s a solution to a challenge,’ Chris says. ‘We have substituted some practical skills, like changing the nappy on a doll, with short videos from the NHS. In future, we want to look at online-based tools to get across some aspects of practical care beyond videos, like featuring a mock-up of a cot filmed on an iPad, where participants would have to identify and remove risk factors. Face-to-face is not going to happen for some time.’
In the meantime, the online course focuses more on the characteristics of fatherhood – what type of father participants want to be, and how to manage relationships with partners, friends, colleagues and themselves.
The charity is currently hoping to secure funding from other Clinical Commissioning Groups to provide further online courses.
Chris believes that addressing the emotional needs of fathers could help create a sea-change in gender roles. ‘In order to reach true equality between the sexes in child-rearing, society needs to move beyond dominant archetypes of men as provider or protector and women as nurturing and caring,’ he says. ‘We have to empower fathers to take on more caring roles, and this is a skill fathers can learn.’
CASE STUDY: Peter Sen
Peter Sen went on a face-to-face iteration of the Future Dads course in February 2020 after seeing a flyer when at the hospital for a scan.
‘I hadn’t given too much thought to what my role was in the whole pregnancy, or with the little one to come,’ he says. ‘It was more the functional side that really drew me to the course. I was absolutely petrified of my responsibilities; how to hold the baby, how to change a nappy.
‘I was really surprised because I came away with much more than that. It was incredibly interactive, but more from the point of view of discussions about what your role is as a dad than about how to do nappies.’
The course began with a series of case studies from a father’s perspective, with participants discussing their responses to different approaches.
‘We also did group exercises on words like “friend”, “role model”, “disciplinarian” or “provider” where you had to rank them from lowest to highest priority in terms of what your child would expect from you at different ages,’ Peter adds.
‘Then we talked about what items you actually need at the start of a baby’s life, to take away some of that stress of having to buy the newest, all-singing, all-dancing brands.’
He believes this more holistic approach to considering fatherhood gave him skills which have already lasted far beyond the early days of his baby’s life.
‘I went in thinking it would mainly help stop me freaking out during labour, but it really made me think about how I will interact with my son over the course of his life, and how I can be present, supportive and patient, for my partner and my child, now and in the future.’
FURTHER INFORMATION
- Five Steps to Mental Wellbeing: https://bit.ly/3JaXh0Q