Waitakere City has held a ‘fathering week’ in the lead-up to Fathers Day starting on Monday 27 August.
Events included a panel discussion on supporting new fathers, a father and son hike in the Waitakeres and a ‘training night’ for dads to play games with their pre-schoolers.
Auckland University lecturer Warwick Pudney pointed out that there is no specific ‘fathering service’ in Waitakere City.

Wellington researcher Sarah Farquhar has issues a new comprehensive web-based resource about male pre-school teachers , which includes the proceedings of the first ‘Men in Early Childhood Care and Teaching Summit’ held in Christchurch in March this year.
Called a ‘Record of Challenges, Changes and Thinking’ it includes both political analysis and stories by male pre-school teachers .
The resource is available online from the childforum web site www.childforum.com, or write to PO Box 58-078 , Porirua.

An Auckland meeting on men’s rights and issues ended with a call for a ‘Men’s Rights Department’ at government level, similar to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.
The meeting was called by Julie Whitehouse of ‘Single Parents New Zealand’, who was alarmed by the stories she heard from men during picnics and outings of her group.
She said that in her experience, most of the men in her groups had been subject to unfounded accusations in order to force separation from their children.
The meeting, which included representatives from men’s groups as well as individual men’s rights campaigners, heard the stories of some fathers who now have day-to-day care of their children after protracted fights to have them removed from unsafe situations. The fathers reported that they had been often be thwarted by false allegations against them and a misuse of the Domestic Violence Act.
Many attendees also called for a revamp of the Family Court and the review of the Domestic Purposes Benefit.

A new New Zealand-based discussion web site has been launched for ‘DIY Fathers’ on Fathers Day. Wellington dads Scott Lancaster and Stefan Korn, both fathers of young babies, wanted to create a web site ‘particularly relevant for fathers, that fathers can hook into to find out about childcare – for example why your baby’s not sleeping at night’.
“I think males process information differently,” says Scott. “My wife would read a book on childcare and intuitively absorb everything she needed to know, whereas I’d be reading and re-reading. I’m not really a book person, but I do like to get information online, and that’s one of the motivators for creating diyfather.com.”

The Department of Corrections has surveyed its female prisoners on how many have children under five and what their respective prison terms were, but dads were not asked.
A proposed law change will allow children under two years of age to live with their imprisoned mothers if certain conditions are met, but the bill does not allow for such an option for fathers, regardless of the circumstances.
August saw the highest prison population ever recorded in New Zealand at nearly 8,300 people, despite over a decade of declining crime rates.
20% of the surveyed women has children under five, and about 10% had children under two. Two thirds of the surveyed mothers had minimum security classification, and just over half served less than two years.

The Father & Child project to establish an ongoing ‘New Dads Edition’ of Father & Child magazine has come closer to realisation after a significant funding boost from the Canterbury Community Trust as well as support from the Lion Foundation.
Other funders have also been approached to support seed funding for a special edition of Father & Child whicht will be distributed through the ‘Bounty Birth Pack’ to hospitals nationwide.
Eventually the publication, aimed to have 52 full-colour pages, is to become self-funding largely through advertising. It will cover issues and stories around childbirth and the early months from a father’s point of view.
Father & Child Trust had produced a New Dads Edition in 2000, which was distributed through Canterbury only and could not be sustained as an ongoing publication at the time.