Forget about advice booklets on how to be a good dad. For the first time NZ dads celebrating the birth of a new baby will be greeted and acknowledged at the hospital by a resource produced by other fathers.
Father & Child brings you the New Babies Edition, free of charge, through the Bounty Birth Pack in hospitals in Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington!
The mag is in typical Father & Child style: a mix of factual articles and first-hand stories, although the latter provide the bulk for this special edition. What’s it like to be a new dad? To add a new baby to the family? Or to start a second family? Are dads still expected to be main providers? Fathers talk about these unique experiences and describe that unique mix of joy, wonder and worries.
The design is sponsored by Christchurch-based Strategy Advertising and Design, an award-winning firm considered to be a leader in the design market. This first issue was made possible by donations from the Canterbury Community Trust, ASB Community Trust and the Lion Foundation.
This first issue has a print run of 15,000 copies, which is expected to last 6 months at current birth rates. The Trust aims to make this publication ongoing and nationwide. For this, advertising support will be needed.

by Brendon Smith

On the 2nd of March, 2008 Father and Child Trust Auckland, ‘came out’ in public. The event was the Toddler Day Out at Waitakere’s Trust Stadium. We were convinced that it was a better networking event than the Teddy Bear’s Picnic. In the end, we were lucky that another Trust helper attended Auckland’s usually more popular, domain based fun day.
After meeting and being given a handy sand-pit, by Annie Gordon of Barnardos, one of the organisers, we knew our visitors would be able to chat, while the toddlers built castles. With a giant bouncy Castle and busy dance and activity stage, the fun was everywhere, and we struggled to keep up with the visitors. Among the Dads and mums were other stand representatives who had noticed us. We got a lot of ‘finally’ and ‘thank-goodness’.
At one stage, we were visited by the Prime Minister Hon. Helen Clark, who asked. ‘And who are these people?’ to which I replied ‘We are the Father and Child Trust, we aim to educate and encourage all Dads. The PM replied quickly ‘Well, you encourage them to take up their paternal leave, now, if they want it.’ and I said ‘Yes, thanks.’
Then, her assistant noticed my buddy Ian, recently returned from Australia, mainly to live here while he brings up his children, with his baby asleep on his shoulder, beside me. They had to take the opportunity, three fast grins were assumed and the flash went pop!
We were glad to be noticed, but I was not sure if I wanted to be seen in that photograph. In fact, we met so many good contacts it needed to be a special person to stand out. Then, when I came across massage therapist Eva Scherer I was sold. She had me happily being photographed outside her pink drop tent and then smiling, sitting right inside!
There I had been, feeling reluctant in a photo–op. with a VIP, yet happy to be pink…

Want to be involved with Auckland Father & Child? Contact Brendon at:
brendon@fatherandchild.org.nz
Or ph 525 1690

10 Years of Father & Child Trust

As the Father & Child Trust celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, Harald Breiding-Buss reflects on how it came about and what difference it made.

Having a good idea is one thing, putting it into practice quite another. And then to still keep the idea going after 10 years is yet another ballgame.

Calling that first meeting back in August 1997 was rather nerve-wrecking. I had asked five other guys to come along to discuss forming an organisation, most of them members of a playgroup for at-home dads which I had known for a few years. We all got lots out of knowing other guys in that situation, but would that be enough to take it one step further, and would people be prepared to make the commitment to get it going? Would they really find it worth their while, or would I start hearing excuses after a few months that people are too busy and so on?

I needn’t have worried. After 10 years some of those original guys are still with it—and have become friends in the process.

What we wanted to create was something that would offer fathers support – simply being taken seriously in a caregiving role, be it fulltime or part-time. ‘Fathering’ was a fairly big issue around about that time, with statistics being thrown around that New Zealand children were a ‘fatherless’ generation. The official answer to that was that men need to be told to be better fathers.

To someone at home with his children day after day that is an odd, rather patronising concept. At the time my main worry was how to get more time for myself, not even more time with my children. A TV ‘documentary’ at the time, featuring Sean Fitzpatrick, took 1 ½ hours to tell fathers what and what not to do, and in all this the already invisible involved father became even more invisible.

In our day-to-day experience, if you are an involved father you are completely ignored. For midwives, Plunket nurses and other ‘health professionals’ you as good as don’t exist. The stereotype about what you should be as a guy was proving stronger than what they actually encountered in New Zealand houses and families. While New Zealand’s rates of solo fatherhood and the time men spend around children was soaring through the roof, the political discussion remained on the uninvolved dad – it was safe to keep blaming men, when the actual problems were with support and health systems.

So our mission was to offer support for fathers where needed, but mainly to educate those service providers that every baby and child has two parents. It is simply not good enough to give all the support and education to one parent only. In all our publications and activities we would presume involved fatherhood, and look for obstacles if that was not the case. The onus is not on men to prove that they are good fathers – it is on the professionals to show that they care about fathers as much as they care about mothers.

Awareness that there are big obstacles for fathers has grown over the last 10 years. The ‘deadbeat dad’ is not exactly dead, but it is no longer automatically assumed that a man’s natural inclination is to stay out of childcare as much as they possibly can. But as yet, that awareness has not shown itself to make any difference in practice.

Father & Child magazine played a role in bringing that awareness about. The first issue was produced in December 1997, but it didn’t become a printed publication available through bookstores until 2002. Its mission was and is to tell fathers’ stories, both the good and the bad. Amateurs that we all were we did our own investigations and prominently covered important research.

When Father & Child magazine moved from a photocopied publication to a printed one, it also drew more attention from people outside Christchurch, and some of them have come to occupy key roles in the Trust. In 2005 two non-Christchurch members were elected to the Trust’s governing body, the Board, for the first time. Auckland-based Brendon Smith has since become a paid staff member, the Trust’s first outside Christchurch, paving the way for a permanent presence in Auckland. Wellington’s Mark Stephenson represents the Trust in the all-important political circus of our capital and is set to lead a Trust research project on single dads.

Initially our focus was on the maternity sector: Those months before and after the birth of a new baby. It is a window of opportunity to reach parents as often they are actively looking for information. It is also the time when fathers most need to be included as equal parents and decision makers so this can become the pattern for years to come. Sadly, the maternity sector was, and still is, the time where least effort is made to include fathers.

So the Trust started some work in antenatal classes to give fathers the opportunity to talk about their own issues – not just supporting the mother, but identifying what support they themselves need and should have, and what their own concerns and feelings about birth and the months after really are.

One of the first discoveries in doing that was that the guys tended to be rather quiet as long as they were in the same room as the women. Once they were amongst themselves, and after about one minute getting over the awkwardness of finding yourself in a ‘men’s group’, it was extremely hard not to go overtime because the guys were talking so much.

The fathers’ way of supporting their partners during pregnancy was (and is) not to burden the expecting mothers with their own feelings, expectations and issues. Disagreeing with your partner at this stage would seem unsupportive, and so the men rather say nothing. When by themselves, however, it turned out that the guys have very clear ideas about what they would like their family to look like in six months, a year or two years’ time. Most commonly such plans involved an increased share of the caregiving as time progressed.

Then, and now, young children are seen as a women’s issue, and men are simply not asked about what they’d like to see, and neither are they given the skills to be competent caregivers. Just trying to get the midwife or Plunket nurse to visit at a time when the father can also be around can be a real mission, and is certainly not in the average midwife’s brief anyway. Instead of increasing the childcare share, a new father is increasingly missing out, and being much more than ‘mum’s helper’ becomes ever harder to realise.

The Trust also looked at the issue of teenage fathers – a group of parents you never used to hear about. In the public eye teenage parenthood means single motherhood for young women and they might as well have been impregnated by airborne pollination for all we would hear about the fathers. This has definitely changed, and the Trust can take credit for this. While still almost completely ignored by social services, teenage fatherhood is no longer an exotic concept or issue. When we started our teenage fathers project there was still an assumption that the fathers of the children of teenage mothers were several years older than them, sometimes even in their thirties, and that ‘teenage fathers’ as such hardly existed. But the Trust told the stories of some of them, including some single teenage fathers.

There were always individuals that happily took the message on board in their practice. One Christchurch community worker, who had been working with teenage mums for nearly 20 years, said that she now realises that she needed to ‘widen her horizon’. A Plunket worker, working with postnatally depressed women, changed her practice to not only tell fathers how to support their partners, but by also simply asking them: “and how are you in all this?” At least one lecturer at a Christchurch institution that is training midwives makes sure that her trainees are exposed to fathers issues, by regularly inviting the Trust to do a session with the trainees and giving other information.

But when such people leave their jobs, their efforts at providing an inclusive approach go with them. To get an inclusive approach working everywhere would require training and backup support for nurses, midwives, parent educators and so many other people working with families , that it would in turn require a much bigger agency than us to provide it. But since government does not see the necessity for such an approach, there is simply no money for it. And so we keep plodding away at an individual level, and, given our size, rather successfully.

Just being around helps a lot. It’s not so much about whether you can provide, for example, a staff training session, but whether you can provide it again after one, two or even three years. Including dads is not just a fad—it’s a long-term issue, and much of our job is to prevent it from being filed away under ‘been there, done that’.

Next: Going the Distance

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.

21 August 2007 marks the official date when the Father & Child Trust has been in existence as an incorporated body for 10 years. The occasion will be marked on the day of the Trust’s Annual General Meeting in late June.
Father & Child Trust is based in Christchurch, but since 2006 there has also been a small home-based office in Mt Wellington, Auckland, with some funding attached to it.
The Trust evolved from a playgroup of mainly at-home fathers which started in 1994, and has worked towards better inclusion of fathers in health, social and community services ever since. The Trust funds and owns Father & Child magazine.
It was the Trust who put teenage fathers on the agenda and achieved a better recognition of these ‘other’ teenage parents.
The Trust has also pioneered working with fathers ante– and postnatally, and produced a ‘Dads and Babies’ resource for maternity health providers.
A special anniversary issue of Father & Child magazine is planned.
We produced NZ’s only ‘Dads and Babies Guide’ and since 2003, the national ‘Father and Child’ magazine.
As NZ’s longest established Fathers group, we now provide local support in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch while encouraging Dads all over NZ!
Father and Child Trust are funded by Lotto and Community Grants, Private Donations and magazine subscriptions.

New Fathers Misunderstood Says Nelson Study

A study by the Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology and the Public Health Service has found that new fathers are worried about different things than what their partners think they are worried about!

The new fathers participating in the study ranked three issues most important of all: the lack of involvement in the transition process to parenthood, a stressed relationship with the partner, and the joys of being a dad.

However, the mothers in the study thought their men are at least just as concerned with money, sex and the gender of the baby – issues that were mentioned in the men’s interviews, but not even ranked as important.

“The data ranked as important by the women (but not by the men) tends to reflect commonly held views about how men respond to fatherhood.” write researchers David Mitchell and Philip Chapman.

“This raises questions about discourse that is dominant, where it originates and whose interests it reflects.”
The researchers acknowledge the limitations of their study, which involved only 11 couples who were interviewed in gender-specific groups before the birth and 6 months after.

The fathers in the study also widely criticised not being involved by midwives, Plunket nurses or other providers and ranked this as one of the top issues.

Father & Child Trust Coordinator Harald Breiding-Buss, who has worked with men in antenatal classes for 9 years, agrees with the findings. “The failure of ‘maternity’ services to address, or even know about, new fathers real concerns is a major contributing factor to relationships making an irreversible turn for the worse around this time”, he says.

“We’re having a 21st century maternity service system based on 1950′s stereotypical beliefs.”

Previous research by the Mitchell/Chapman team had found similar discrepancies between views and needs that men expressed to their interviewers, and perceptions held by maternity health professionals

Father Initiatives Snubbed by Government Funders

Funding for father services in New Zealand remains marginal after both national and local government funders have declined parting with money for solid project proposals by the Father & Child Trust.

The Trust is the only legal entity in New Zealand providing on-the-ground services specifically for fathers and the children in their care.

S.K.I.P., a fund administered by the Ministry of Social Development, declined an application for renewal of funding for the Trust’s parent education project, targeting specifically marginalised groups of fathers, after having provided financial support since 2004.

The position was subsequently made redundant.

A research project aiming to establish support needs of solo fathers was declined by the ‘Blue Skies Fund’, a Families Commission fund.

And shortly before Christmas the Christchurch City Council decided not to support a Trust project on parent education for inmates at Christchurch Prison’s Youth Unit for funding through the Ministry of Youth Development’s ‘Youth Development Partnership Fund’.

In all three cases the reason given was that the funders felt applications did not match the criteria closely enough.

The Trust has never received significant amounts of government funding in its 10 year history with the exception of two years of SKIP funding worth about $55,000.

Its teenage fathers survey, for example, had been funded by a Netherlands-based Early Childhood Development agency because no monies could be obtained in New Zealand.