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