‘Ignored’: Australian father’s plea for change

An Australian father and doctor is pushing for a crucial change, arguing the current situation is hurting many new dads – and their families.

OPINION

I am smiling in the photos of me and my freshly arrived firstborn, but I remember how long it took for the smiles to feel real.

My heart was devoted to the little guy and his amazing mum, but the warmth of mutual enjoyment didn’t ignite for many long weeks.

There was just so much changing to do.

I put everything I had into that change for my new baby and his mum. I changed him a lot – literally – insert nappy jokes here. And I walked a lot of pavement miles, including to the local Maternal and Child Health (MCH) centre – where I felt like a third wheel.

This wasn’t the fault of the women looking after us. They greeted me and asked if I had any questions, and some even asked how I was. I invariably said, “fine thanks”.

But I wasn’t fine.

I was changing, and it was the hardest thing I have ever done.

Change is hard for most new parents, but there’s one simple change affecting their families that seems harder to make happen than it should be – the name on the signs out the front of our world-leading universal early family health centres.

With Victoria’s councils at the polls this month, it’s time this long-overdue municipal and public health change got sorted out.

I’m a peri-natal psychiatrist and founding member of the Australian Fatherhood Research Consortium. I know the harms of excluding fathers from the peri-natal and early family periods, and of the great benefits to maternal and child health of including all parents and caregivers from the get-go.

Dr Matthew Roberts with his baby.

Of course, you don’t need a pile of research papers to see this – it makes sense, it passes the pub test. Victoria is the only state that calls its universal early family health services Maternal and Child Health.

I first looked into this somewhat gingerly over 15 years ago, painfully aware of being a young man in a field of older women. It was explained to me that the MCH name in Victoria mattered, because only Victorian MCH nurses had midwifery training. And that was how they wanted it to stay, in recognition of their unique skills.

Also, it seemed there was a bit of anxiety that if the name changed, MCH nurses would be expected to do more for dads than they felt like they knew how to do.

Something needs to change in our health care system. Picture: iStock

I got along well with most MCH nurses, partly because we all wanted to work better with dads. Many expressed some awkwardness about the sign out the front, mirroring the puzzlement dads here in Victoria felt about it.

Then there were the LGBTQIA+ parents the sign ignored, accustomed already to exclusion perhaps, but no less puzzled by it.

So what’s stopping us? I’ve mentioned the political reasons; I wonder if also there’s a maternal part of many MCH nurses that just loves maternity so much, and wants to preserve that sense of a special place just for mums and their bubs.

Amid the stink of toxic patriarchy and #metoo, I get that a sanctuary for women who’ve just given birth is really important.

The question for us is what price that beautiful protective care comes at for those excluded.

Ironically, that exclusion goes on to impact maternal and child health, too. In new families, everyone affects everyone else, so no one is truly cared for until all are cared for.

Would it have helped me and my new family if the local centre was called a Child and Family Health Centre? Or as Jamal Hakim in the current Lord Mayoral elections is suggesting for the City of Melbourne, a Parental and Child Health Centre?

I think so, yes.

‘I was changing, and it was the hardest thing I have ever done’.

Matthew Roberts felt like a ‘third wheel’ after the birth of his child.

We were City of Melbourne residents at the time, and the nurses we met were terrific. But a third wheel I still felt. Who knows how much earlier the fire might have been lit in my new dad’s heart if I had felt less like an optional extra?

Clearly there are still some in MCH in 2024 who struggle with this essential change. I feel for them, sure their hearts are in the right place, but I have to side with the babies and their parents and caregivers the name currently lets down.

Babies have the toughest job on the planet, because they have to change the most in the shortest time. We that must try to keep up with them have the second toughest job.

Compared with that gruelling 24/7 learning curve, organisational change is not that hard.

So ask your local candidates if they support changing the name.

Because every child deserves to start life with all hearts healthily ablaze, fuelled and tended.

Dr Matthew Roberts is a Melbourne-based psychiatrist psychotherapist, teacher and writer. He works in private practice in Heidelberg and in public practice at Peninsula Health in Frankston, and teaches for Monash University. He also developed the role of Fatherhood Clinician in his private practice to meet the peri-natal and family-life needs of fathers and is a founding member of the Australian Fatherhood Research Consortium

Originally published as ‘Ignored’: Australian father’s plea for change