Supporting fathers and fathers-to-be: Insights from research and practice

Content type
Webinar
Event date

28 August 2024, 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm (AEDT)

Project
Presenters

Harley Hall, Vincent Mancini, Tim Moss, Melissa Willoughby, Rosie Schellen, Sean Martin

Partners
Location

Online

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About this webinar

The role of fathers has evolved over time. In recent years, Australian fathers have become more involved in childcare and their children’s lives. It’s estimated that modern Australian fathers spend triple the amount of time with their children than their fathers spent with them. Dads are no longer solely thought of as providers – they are now more involved in hands-on parenting duties such as playing with, feeding and bathing their children. With fathers taking on more active parenting roles, and with the role of fathers continuing to evolve, there is an increasing need to understand how to best support them and their mental health and in so doing promote the wellbeing of their children.

To celebrate Father’s Day, we will be broadcasting a recording of the hugely popular fathering symposium from the AIFS 2024 Conference. After the broadcast, the presenters will join us for a 30-minute live Q&A facilitated by Dr Sean Martin, the Program Lead of the Ten to Men Longitudinal Study of Men’s Health at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

The fathering symposium covered a range of topics that included the importance of fathers’ health for the development and wellbeing of children and families, and the relationship between fathering behaviours and child mental health. Harley Hall, a Ngarrindjeri-Kokatha/Wirangu father, and child and family partner of Emerging Minds, also shared his experience of engaging with child and family services and co-designing the documentary, Rebuilding our shields: Sharing the stories of deadly dads. For more information on each of the presentations please refer to their relevant abstracts.

In the webinar you will:

  • develop an understanding of contemporary Australian and international evidence on fathers and the role fathers play in child health and development
  • learn how to best support fathers in the care and parenting of their children and increase father involvement in child and parent services
  • gain insights on the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fathers and how you can better support them in your work.

This webinar will interest practitioners who work with or encounter fathers and their families. Practitioners do not need to have specialist training in fathering or men’s health.

We hope you can join us for this important discussion on supporting fathers and fathers-to-be.

This webinar is co-produced by CFCA and Emerging Minds in a series focusing on children’s mental health. They are working together as part of the Emerging Minds: National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, which is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.


We encourage you to test your system before the webinar, and read our Frequently Asked Questions. A recording of this presentation will be made available shortly after the broadcast.

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DR SEAN MARTIN: Hello, and welcome everyone to today’s very special webinar around supporting fathers and fathers-to-be, with some insights from research and practice. My name is Sean Martin, I’m the program lead of the Ten to Men study here at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, or AIFS.

Before we begin, I’d just like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that I’m joining you from today, the Kaurna people. I pay my respects to their Elders, both past, present and emerging, as well as acknowledging any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander colleagues who might be joining us today, and invite you to do the same wherever you’re joining us from today.

So before we begin the broadcast of the fathering symposium, I just have a couple of little housekeeping moments to cover. Firstly, to denote that today we’ll be having a live question and answer session at the end of the symposium, and I can invite you to submit any questions that you might have via the question portal on the little Go To Webinar dashboard there.

The second point is we acknowledge this is a slightly longer webinar than our usual webinars, it’s going to go for about an hour and a half rather than the usual hour. But if you can’t stay with us during the whole duration, don’t worry. The webinar and the Q&A session will be posted online on the AIFS website by the end of the week.

Another point is just to note that we have prepared some related readings and materials for you today. That’s again under the handout section in your Go To Webinar dashboard, so I’d invite you to spend some time perusing those.

Also of course as normal, there's a short feedback survey that will follow the conclusion of today’s webinar and I’d ask you to spend some time, we’re really interested in your feedback on that.

Also too, we’ve been very blessed to have a tremendous amount of input on questions through the registration process, I thank you for those. We did identify some topics that will probably be out of scope for today’s webinar. That’s primarily just because we want to spend the appropriate amount of time unpacking all the issues that relate to those particular areas. So they’re things like fathers’ use of violence, those men who have experiences through the family law system. We here at AIFS acknowledge that they’re tremendously important issues for a lot of you, and as I say, we’ll hopefully have an opportunity to address those in webinars to come.

So let’s get going. I want to first of all start by thanking all of you for joining us today, and as I’ve said before, your contributions to date as we lead into Father’s Day this Sunday. So, happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, and the dad-type figures. It’s a wonderful day for myself with young children, I’m looking to replenish my store of pens and socks. But wherever you are, I hope you have a chance to celebrate that, or not, this week.

So obviously, as many of you know better than most, the nature and the role of fathers in Australian society continues to evolve, and we wanted to take the opportunity today to explore some of these issues and how to best support fathers’ health and wellbeing, and by extension that of their children and their communities. So we’re going to start today with a broadcast of the presentations that occurred during the fathers symposium from the AIFS conference back in June, then I’ll be back and the presenters will be joining us for a 30 minute live question and answer session.

Those presenters’ full bios can be found in the handout section for the Go To Webinar dashboard, but I will let you know that we’re hearing today from Vincent Mancini from Telethon Kids, Tim Moss from Healthy Male, Harley Hall from Emerging Minds, and our own Melissa Willoughby from AIFS.

So let’s get started with that broadcast and I’ll see you back here in precisely 57 minutes.

DR VINCENT MANCINI: Today I suppose I have three objectives. In many ways I might be preaching to the converted, but there might be some sceptics in the room, so the question that I want to address is how do fathers impact early child development? Why do we care about dads in this space of early child development? You hear, “Oh, well, I can’t really do much until they can kick the footy, or talk back, so what’s the point of me being involved pre-conception, let alone in the early years?”

I’ll talk a little bit about contemporary Australian fatherhood, so being a dad in 2024, and then also probably of most relevance to many of the people here in the room is engaging fathers in early child services here in Australia.

I’m going to start with a quote, and a couple of photos that might give away who the baby is in that picture about 31 years ago. ‘The contemporary view of fathers is that they have important influences on their children’s development, beginning before birth and continuing over the life course.’ I think it’s really relevant for me to acknowledge that I’ve had a real privilege of having an engaged and responsible father, and I’m the child of two immigrants who really value family above everything else. So a shout out to my old man here.

So that first question of how do fathers impact early child development? And for me, I never set out as a person who was really interested in working with fathers actually. I was a child health clinician, I was a clinical psychologist by trade, really passionate about working with young people. And then, perhaps naively, I didn’t realise just how much work I would be doing with parents. I thought I was going to be the person to change the lives of these kids. How silly of me to assume that. It’s the parents, it’s the system that surrounds the child.

And through my research journey, what I found is that a constant gap that I was seeing in the literature, and I myself was guilty of this, is in that limitation section in the end of a discussion section you say something like, ‘This study was all – we recruited mums, we don’t really know about dads in this picture. We don’t know if they’re relevant, we don’t know how they’re similar, different. That’s someone else’s problem. Future research can deal with that.’ And then coming full circle, I became the person whose task is trying to resolve that.

Perhaps an easier answer to that question of what areas of a child’s development do fathers impact, it’s probably best answered with well, what areas don’t they impact? There’s a huge amount of research that’s coming out in the field which is looking at virtually all aspects of child development in the family system are influenced in some way, be it directly or indirectly, by father involvement. This includes things like children’s physical health, a lot of work in language acquisition of young kids, into mental health, neuro development, their capacity for lifelong learning, capacity for lifelong resilience, things like sleep, and the ability to regulate their emotions. So just about every dimension of a child’s development is in some way impacted by their fathers.

There is some overlap between that impact with other parents, mothers as well, but there are in many areas some evidence to suggest fathers may exert unique or complementary influences on the development of their kids.

And so this really begs the question of why and how? So we know that there are these associations, we know that there are these relationships, and for me when I think about framing my research, some of the most significant development to happen in the fathering literature has been the development of good theory and good framework that can actually guide directions for research, as well as directions for policy, directions for intervention, directions for action.

The classic biopsychosocial approach to understanding human development has identified across both biological, psychological, and social determinants, fathers have an impact in all of these ways. For me, as someone who doesn’t have a biology background, I’m really interested in the biological stuff, knowing about things like pre-conception health of men, and how that impacts the development of their kids. Someone sent me a study that was just published earlier this year looking at how fathers’ gut microbiome in pre-conception health, how that has links to children’s development. So all of a sudden, there’s this really fascinating research about the contribution that fathers make before the baby is conceived.

Perhaps we know more around the psychological component, as well the social component as well, when we’re talking about the quality of early attachment relationships between that secure parenting system that’s around the child, as well as the social determinants. For example, a lot of people are familiar with this concept of rough-and-tumble play that dads tend to do quite a lot of with their kids, and how that’s actually beneficial not just for human development but across mammals as well. If you actually look in rodent studies, the benefits of rough-and-tumble play, and the long-term development of these mice, and that includes things like social cohesion in their little mouse community, as well as even things like reproductive success.

Another framework that people may be familiar with, or I would encourage you to have a look at, is the ecological model of father involvement. Really what this does is it just acknowledges that it’s not just the dad and the kid, it’s not happening in isolation. There are systems, there are mechanisms, that surround that dyad. There’s often another partner, there's other children, there’s a work situation, there’s cultural beliefs, there’s chronological beliefs, where here in 2024, what it means to be a father may differ radically from 1924. And so, there are all these mechanisms that link the dad to their child, and so again, this helps us to identify potential pathways that we may need to consider.

The other thing to keep in mind as well is possibly Pleck’s dimensions of paternal involvement. So again, when we think about what it means to be an involved father, an involved parent, people probably see themselves visualising dad and kids doing dizzy-whizzys, kicking the ball together, reading together. But paternal involvement, and parental involvement, is a lot more complicated than that, and parents in the room would probably acknowledge that. There are lots of ways that you may be involved, and not all of them are recognised as effectively.

And so Pleck’s dimensions effectively derive five different types of paternal involvement. You’ve got positive engagement activities, warmth and responsiveness, which is probably the one we think the most when we think about an involved parent, we talk about control, process responsibility, and indirect care. Now, all of these things are important for children’s development.

So when we think about contemporary Australian fatherhood - this is my mum and my dad and I, and I know that it’s nice here, but this was probably not long before they separated, and remained separated throughout my life. So it’s probably one of the few happy family photos that I have so I cherish this one quite dearly.

So times have changed probably since 1992, and having Lyn present earlier this morning really also solidifies that things are changing. So what we’re seeing is there are growths in the rate of father involvement that we’ve seen across Western industrialised nations, but they’ve also stabilised since about 2012. So there was some sharp increases from the ‘80s into the ‘90s, and prior to that, but since about the mid 2000s we’ve petered out on the amount of time that fathers are spending with their kids.

We know that in Australia that we don’t just have traditional nuclear families. We have all sorts of blended families, step-families, reunified families, and they have unique needs as well. And again, there’s a growing need to understand fathers and the systems that they exist in as well. So for us, thinking about what is it about the systems, the family unit, it’s the resources that they have available to them.

Just some quick fun, this is my nephew on the left and my niece on the right, that’s my brother in law.

So we know that one in every five Australians is a biological father. Many more people may play the role of a father figure, so you might be the responsible uncle, step-dad and so on. We know that since about the ‘90s, the time that fathers spend with their kids has increased by about 30%. We’re seeing greater overlap in parenting roles and responsibilities, but as we know from today’s keynote, it’s not completely equitable yet.

When we ask fathers, and this was work that we did last year, “What are the biggest challenges for you as a father here in 2024?”, or 2023 at the time, it was navigating the work/family balance. The benefit that they saw was seeing their children grow, and watching their children flourish, was probably the most rewarding thing for them as a parent, that was the biggest benefit they saw.

And we also know that the uptake of paid parental leave form fathers here in Australia is quite low, it remains quite low, and there are lots of individual and systemic reasons for that. This graph here just shows you the change in fathers making use of flexible working arrangements to accommodate their children, and how that’s changed since the mid ‘90s to just pre-2020. I’m curious to see what the updated figure looks like in a post-COVID world.

But the other thing here is when we look at fathers’ time use up to and after the birth of their first child, you see that they consistently remain employed. That’s that fairly horizontal line in the top left there. Whereas things change more radically for mothers, and we may expect that as well, given what we heard this morning, and given what we know about men’s use of parental leave and many other factors.

This piece here around enhancing father engagement in parenting programs, so I just want to talk about this briefly before I finish. Increased rates of father involvement in early years, we know that it’s increasing. However, it’s outpaced father engagement in parenting programs, okay? So for really common, popular Australian parenting programs, for example Triple P, many people are familiar with Triple P, the ratio of mums participating to dads is about four to one.

Again, you’ll hear this time and time again from service providers, “How do we engage dads? We tried, it was hard, and we stopped.” Or, “We don’t have the resources to, we’d really like to.” And so this is a persistent challenge that we hear from service providers.

And what we also know actually is with programs like Triple P, these programs, whilst effective for both mothers and fathers, they’re less effective for fathers. So even though they get something out of it, they get slightly less, and so that’s talking to what is it about these programs that aren’t completely meeting the needs of fathers?

We know a little bit less about where and how Australian fathers receive parenting support. We often hear in the qualitative literature that their partner is a real trend-setter in terms of helping them adjust to fatherhood, learning what their roles and their responsibilities are.

But there are other informal sources of support, and also other formal sources of support as well. So one successful model that’s been shown to promote father engagement has been the onset of these father-focused service providers. So we have the Fathering Project here in the room today as one really common example, as well as father-focused branches of existing parenting services. And again we’ve got some other people here in the room, and also across the conference, who will also be talking about their fathers’ program.

What this does is it provides opportunity for tailored content, and it removes barriers to participation. One of the classic things you’ll hear from dads is they’ll say, “I didn’t know that I was allowed to attend.” Or, “I thought it was going to be all mums so I didn’t want to come along.” And then all the dads think it's all going to be all mums and then none of the dads come. It’s a bit of a paradox, right?

In a study that I published last year, we looked at how fathers are actually using online social media to receive support for parenting, and the three Cs that came out of that was connection, community, and convenience. So this is why fathers were using social media - to connect with other fathers. And I’m happy maybe in question time if someone wants to ask a question, which is fine, to share a little bit about that.

But then also an Australian study from four years ago interrogated this a little more closely, looked at the research, and looked at what evidence-based strategies can a service provider, can a researcher, use to enhance father involvement? So these are the six strategies that they came up with. So the first is to engage fathers as part of the parenting team, avoid a deficit model of fathering, increase awareness of parenting interventions for fathers. You’d be surprised how many fathers don’t know that there are resources that are made for them. Ensure father inclusive content, and delivery of parenting interventions. Increase father engagement practices, that’s both organisational and service levels. And increase professional training regarding father engagement. So this here serves as a bit of a model for us going forward.

Just thinking about an example back home in Western Australia is, for me, I use this joke that, “In policies and services we need to use the F word”, okay? We need to actually say that we want fathers to participate, or we need fathers to participate. I don’t think that we should feel guilty about that.

And in our perinatal infant mental health model of care, you’ll actually see specific references made to fathers. So this effectively says, “There is policy, or there are at least points in policy, that are for you. We need your input, and you’re important in this early tapestry of child health.”

So just to wrap up, it’s very difficult for us to understand comprehensively the tapestry of early child development without trying to see where fathers fit. They make important unique contributions to the growth and development of their children, and this does last across a lifetime. I think for me, it’s a womb to tomb approach to understanding the influence of fathers on their kids. The landscape is changing. We want to understand fathers and the systems that they’re a part of, not separate to them, and that there are also clear and actionable strategies that we can use to enhance father involvement.

But this is also contingent on an agreement that father involvement is actually something we want as well. So researchers, services, policy makers, we probably actually need to have some consensus there and say, “Do we actually value father input? Is that juice worth the squeeze, so to speak? Or is it too hard and we put it in the too hard basket?”

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIM MOSS: Healthy Male has been around for 23 years. We were established as an organisation called Andrology Australia, we changed our name five years ago because nobody knows what andrology is. We are a not-for-profit organisation funded by the Commonwealth government department of health and aging, and we provide evidence-based information, education, and advocacy to promote the health of Australian boys and men. I will give you a website at the end that you can have a look at if you’re interested.

Healthy Male was part of a group of organisations that was responsible for writing the National Men’s Health Strategy at the end of the last decade, and it identifies five priority male health issues for Australia: mental health, chronic conditions, sexual and reproductive health, and this other one where men are over-represented which is a really interesting one that I’ll pick up on, injuries and risk taking, and healthy ageing.

Now, what’s not here is fathering. We’ve got sexual and reproductive health, but we tend to think about that as this has got to do with fertility, it doesn’t involve the father in the antenatal events and the postnatal care of the child. And that’s dumb, frankly, because most Australian men want to be fathers. Even kids the age of my 15 year old son, some of these boys are talking about when they’re going to be dads. And if you ask a bunch of people in their childbearing years, just about all of them will tell you that they want to be fathers.

It's important for us to consider that in the context of men’s health because men are, I think wrongly, blamed for disengagement with the health services and therefore blamed for poor health. We have a responsibility to look after people, and I think in helping men to be healthier we can help, as Vincent has shown us to some point, have benefits for their families as well.

So it was this that led Healthy Male to come up with this thing that we’ve called Plus Paternal, and it focuses on the systems that exist at the moment for father support, and identifies where they are lacking and starts to suggest how things could be better. And Vincent has shown us that.

The evidence and feedback from that process show clear and consistent themes. Australian fathers have unmet needs, they’re diverse. There are traditional norms, social norms, that negatively influence the roles of fathers, and the support and experiences they have, and that happens for men and women. The health system’s focus on mothers is rightly placed because of the biological role that she serves, but it tends to squeeze dads out. We need to think about, rather than a maternal focus, perhaps a family focus.

The knowledge of men and health professionals in relation to fatherhood need to be strengthened. That’s a positive way of saying that men don’t know enough, and neither do health professionals. So we need to educate them.

These are the things that we know influence fathers’ engagement in antenatal care. So when we’re talking about antenatal, we’re talking about up to the time of birth. It’s important to draw these lines. The beginning of antenatal is somewhat grey, it’s kind of any time before birth, probably after conception.

Fathers will be better engaged if they feel that they have a valued role in decision making during pregnancy, and if they feel welcome. They’re pretty easy things to accommodate. There’s a bunch of things that work against them though. There’s the feeling of being excluded. There’s a lack of knowledge and understanding that I mentioned. They feel like they are observers, not participants in antenatal care. They’re anxious because they’re doing something that they’ve not done before and blokes hate doing that, a little bit like a donkey. Time is another limitation as well. We know that people who are in full time employment may not be able to spend three or four hours at an antenatal clinic.

And it’s a shame that all of these barriers exist because fathers’ antenatal engagement has lots of benefits for the pregnancy. If a father is involved during the pregnancy, then there’s a higher likelihood that his partner will have early antenatal care, and early antenatal care is a really good predictor of successful pregnancy outcomes. And fathers’ involvement also encourages maternal healthy behaviour. There’s evidence, for example, that if a father is more involved during the pregnancy, his partner is less likely to smoke. There’s a lower likelihood of maternal stress and smoking, drug use, alcohol use, and there’s good pregnancy outcomes that benefit the baby. So foetal growth restriction and pre-term birth, which frankly kill babies, are much less likely if the father is involved. It’s pretty cool.

And then it benefits the children as well, and Vincent has told us a bit about this. There’s a higher likelihood and a longer duration of breastfeeding if the father’s involved, and we know that’s critical for the optimal development of babies. There’s a higher likelihood that that dad will be involved in his children’s childhood and Vincent has told us about all the benefit in that, and the benefits to learning outcomes as well.

So we’ve produced this document called the ‘Case for Change’ and it has a number of goals articulated in it. I would encourage you to go to the Healthy Male website and grab a copy of this and have a look at it if you’re interested. It’s all kind of obvious, but it needs to be said. Fathers’ antenatal engagement though is not enough because we know that things delivered during pregnancy don’t get the best possible outcome. It’s this second sentence here that’s important: ‘Optimising the health of women and their partners prior to pregnancy improves conception rate, pregnancy outcomes, child health, and the health of future generations.’ And that’s where we think improving the health of men, and the engagement of men, is building their families can cause benefits.

So we’re focused now on pre-conception care. The World Health organisation defines that as the provision of care, unfortunately it says here to women and couples, it doesn’t say women and men, and that is a barrier to men’s involvement in these sorts of things, as Vincent’s suggested. And that care is aimed at optimising the health of parents so that when they conceive and have their babies, they are as healthy as possible.

The World Health Organisation suggests that pre-conception health starts some time in between school and adolescence and adulthood. In a medical care context, pre-conception care is usually defined in terms of pregnancy, so therefore directed at females. And it’s usually the three months before pregnancy because for optimal outcomes for your pregnancy you should be fully vaccinated three months before you conceive, and then within that three month window is the time that you should start taking your folate and things like that.

The Royal Australian College of GPs provide us with the map for preventative care, and this is where they talk about pre-conception care, and they say a lot about the pre-conception care of females. This is what they say about the pre-conception healthcare for males. We have engaged with them, we have written a chapter for them, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the next edition because there’s not randomised controlled trial level based evidence for this stuff. So they’re not going to include it in there.

These are all the things that we can link that concern paternal pre-conception factors, and the outcomes for their offspring. This is a big list of stuff where you can get benefits for babies from caring for dads, and of course you get benefits for dads as well, right? It’s not just about improving the health of families that we should be so concerned. There’s two parts to this slide. I quite like this slide, I’ve seen people smiling because this is hilarious. I used an AI image generator to give me a picture of an Australian man in his 30s, and then to have characteristics that are associated with the disease burden in Australian men that’s shown in the graph on the right.

Australian men suffer as a consequence of alcohol use, illicit drug use, child abuse and neglect, occupational exposure to hazards, and being overweight. So this is your 30 year old Australian male, and Australian men are about 33 when they have kids, right? So we’ve got blokes that might look like this, that have everything beginning way behind the eight ball. I particularly like that the AI image generator put a cigarette in his hand so it looks like he’s putting a cigarette in his ear. Don’t trust AI.

And you can see in that graph on the right that I mentioned that there is a larger burden of disease for males of reproductive age than there is for females. This is consistent across the life course, it’s about 20% higher in males than females. It’s a problem and it should be dealt with.

I’m going to finish by referencing an article that you can see cited in the bottom right of this slide. Men are more than just their healthy sperm, and that’s often how they are thought of when it comes to parenthood. It’s how we think about fertility care for men, for example. There are lots of things that we can benefit from if we think about men not just as that, but we need more work and that’s where you people come in.

We need evidence from epidemiology. We need mechanistic studies to tell us how these associations actually work. We need studies of social determinants. These associations actually need more lived experience because a lot of the information that we have comes from studies of mothers, not fathers. We know everything about men’s use of condoms in Australia from asking women, nobody’s asked men. And we also need investigations into implementation and working out what’s causing these barriers that we see, and assessment of policy. That’s where you guys come in, not me. It’s Men’s Health Week, I want to wish you all a very happy Men’s Health Week, and I thank you for your time.

ROSIE SCHELLEN: So these resources, so I was doing some resources for actually working in family violence, and we developed a documentary and went out and spoke to families all across the country, Darwin, Western Australia, to make this documentary. One of the things that came out of these conversations with mothers and practitioners, Aboriginal practitioners and researchers, was our men are portrayed in such a way that the only time that they talk about them is with family violence. And that is not our community. Yes, we do have communities that are struggling, and that are suffering, and that are hurting, but that’s not our community. When are people going to talk about our men in ways that are actually positive?

So these resources came out of that because it’s like well, yeah, it is true, there’s this assumed way of thinking about Aboriginal fathers. So exclusion from services, yes, definitely, just as a man. But then being an Aboriginal or a Torres Strait Islander father, that brings on a whole new level of exclusion. So these resources came out of these conversations, so I just want to share. This is one of the videos that was part of the documentary.

HARLEY HALL: The shield represents for me, strength and protection. As a dad, sharing that knowledge and passing it on, teaching my son how to do this, and then that’s something that he’s proud of.

Culture is a big part of our living, and it’s something that no matter what we go through in life, it’s something that I hold on strong no matter what we go through or what we face in life. And that’s something that no one can ever take away. They can take physical parts and stuff like that, but your strength in culture and identity inside, that’s something that no one can ever take away from you.

For me, protection is family. So being around my family, because I’ve been going through a tough time and I think just being open, being able to talk about things, not hold it in. Just being around family is what helps me get through. But also being with my kids, seeing them, that’s protection and strength there.

My name is Harley Hall, my Ngarrindjeri name is Ngrakani which means ‘shark’ in the Ngarrindjeri language. I’m a proud Ngarrindjeri-Kokatha man from Raukkan and Koonibba I’m from Ceduna westside. I’ve got two daughters and one son. I live on Country down near Murray Bridge. I’m Ngarrindjeri Ruwe.

My kids have big hearts, different personalities. They’re my world, they hold me together. So everything that I do is for them, that’s why I live a positive life and stuff because I want to be known as a positive person in community. It’s all for them, everything that I do is to teach them to be strong and proud Ngarrindjeri kids too, to be proud of their culture and their identity. Be there for each other, be loving and caring for each other. They’re very loving and caring, although they do fight like siblings do.

Me as a father, I want a better life for my kids and my family, to remain strong. It’s hard when you’re out there fighting for your rights, and fighting to be heard and that sort of stuff, and just to be treated normal, and then come back and be strong for your family. So I guess having the world stereotype us is hard. The stereotype out there in the real world doesn’t give us a voice and doesn’t value us as much as it should.

I think the role of a man in a family is as much as a mum’s role. And out in the real world, being part of the system, and in my own experiences and stuff, I’ve known that I’ve never been valued as much going through the system. And some of the stuff that I’ve faced. If I can get through that, I could imagine everyone else having to do that too.

The river is a big part of me, I grew up on the river and am very connected to the river, and it’s part of healing too. So the river has always been a part of strength for me. So if I’ve had a bad day coming home from work, I’ll go the long way just so I can go see the river.

You want to be the best that you can be, and you can only work with the cards that you get dealt with, and a lot of the things that we go through like generational trauma is something that’s out of our hands. But it definitely affects all our families in different ways. I think like our Elders and ancestors not being able to speak their native tongue and that sort of stuff, and being dispossessed and having everything, the world against them, and them fighting through and trying to be strong for their families. And then it’s like the society, the system, breaks them and then they’ve got to go back to their families and try and be strong.

I want them to be able to come to me, no matter what they’re facing. I didn’t feel like I could go to my dad and talk about my feelings and emotions, so for me that’s probably big. Also, providing and stuff for them, just be there for them really. I think that’s the most important thing for me, is being there for my children. How cool is that, man?

HARLEY’S SON: I’ve done it all by myself.

ROSIE SCHELLEN: So one of the things that we’ve heard a bit earlier about is around how do we have fathers within these conversations. Being a non-Aboriginal woman, going around and having these conversations with dads is, for myself, really hard. And that was the hardest part, it was actually my own fear of having a conversation that actually stopped it. So, I just went out and talked, I just went out and talked to dads, and I said, “Look, we’re doing this, do you want to be involved?” And men want to talk, they want to talk about their children. Think about that! Amazing!

Harley, do you want to talk about that old fellow, Joel, that we had the conversation with in Darwin?

HARLEY HALL: Yeah, so one of the men up there, I’d say for me he’s the strongest man I’ve ever come across. And he was only small, not physically strong, but just because he was a man that lived in two worlds. He talked about living traditionally providing for family, to now having to go work and earn money and to provide for family. And he was definitely one of the strongest men, I’ll never forget him. He talked about our new spear being money to provide for family, because traditionally – well, he still goes back and forth. But we live in a world where we have to provide for our family, and in the Western world it’s money we need to put a roof over our head, and food, and that sort of stuff.

I think we went through everything. I noticed with a lot of the men that we went and talked to, they all said similar things about not being heard, that sort of stuff. You could tell just from them being with their families and stuff, you could tell that they were family men, strong, proud family men. But feeling like they were held down a little bit by the system and reality. So it was definitely an eye opener.

I was sitting there listening to him and I just cried because I could just relate to him. To this day, I’d say he’s the strongest man I’ve ever come across. Just listening to his story, and how he’s still being a strong man providing for his family but living in the two worlds, and I could relate to that.

ROSIE SCHELLEN: And that conversation was a really great example of how to have a conversation. This was a traditional man, he’d gone through ceremony -

HARLEY HALL: Law, yeah.

ROSIE SCHELLEN: Law, there’s rules around talking. As I'm hearing his story and he’s talking to me, I’m going oh, should I be hearing this, should I be hearing this? And I said, “Do you want me to leave? Is this something that I should be recording? Is this something I should be hearing?” And he goes, “No, I want you to hear it, I want you to hear this and I want you to share this story.” I then had to turn around to Harley and go, “Can you stop crying? It’s coming through the mic.” No, it was really great.

But it’s just having those conversations. I’m not an expert at being a father. I do have six brothers and they tell me that I’m a little bit of a boy sometimes, but I’m not that father and I’m not that expert. And I think that that’s one of the things around that we can learn in our practice, be it whether you’re working with mothers or children, being the non-expert and being able to be curious, and to be able to ask conversations. People want to talk. I was really surprised at how much the Aboriginal men shared with me, to be able to share with you. So Harley’s story is one story of many that we get to listen to.

One of the other things that really surprised me as well was I work with a Darwin Indigenous men’s group up there, and I walked in and I was talking about our resources. And they said, “We know your resources, we use them within our men’s group.” It was like oh, how amazing is it to hear stories of how dads are trying to actually consider different ways of being with their children? So it was really quite amazing.

The other thing that we really need to consider around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parenting and roles of fathers that might be different from what you might be thinking about from a non-Aboriginal perspective, is that dads have a really, really central role in being responsible for passing on culture.

HARLEY HALL: Yeah, I was lucky enough to grow up around culture, and my dad being strong around culture and that sort of stuff. If we talk about being resilient and growing up, that’s one of the main things that helped me get through my toughest times in life. And for me to be able to pass on and share that culture with son, all my children, it’s something that’s going to keep them strong, and it’s something that can’t be taken away from them either. It’s really big with my family.

If we’re going to be real, I was getting into trouble with the law and that sort of stuff, and I didn’t think about what sort of person I wanted to be until my oldest was born. That’s when I started thinking I want to be a role model. Literally it changed my life and my every day, the way I think, being positive.

From there, I went out into the community, and for the last 15 years I’ve been really highly connected with community. But even with being connected and strong, I find it real hard because I’m going through some stuff now still, fighting for my kids in court and that sort of stuff. And I thought, look, I don’t have a voice. I know that we’re all born with different temperaments, resilience and that sort of stuff, and I see myself as really strong and resilient, and I can only imagine people that aren’t so strong and having to go through that. So I guess I’m lucky to be born with a strong temperament and resilience.

But I think talking with dads, and helping and that sort of stuff, has only done good. But culture was a big part of my upbringing that helped me get through that, and that’s something that I share, that cultural practice in community, and just to build around that strength-based resilience work with youth and adults.

ROSIE SCHELLEN: I know we’re actually running out of time, but this is a plea, or a call to action. Be it whether you’re in a taxi and there’s a man there and you might just go, “Are you a dad, do you have children? What’s it like?” Or when you’re working with a family, include that father. But particularly when you’re working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, don’t let ideas and assumptions actually cloud what’s real.

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: So some background on this topic, Vin did a really good job on providing a really good overview of this area, but just to reiterate a few things, we know that both mothers and fathers play a really key role in the health and development of their children. Almost every child in Australia will have a biological or non-biological father figure. And mothers are still disproportionately responsible for much of the house and childcare duties, however fathers are increasingly taking on more childcare duties than they have in previous generations. Fathers are also no longer thought of as only a breadwinner, and now take on more hands-on duties like feeding and caring and looking after their child.

This shift in fathers’ behaviour in their childcare now provides a new opportunity to support child health and wellbeing. Improving child mental health can be done through supporting fathers to work out whether there’s things they can do for their kids, and this will benefit not only fathers and their children, but also mothers and families.

So in this context, we wanted to look at the evidence to understand what fathering practices can be done to promote child mental health, and how can child and family practitioners support fathers to promote child mental health. I’m not going to spend too much time on the methods, but I am a big methods nerd and if there are any questions, or if anyone would like to have a chat afterwards, very happy to.

So, just very quickly, we conducted a rapid evidence review, and this is a type of literature review that has systematic and replicable methods that is done in a tight and concise timeframe, and it can be completed relatively quickly compared to other types of reviews like a systematic review.

So the first step we did was consulted with stakeholders, and these stakeholders were experts in fathering and parenting as well as men’s and child health. These consultations informed our research questions, the scope of the review, and any publications from the review.

This is our inclusion criteria. We were interested in research studies that looked at the association between fathering behaviours and child mental health. We restricted our review to high-income countries where English was the primary language, and they were published between 2012 and 2022. We put in these restrictions to make sure that the evidence that we were reviewing was based on contemporary evidence, and was also the most relevant to the Australian practice context.

So, the studies that we found, we analysed them using a narrative synthesis, and we also guided our analysis around the five paternal engagement elements listed here, and Vin very helpfully has already gone through all these. I’ll touch on the definitions again when we look at the results.

So our search returned about 5500 records, and of these 32 met our inclusion criteria that I showed in the previous slide. Most frequently the studies were cohort studies, and they were conducted in the USA, UK, and Australia. These studies often used data from large longitudinal surveys such as LSAC, the Growing Up in Australia study, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing studies from the USA, and the UK Millenium Cohort study.

So there was a wide range of fathers included in the studies from zero all the way up to almost 10,000. On the higher end, these were usually where people had conducted their own type of review, and that included multiple studies. And as Vin noted in his presentation, some of the studies didn’t actually ask fathers at all, they interviewed mothers and children about fathers’ behaviour. We found three studies that met our inclusion criteria that did this. Where the studies did report on the fathers’ characteristics, they were usually biologically related to the child. There was a mix of married or unmarried, and the fathers usually lived with the child, and were predominantly white and heterosexual.

So, moving on now to the different fathering behaviours, the first element that we looked at was positive engagement activities. These are interactive activities between the father and the child, and this included things like reading, arts and craft, and play. Overall we found this was very beneficial for promoting child mental health. We found that these type of behaviours can reduce child externalising and internalising behaviours, and it can also reduce child behaviour difficulty. We found that positive engagement activities among fathers could also improve child prosocial behaviours, and improved social confidence, emotional skills and also child self-regulation.

There was mixed results on the association between child and father play, predominantly rough-and-tumble play, and aggression.

The second element that we looked at was warmth and responsiveness. So this includes acting in a positive and warm way, an affectionate way, towards the child, and can include things like physical affection and telling the child that they’re loved. Generally this is also very beneficial for child mental health. Warmth and responsiveness was found to improve prosocial behaviours in children and development in infants.

There was mixed results on whether warmth and responsiveness could improve child internalising and externalising behaviours, and this was because there was a mix of studies which found it might improve these factors, or there was no association between them.

The third element that we looked at was control, and this includes things like paternal monitoring, involvement in discipline, and knowing the whereabouts of the child. So in these studies they looked at what kind of control behaviours were associated with different mental health outcomes. So we found that generally non-physical, not overly intrusive, and consistent control, or discipline, was associated with benefits to the child mental health. This includes things like improving prosocial behaviours, and also decreasing externalising behaviours and anxiety in children.

On the other hand, the studies reported that typical harsh control such as smacking or yelling generally had negative impacts on child mental health. This includes increases in internalising and externalising behaviours in children, and emotional difficulties, and decreases in child prosocial behaviours.

So these were the last two elements that we looked at, indirect care and process responsibility, and these are the physical and mental activities done for the child, and generally found this is a large gap in the research. There was only three studies that looked at these two elements, and the findings are largely inconclusive due to large gaps in this area.

So indirect care giving includes activities such as purchasing and arranging goods for the child, or booking services like a doctor’s appointment. Only one study examined – sorry, two studies examined this element, and one found that it may reduce depressive symptoms.

The last element that we looked at was process responsibility, and this refers to the mental work done to manage the child’s life and wellbeing to ensure that their needs are being met. I sometimes think about this as the mental burden that people speak about in childcare. There was one study that looked at this, and it did not find an association with this type of behaviour in fathers and child mental health. However there obviously needs to be a lot more research in this space to understand how these behaviours in fathers can impact child mental health.

So as I mentioned before, our resources are aimed at practitioners in the child and family spaces. So a second aim for this review was thinking about what can this evidence tell us about how practitioners help fathers to support child mental health? So the impacts I’m going to share here come both from the research, and also from the consultations that we conducted with experts in the area. So practitioners can speak to fathers about the benefits of them being involved with their children. As previous presenters have already spoken about today, something that’s great to do is just ask fathers how they’re going with their fathering, what kind of behaviours are they involved in?

One of the fathers who I spoke to, he was sharing with us some experiences he had in the perinatal period, and we asked him what was something he’d like for practitioners to know and do he said, “Just ask me how I’m going.” Which is quite simple and nice, but also shows what fathers really need, just having a conversation.

It’s also important, as Vin pointed out as well, to take a strengths-based approach to these conversations, so pointing out things that fathers are already doing really well and encouraging them to continue to do these things and to build on them. There is some evidence that taking a deficit-based approach can actually lead to feelings of shame or guilt, and might lead some fathers to disengage with the service.

Practitioners can also encourage fathers to engage in more of the behaviours that can support child mental health such as interactive activities like play, reading, arts and crafts, and being warm and loving towards their children.

As some of the other speakers have touched on today, it’s important to be really intentional with how we engage fathers because we know fathers are less likely to be involved in child and family services than mothers. And doing simple things like using the F word, and making it really clear that fathers are welcome and we want them to attend our programs, can go really far.

We can also think about whether there are any policies or practices in our programs or services that make the assumption that the mother is the primary caregiver, and whether there’s any things we can do to change this assumption.

I do just want to touch on some of the limitations of our research. So we really focused on contemporary evidence that’s conducted in Australia, or countries that are generalisable to Australia. This means we were unable to capture all of the evidence that’s out there on fathers and child mental health. Some notable exceptions are we didn’t look at any grey lit, and we also didn’t look at any research from low or middle income countries.

So as I mentioned previously, much of the fathers who were included in our studies were white and heterosexual, and this could be a key area for future research where they could consider a more diverse range of fathers such as queer fathers and fathers from varying racial and ethnic groups.

Also many of the studies that we looked at, looked at each type of fathering behaviour in isolation. While this is really good when we’re doing research where we want to look at how this particular behaviour influences a particular outcome, looking at different combinations of behaviours, and how they influence each other and child mental health, could paint a better and more accurate picture of the reality of parenting and fathering.

So a very quick summary before I wrap up, we conducted a literature review where we looked at academic research articles, and also consulted with some key stakeholders. We focused on studies that looked at the association between fathering behaviours and child mental health, and we found that many of these fathering behaviours were associated with improvements in child mental wellbeing and decreases in child mental health challenges. Some examples of these behaviours were interactive activities like play, reading, arts and crafts, being warm and physically affectionate towards the child, and practicing non-physical and consistent discipline.

Practitioners and services in the child and family space can speak with fathers about their parenting behaviours, encourage these behaviours in fathers, and can consider how they can make their services and programs more inclusive of all parents including fathers.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Well, welcome back everyone as we start to see some of our fellow panellists come back and join us online for this live Q&A session. I want to thank you again for joining us once more, I can see many of you trickling back in for this Q&A session. I hope you enjoyed that broadcast, it reminded me of the great energy and enthusiasm we had on the day. I continue to see some of those come through in the questions that we have for you this afternoon, so please keep firing those questions through.

I do want to just briefly acknowledge too that some of the questions that we had come through were around some of those issues that we spoke about earlier around men’s use of violence, and men’s experiences with the family system. We’re not going to shy away from those. In fact we’re with you, we agree they’re very important issues. We did want to just make sure that we don’t pigeonhole them into a brief couple of minutes discussion. As I say, we want to return to those issues in due course and give them the proper room that they need for discussion.

So with that, I want to throw over to our panellists now for a few of the questions that have come through. As one loosener we’ll start up with, and I’ll throw this to all of our panellists, it’s just a very generic question around how in our panellists’ perspective they think practitioners who work with fathers can best support the health and wellbeing of their children? So who wants to tackle that one to start with? I’ll start nominating people. Vincent, you’re the first person on my screen, do you want to shoot to that one?

DR VINCENT MANCINI: Yeah, sure, thank you. But before I do that, I do see a question from the audience about my slides not matching the presentation. I think I’ve accidentally given people my second presentation from the AIFS conference, not this one. So forgive me, and I’ll get that corrected before this webinar goes out and the recording -

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: It’s very generous of you to share more of your work, Vin.

DR VINCENT MANCINI: Yeah, I wanted people to get the other presentations. No, not really.

Look, Sean, your question is a really timely and a relevant one. I think for me, perhaps a more generic answer, though one that I think is still important, is actually for people, practitioners, to actually set aside the time to ask fathers how they would like to receive support, information, help. It seems like a little bit of an oversight, but it is one that we as healthcare professionals can sometimes be quite guilty of, or fall into those patterns. We might do things the same way that we were trained, or the same way that we used to do things, and all of a sudden it’s been four, five, 10 years and you actually really haven’t had a chance to ask the people you’re working with, “Is this right for you? Is this the right fit? Is this something that works for you?”

When it comes to, I think, maybe some more specific recommendations, what we’ve seen here in Western Australia is I think more of a concentrated effort for healthcare professionals to maybe meet fathers where they’re at. So this doesn’t just include where they’re at in terms of their health and wellbeing and their life journey, but I’m talking about maybe even geographically as well. So if we were to try and deliver intervention, or resources, or support for fathers, we’re seeing growth in the demand for workplace programs. So we can actually deliver something in a palatable, short, brief format that might be appropriate for a lunch break, like a lunch and learn thing where the practitioners will actually come to a workplace and work with people there. Rather than imposing these additional constraints such as, “If you would like support, that’s great. But you need to finish work early, and you’ve got to get in the car and you’ve got to drive 30 minutes, and you’re unable to participate in after work activities that might include your kids.” So I think going to where fathers are is really important.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Great point, and I’m going to throw to the rest of the panel in just a second. Harley, another series of questions we got was around how practitioners can best support First Nations fathers, First Nation families. Do you have any thoughts on that?

HARLEY HALL: Yes, so I was thinking, with me being a father, and having to reach out. Also working with families and stuff, you’ve got to be welcoming. I reckon me walking into a room seeing Aboriginal art, or it could be even acknowledgement plaques to First Nations people, acknowledging – shows me that the organisation genuinely cares a little bit.

And also my biggest thing would have been you’ve got to be open minded, everyone’s different. And working with First Nations people, we’ve got over 500 different clan groups that make up Australia and we’re very different. So people think that one size fits all, but everyone’s different and you’ve got to build a rapport, take it slowly, and I believe we’ve got to give them a voice and actually listen.

Sometimes that’s something that I had to find out, become narrative trained and that made me a better listener. Just because something’s not your way, doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Take it slowly, build that rapport, and just get them to be a part, make them feel that they’re wanted and needed.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Sure, some great points and thanks for sharing. I’ll throw to the other panellists, are there any other thoughts on that particular question, on how practitioners can best support fathers?

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIM MOSS: After you, Melissa.

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: Thanks, Tim. I have some things I think relate to maybe what Vin was saying, but first I want to say fantastic answer, Harley. I think all of those things are so important both in terms of First Nations fathers and also all fathers, having imagery that’s welcoming and language that’s welcoming.

So with some of our work that we’ve done speaking to practitioners and fathers, something that’s come up a lot, I think Vin touched on, is recognising that every family is different. The same thing is not going to work for every family, and recognising the different family dynamics and family structures that may be present. And recognising that both mothers and fathers are the experts in their own family, and with their own children as well.

We were speaking to a father who was sharing their experience about being in the perinatal period, and something that struck me about what he said was, “Just ask me how I’m going.” It’s something so simple, was something that he didn’t experience when he was engaging with services, and he felt that he really needed just to be seen and have his experience as a father, and also as someone supporting their partner, be seen and be validated.

So I think it’s just really important to have a really open and curious response when working with families and fathers. Ask questions, ask them how they’re going, what’s their experience of being a father like, how did they go transitioning to fatherhood? And try to have a very strengths-based approach in the response, focusing on what they’re already doing well and how can that be built on?

DR SEAN MARTIN: Great, thanks Mel. And Tim, I’m going to throw to you in just a second. But it did remind me, Mel, as you were speaking, to direct people towards those related resources in the handouts that you have put together. They touch on a lot of those issues and I’m sure will be useful to a lot of people. Sorry, over to you Tim.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIM MOSS: That’s cool. Two very simple things, I think. You can’t hear me?

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: Oh no, the audio is just a bit out of sync Tim.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIM MOSS: Oh, okay. Look, the two important things, one general, one very specific. If men read or hear parent, they think mum. So including dads in the language that is used is important.

And the other thing is they might be dads, but they’re also individuals, like we’ve just heard from Melissa and Harley. It’s wonderful if you can use people’s names. Referring to somebody by their role is isolating.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Important point, and we hear again and again the power of language, not just with fathers but in men of all different persuasions, so that’s wonderful.

I’d like to encourage our audience to keep those questions coming in. We’re getting a lot of great questions.

Tim, I might just stick with you if I can because there was one question that came up through your talk around education programs, and particularly education programs focused on relationships, and men and relationships. Are you aware of any that exist, be it in the antenatal period, or even beforehand? And are they something that we should be looking at for father engagement after the birth of their children?

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIM MOSS: Sean, as you know I’m an evidence-based information kind of guy, and there is not good evidence about what sorts of education provision, format, content, what works and what doesn’t. So the short answer is we don’t really know. There are a number of very useful, it seems, anecdotally at least fatherhood educational programs. One that I think of straight away is the National Fatherhood Initiative out of the United States, and that’s evidence backed. That’s the only one of those that I know about.

But there’s a lot of support for fathers from particular organisations that deal with different aspects of parenting. So PANDA has good resources for men, for example, with perinatal anxiety and depression. The people who work on helping parents through perinatal loss also provide great resources for males. It’s a matter of going out and looking for them really, I don’t know that there’s some consolidated spot for them all. Perhaps that’s a job for me.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Great, it gives us something to aspire to as a field. And just to acknowledge too that it’s really great to see, particularly online, there is an emergence of new resources that are particularly targeted at fathers. So that’s great to see as the field starts to develop.

There’s a very interesting question that came through from one of our audience members here that acknowledges the excellent work of many trying to create more male-friendly services, but also acknowledges that the majority of service providers in the family services and the counselling spaces are often still women rather than men. So a question to the general panel, are you aware of any work that’s being done on a capacity building front to build up that workforce to get more men involved directly working with other men? I’ll throw that one open again to see if we have any bidders with our panellists.

HARLEY HALL: Something I should have said earlier too is in saying that we’ve got our men’s business and our women’s business, so some men might not be allowed to talk to a female in that setting. It’s something I should have mentioned before, so we definitely have to take that into consideration while working with our First Nations families.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Yeah, definitely, it’s a great point Harley. Just as we’re progressing as a field to create more resources for dads, start very broadly, and then it’s a great sign that as the field progresses we’ll work out how to work with dads of all persuasions, including First Nations dads.

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: Sorry Sean, I was wondering I could just ask Harley a question. I think you’ve touched on a really interesting point there, Harley. I was wondering from your perspective as a First Nations man and a father, do you have any recommendations for practitioners or services who are wanting to work with First Nations people, and how to navigate what’s appropriate to speak to men to men of the men’s business and what’s appropriate for women to women for women’s business?

HARLEY HALL: I think everyone’s different, you’ve just got to ask them questions. First of all, I’d utilise the Aboriginal workers in your workforce and your organisations, get them involved. Pretty much you’ve just got to ask them questions just so you’re not treading on toes and that sort of stuff. But just be open and honest because you don’t learn until you ask.

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: Fantastic, thanks Harley.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Actually Vincent, can I ask you as a practitioner, are you aware of any workforce capability work?

DR VINCENT MANCINI: Yeah, it’s a great question, and I think that there’s probably two pieces to this, right? In that question from the audience member, the first is what is the existing workforce able to access or receive, or take part in, that might be able to help them work better with men more effectively, or with fathers more effectively?

Probably the example that comes to mind that I’d be remiss without mentioning is for me. from a mental health background, Movember have done a really good job at putting together a program called Men in Mind. It’s an online resource, it’s like a PD, professional development type of course, that people can use. It’s obviously designed for people working in the mental health space, but some work that I’ve got going on on the back end is making me query whether or not that actually has utility outside of the mental health space and more into antenatal, perinatal care as well.

But really what this program aims to do is increase a mental health care professional’s skills and confidence to connect and respond to the needs of male clients, and the typical types of expressions of mental health distress that are common for men.

So there are resources, and there are materials that are out there, and I daresay internationally there may be some other ones as well. I’m just thinking about what’s available domestically, and Movember have put together something that is very highly polished, but also has the evidence base to back that up as well. So when it comes to study designs, evaluations, Men in Mind has been quite robustly evaluated, so that’s why I’m a big advocate for a program like that.

The second piece to the question that was asked was almost increasing the number of male practitioners in the workforce as well. I think that’s maybe a slightly more challenging problem for us as healthcare professionals, and as academics, because really what we’re talking about is making these courses more appealing, or incentivising for male practitioners, and that can sometimes be challenging. We know that there are certain professions still where there’s quite pronounced gender differences between men and women in terms of people going out into tertiary education.

And that said, I do think of some stories, particularly in some of the work that I’ve done in neonatal intensive care units, where at a birthing hospital here in Western Australia I think out of I believe it was maybe 300 nursing staff, there was one male nurse who was working as a midwife in the neonatal intensive care unit. And the story was this guy couldn’t walk down a hallway without a flock of dads chasing him and asking him questions because they wanted to have a conversation with another man about this experience. “Am I going to be okay? Is my baby going to be okay? Is my wife, my partner, going to be okay?” It’s really interesting for me because obviously the male nurse never signed up to become the advocate for all male nurses or anything like that, but he really took it in his stride.

The other thing that I’d probably encourage people to do, and I think this is really important, and I think Mel mentioned it earlier on as well, is there are a group of men in the community who will be highly resistant to getting support from someone else that they don’t perceive as being able to understand what it’s like to be on the journey that they’ve been on. And often that line that they draw is along gender lines. So it could be, “You’re a woman, I’m a man. You don’t know what it’s like to be a man so I don’t want to talk to you.” Or, “You’re not going to be able to help me.”

And I think that for us as professionals, we could interpret that as let’s put them in the too hard basket, let’s refer them on, let’s not bother providing them with the support. But maybe a more optimistic way to perceive this is this could possibly be a bit of a clinical challenge for us, and it could be one that we can use to our advantage.

And I think about that for me as a mental health care professional, if I’m working for a client who’s a man, I still might not know what it’s like to be them in their experience, and in their journey. Just because I’m a man and they’re a man doesn’t necessarily guarantee that we’re going to be able to speak the same language, or fully understand what it’s like to be in that situation.

So I think that for people who find themselves working with men who may not identify in the same way that the client presenting is, I think there’s a way to build that relationship. And I think again for me the way that I’ve found that’s worked is taking this curious stance. “I don’t really know anything about your experience, please tell me, educate me, show me what it’s like to be you in this situation. I’m not a man”, or maybe, “I’m not a father with a child with complex needs, tell me what that’s like.”

And so what you find is that as long as you’re open to being able to attempt to understand what that person is going through, very quickly do those lines tend to dissipate, and you can actually build really productive meaningful relationships with clients who you actually thought you may never have actually been able to build that relationship with. It’s just about giving them the space, and for them to be able to see you actually taking the steps to say, “What’s it like to be you?”

DR SEAN MARTIN: Great, thank you for that, Vincent. Just a very quick follow up if I can because it’s one of the questions that also came from our audience, does it actually matter whether fathers have a male practitioner or a female practitioner? Is anyone aware of research that does suggest there’s a clear preference for one or the other, or the preference is really just for a targeted service?

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIM MOSS: I don’t specifically know about the perinatal context, Sean, but in primary care the gender of the carers of males does not matter in terms of the quality of service they receive, the quality of care.

DR SEAN MARTIN: Yep, that’s my experience too, as you say, within primary care. Vincent, you’re often delving into the research on these matters. As it relates to fathering services and provision, is there a gender preference for dads or there is, as Tim suggests, more just a concentration on proficiency?

DR VINCENT MANCINI: Yeah, I think the priority really is proficiency. I think where you might see some of a resistance is again it could just be that entry point. I think that there might be a group of people in the community who we as professionals may never see because they go, “I really want to chat to another father, or a man who’s maybe further along in their parenting journey than me. Knowing that this service doesn’t have anybody like that, I might not actually go there.”

So it’s important for us to recognise that there might be a group in the community who we might not ever see presenting clinically.

But I also think that if we can work to maybe overcome that entry point, and I think that some of the ways that we can do that is you might find that there are people who might work as less of a clinician and more as an advocate for a particular service, again talking about the proficiency in that service.

But at the same time as well, when we’re thinking about proficiencies, I really do think that any proficient healthcare professional can build meaningful relationships with their clients, with fathers, irrespective of where they are in their journey. The other thing that I probably do caution people against as well is that if you’re a clinician and you’ve got kids, what you don’t want to be doing is a client comes in and you say, “Well, this is what I did for my kids and it worked, so just go and do that with your kids.” It’s a really quick way to put them offside because you’ll get things like, “Well, you don’t have the same kids. My kids are different, they’ve got different needs, different experiences, our family is different.”

So it’s sometimes really important for us as professionals to spend a lot of time actually listening and building the story for these people to ensure that they’re feeling heard and that we understand their story. It’s not my job to impose what I did as a parent on to you.

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: Just what you were saying there - oh sorry, Harley, you go.

HARLEY HALL: I think location is a big thing too, because I think it’s very different to, say, remote communities to working in the big cities. I think that plays a factor. I believe that we need to bring the two worlds together a bit because we’re not all academic with PhDs and degrees and stuff like that, but lived experience, bringing that alongside, working together, get better outcomes for the community and stuff too.

DR SEAN MARTIN: That’s a great point Harley, and it’s a beautiful segue into one of the questions that’s just come through, which is around whether or not collectively we’re aware of online programs that are specifically for fathers in regional or rural or remote locations? Again, Harley, if you are aware of any, or generally in the panel, if they could point us in the direction of some of those services?

HARLEY HALL: Me personally working with First Nations, it depends where you live and your community. I suggest, because there’s different programs running, go to your local Aboriginal community controlled health services, and that sort of stuff, and find out what sort of programs are running in community and get amongst it that way. Asking questions, and going along to Aboriginal organisations, and just make them connections.

DR SEAN MARTIN: That’s a great point. On the rural or remote or regional, anyone else on the panel got some suggestions for our audience?

DR VINCENT MANCINI: I had the resource on my desk, and when I cleaned it to make my office look clean for this presentation I’ve relocated it. But I was at the men’s health symposium in WA last year and we had an organisation, whose name is out of my mind at the moment, but they gave us a – I don’t know about the Eastern states, but here you get those things in your letter box which are almost like a little mini community guide with all the local organisations that you can call and access. And they had those printed, but for rural and remote men’s health initiatives. So this wasn’t just fathers, although fathers stuff was included in there, but there was a range of men’s health services as well. This included things like mental health, but also physical health. So I can try and find that, but I know those resources do exist.

And then the other thing that I’ve seen, again here in Western Australia, is there is some community driven, grassroots types of communities that are popping up for rural and remote dads. The one that comes to mind has been around, I think, for a couple of years now. That was started by a guy up in Karratha, which is on the top end of Western Australia, who recognised that West Australian dads living rural and remote, or who might be working fly in, fly out, might have unique experiences. And so he brought this online community together, which is not a program, or it’s not an intervention or anything like that, it’s more of like a digital men’s shed, or that council of dads that you can go to and discuss.

I think that a lot of fathers may find themselves inadvertently participating in these types of communities. It might not be a dads’ group, or a rural and remote dads’ group, but you might be part of a local organisation. It could be a football club, it could be a religious organisation, or it could be even built around the kids’ school, where there are these opportunities to get together, and talk to, and share with other fathers.

So I think those types of grassroots, community-oriented organisations, they fill a gap in the community that I just think a professional health service will never be able to do because these are your neighbours, these are your friends, these are your peers. And I think that that’s just as important perhaps, I say it half tongue in cheek, but perhaps more important than these professional health services that you might have infrequent contact with across your life. But the people who are around you, and the fathers who are around you in that community that you might find yourself connecting with at schools, or at the workplace as well.

I know for example the Fathering Project have a working fathers’ program that they’re rolling out at the minute. That’s actually providing a space where you’ve got all these men who are working in this organisation who may have never really talked about their kids together, or really never talked about fathering together, they’ve always been talking about work, and they’ve created this space where actually, “Oh, your kids go to a similar school”, or “They play for a similar football club”, or whatever it is. And you build these connections and these communities inside existing communities that you’re a part of.

DR SEAN MARTIN: It’s a great point. Tim, I’ll throw it over to you for 20 seconds mate.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIM MOSS: It’s a really quick one, SMS4dads, of course, is a great resource and is not geographically locked.

DR SEAN MARTIN: No, it’s a great point. I wanted to follow on from Vincent just to acknowledge, just as we saw in the symposium that we had before, there’s a great groundswell in the community, there’s a lot of energy that seems to be filtering up to us as researchers who are working with groups like Vincent’s Fathering Project, Support for Fathers, the amazing work that gets done with the Australian Fatherhood Research Consortium. There’s too many to mention, now that I’ve mentioned, I know I’ve absolutely forgotten too many.

But they are all starting to pick up that energy, turning it into, as you said before, Tim, some evidence-based programs, which then hopefully creates this virtuous cycle that ultimately means, for practitioners, for service providers, what they’re able to provide to men who come to them will ultimately be effective, and worthwhile for men who sometimes find it hard to reach out for help.

All right, unfortunately, it is my solemn duty to just say that that is the end of today’s session. I really want to particularly thank our presenters who have joined us today, who have shown us that sometimes the sequel can be as good as the original movie. Thank you all for your time again today.

I particularly want to again thank our audience members who have just been wonderful, energetic. I apologise, I’ve been trying to desperately monitor some of these questions. We weren’t able to get to all of them, but we will hopefully do so again in the future.

Just a quick shoutout to our team, our behind the scenes team. Pragya, Erin who’s kept us all on our toes, and particularly our colleague who’s joined us today, Mel, has done the cat herding, brought us all together, and frankly done most of the work. I want to thank you all for your work today.

I just want to finish with a reminder about the feedback survey that will be sent to you all after this. Also a quick plug for the AIFS newsletter. Please subscribe to that, like and subscribe, and you’ll be notified about this webinar and other amazing bits of evidence that come around, all manner of family wellbeing.

So with that, we’ll draw things to a close. We look forward to catching you at our next webinar, but until then, take care, happy Father’s Day, and we’ll see you all again soon. Bye for now.

DR MELISSA WILLOUGHBY: Thanks everyone.

HARLEY HALL: Thank you very much.

Presenters

Harley Hall profile photo

Harley Hall is a proud Ngarrindjeri Kokatha/Wirangu family man with strong Kaurna/Narungga bloodlines, He is a proud father of three. Harley grew up on Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri country learning about Culture from family and elders. Harley now operates these practices through his own cultural business, dedicated to empowering and building resilience for Aboriginal children, families and community through Culture. 

Vincent Mancini profile photo

Dr Vincent Mancini is a Senior Research Fellow in the Human Development and Community Wellbeing team at the Telethon Kids Institute. An early career researcher at The Institute, his work is primarily focused on empowering fathers and father figures to improve the health and wellbeing of children. His role is supported by The Fathering Project. His research interests are diverse, spanning early neurodevelopment, parenting, child disability, grief, psychopathology, and emotion regulation. Vincent also maintains an active portfolio of teaching and student supervision, having successfully supervised students at the intern, undergraduate, and postgraduate level.

Vincent is also a self-proclaimed ‘stats-nerd’ – having a keen interest in research methodology and quantitative research methods, including scale development, psychometrics, latent profile analysis, latent growth curves, factor analysis, and advanced regression analyses.

In addition to his role at The Institute, Vincent is also an Adjunct Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Curtin University Medical School and Senior Research Fellow with the UWA Law School.

Tim Moss profile photo

Associate Professor Tim Moss BSc (Hons) PhD is Health Content Manager at Healthy Male and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Monash University. Tim joined Healthy Male in 2020 after 25 years of working in academia and medical research, having honed his communication skills at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science and the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University in New York, and the MIT School of Engineering’s CommLab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Tim is listed among the top 2% of most influential scientists of all time for his work in the field of obstetrics and reproductive medicine.

Melissa Willoughby photo

Dr Melissa Willoughby is a Senior Research Officer in the Child and Family Evidence team, where she engages in knowledge translation activities across a range of research projects related to child and family wellbeing.

Melissa’s research focuses on health inequity, violence, criminal justice and gender. She has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative methods, including analysing linked administrative data. Melissa completed her PhD the University of Melbourne examining violence-related deaths and morbidity among adults and young people involved in the criminal justice system.

She also holds an Honorary position at the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and in the School of Population and Global Health, the University of Melbourne.

Rosie Schellen profile photo

Rosie Schellen is the lead for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce development content at Emerging Minds, she has worked in the field of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing and community development for over 25 years.

Facilitator

Sean Martin | Program Lead  Ten to Men: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health

Dr Sean Martin is the Program Lead for the Ten to Men (TTM): Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health at AIFS. As part of this role, he oversees the management of the content, methodology, and fieldwork activities for TTM, as well as resultant data management and releases, analyses, and publications. As Program Lead, he also engages closely with TTMs external stakeholders including government agencies, expert and community advisory groups, research communities and institutes, and suppliers.

Sean is a clinical epidemiologist by training with over 20 years’ experience in men’s health–related research. Most recently this included acting as the Research Lead within the Urological Research Group at the Freemasons Foundation Centre for Male Health & Wellbeing (University of Adelaide), and as a Senior Research Fellow (Epi.) with Wardliparingga Aboriginal Health Equity (SAHMRI). He also holds an honorary affiliate title with the New England Research Institutes (Boston), where he completed his postdoctoral training as a Fulbright Scholar examining health disparities in urological care. He has worked extensively with a range of prospective cohort studies throughout his career, with further experiences in laboratory science, health services and clinical trials.

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