28 January 2026 • Update
“You want to research dads? Why?”: A blog reflecting on a journey into fatherhood research
Amy Jenkin
“There are so few services for dads, so how will research save money? Won’t it result in a request for investment, and why would that be funded?”
"Will they even engage in research?"
"“Wouldn’t it be better to research ways that fathers can improve the outcomes for mothers, rather than focus solely on them or their relationships with their babies?”
In recent years, I have decided to pursue a lifelong goal of becoming a clinical-academic and one that researches with dads. What has proven so fascinating is that when I explain to people that I want to do this, it often produces some intriguing responses, like those above.
These responses tell us something interesting about how we think about dads as a society and about who healthcare is deemed to be for. On the whole, dads continue to be sidelined and excluded. Having worked for over ten years now as a Mental Health Nurse in a community perinatal mental health (PNMH) service (nationally delivered services which accept referrals only for birthing women), I am as convinced as it is possible to be on the need and rationale for high quality mental health services for women around the time of having a baby.
PNMH service provision has grown significantly in England, having been made a priority in 2016 by the government. The result of a masterful campaign combining the experiences of those affected, clear economic reasoning and research, the need to end the post code lottery of patchy PNMH service provision was impossible to ignore. This work is far from ‘done’; more investment and service development is needed. Women are still dying preventable deaths, and, in our service, the referral rate is the highest it’s ever been. These services are absolutely vital.
But there is also a crucial need to focus more on dads, all dads. How are they? Why and how are they so important? What do they bring that’s so wonderful? What do they need? Do we know?
Increasing research attention has been paid to the parenting journeys and support needs of fathers in recent years, providing evidence of why this focus is needed and important, but knowledge transfer into real life provision is currently a patchy postcode lottery. Recent data analysis indicates that seven times more fathers die by suicide in the perinatal period in the UK than mothers, meaning that 2-3 babies per week lose their dad – a national tragedy. These numbers, the first summary paternal suicide data available in the UK as far as I am aware, made me stop and take a breath. I send love to every family affected, including my friend (and her family), who lost her partner and the father of her two children just before their youngest turned two in 2020. We really miss you, Mark.
Men and boys are also having a hard time, as recent media and policy reports suggest, including Adolescence, and the Centre for Social Justice Lost Boys report. Fathers report significant pressures around fatherhood, and often feel under-prepared for it, leading to high, yet under-reported rates of paternal perinatal depression. Social and cultural norms around masculinities and what it means to be a man can make it unthinkable for men to reach out and ask for help. Shame and stigma can also get in the way of dads being offered and receiving support. We know that there is little by way of targeted support for dads that they can realistically access, and that the perinatal period is a high-risk time for relationship breakdown between parents. We know that separated men are at higher risk of completed suicide.
These concerns pose high costs both for individuals and societies. As well as the overwhelming human impact of paternal perinatal suicide, the 1001 Critical Days Foundation recently found that the economic cost of those suicides in the UK totalled £217 million per year (this is likely to be an under-estimation, as is the rest of the data related to paternal perinatal suicide). They also report that paternal perinatal suicide rates in deprived areas are double those of affluent areas and are higher among first time dads.
Based on the strength of these findings alone, it is evident that a lack of public health support for fathers is feeding health inequalities and that the impact of doing nothing is too high stakes, for fathers, their partners, their babies, their families, and society.
It is in this context that I developed my passion for research in this area, and I am very fortunate to be embarking on a National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Pre-Doctoral Award, supported by the NHS Trust I work for to spend some time developing as an aspirant clinical-academic. I know what a privilege and opportunity this is. Through this award, I hope to connect with fatherhood researchers everywhere (please get in touch!), learn from experts in the field of fatherhood (aka dads and professionals), contribute something worthwhile, highlight evidence that further supports the case for more inclusive support for fathers, as well as progressing how it can be done. I am particularly interested in underserved groups, such as ethnically minoritised fathers, and how prepared fathers from them feel for parenthood, as well as the impact of paternal perinatal suicide.
The value base I hold very securely is that we do not need to think about perinatal mental health difficulties or provision as about being in any way a competition between mums and dads. We need to hold that all parents are incredibly important, their wellbeing is important, their relationships with their babies and children are important, their impact is important, and their difficulties and needs are important.
My research interest is also driven by a personal wish. I hope, if he chooses to have babies, that my son has more support in his transition to fatherhood than his dad did, who almost certainly had more support than his dad did. I hope the dads reading this know how special they are, and I hope everyone else can take a moment today to reach out to a dad and let them know they are valued. I’m off to text my dad, who will no doubt reply with his standard ‘roger that, good buddy’, which I hear in his Geordie accent whenever I read those words.
From our partners and young dads
“[daughter]'s almost two-year-old. She came up the house and she actually really liked it. Preferably my house is the best place for her to, for the contact to be, if I’m honest, 'cause we just buy toys for her all the time. We’ve got a lovely garden that she can play in, lovely, big, and we’ve got a sandpit in there. We’ve been buying loads of things for her to play with to keep her occupied.”
“[Speaking about support of young fathers] We’ve done a lot of kind of advocation and representing them, a lot of the time there’s involvement with statutory services. They don’t have the care of the young person, the care’s provided by the state or the mother, so we’ve attended lots of meetings with the young person to offer additional support and facilitated contact where necessary and offered just general emotional wellbeing, support, improving robustness and resilience, encouraging them to have as amicable relationship as possible.”
“And I suppose it goes back to what we were saying before about behaviours, maybe the education side of stuff and the fact that men aren’t involved in those early conversations, you know, whether it is, I know they’re invited to come along to bumps to babies but I don’t know whether we go into the detail around some of that brain development side of stuff and things like that. Maybe that is the thing that really would change things. You know, if you were given all of that information about what happens to a child as they grow, in a scientific way, as easy to understand as possible, could be the thing that impacted on behaviour in the home.”
“If your child’s with the mother, like your relationship with her depends on your relationship with the child, innit. That’s what I realised a lot, like you can try and be bitter, you can try and be this, be that, but it’s just gonna push you further away from your child, innit.”
“I wanna fight for more stuff for dads. Like I do wanna have that extra support for new dads or even existing dads that we don’t get now 'cause we’re still important too although obviously the mum does need the majority a’ the care because obviously of the after care and the birth. But like the dads take it extremely hard as well. And obviously with having no support I think it increases the rise of mental health.”
“I think both a mother and father combined, it’s communicating and both being on the same page of what’s best for your child or children, and for both, it’s just being there 100% for them and not, like, putting yourself first, it’s, you know, putting the child’s interests first... ”
“We need to be including, we need to not [just] be focusing on mum and child […] That’s a great focus but dad … dad’s not invisible, dad needs to be in the picture as well because there’s research that shows you the effect it has on children and families as a whole when dad isn’t in the picture, so services need to be changing the way in which they work so it’s more inclusive.”
“Cause I think a lot of the time, some of young people who end up having children have been through the care system or support systems and they can feel quite judged or labelled by organisations and it’s breaking the cycle and breaking them out of that to feel empowered to be able to take stuff back, that’s the real interest to me. So, it’s about getting support right, as in being there and giving advice and guidance and all them things that we can do, but also making sure that we are doing with people as opposed to people.”
“One of the most successful projects we ever did was an informal dads’ group, and it used to be on Saturdays […] they did what they wanted, they used to do things like breakfast, and they would have breakfast together and talk about dad stuff and where they were taking their kids. And that group was always really well attended because there was never an agenda. They were never judged. They were just there together.”
“...the whole stay at home dad thing is not something to be ashamed of, you know, if you’re a dad and you wanna take your daughter out for the day, or you wanna take your kid out for the day on your own, well why is that frowned upon, why can’t you take your child out for the day ”
“Oh…patience…compassion…tolerance, a whole boatload a’ that! Honestly, I like a whole lot of life. Sacrifice…compromise, yeah I think, yeah I think they, they would be the, the big, the five, I feel, I think that was five, they would be the main. ”
“We’re currently in touch with social services for two [dads] because they don’t understand why they can’t see their children because they haven’t been informed by social services, their partner. So there’s a massive communication breakdown with those young men, so that’s the main focus of what we’re dealing with at the minute.”
“it’s still…the…sense of judgement I get from other people when they find out that I have a child.And they say, ‘oh how old is she’.I say, ‘oh she’s ten’. And they say, ‘oh how old are you?’. Like you don’t need to know that....I know exactly where that thought process is going, you know. It’s like, ‘oh you look really young and you’ve had a kid’. It’s like, ‘yeah I know, I was there!’”
Partners
