I WAS BORN at eleven in the morning. My Dad was back at work the next day, seeing patients.
I never heard him speak of it as a loss. A man’s contribution to a newborn was measured in the reliability of his income, and by that measure my father was exemplary. He was a good provider, which was the highest compliment available to fathers of his generation. I have spent most of my working life since thinking about what that bargain asked of the men who kept their side of it.
I am writing this halfway through three months of leave with my son, Arty, some of it a long way from Australia. I was there for his first word, which was “Dada”, to my wife’s entirely justified irritation. I watched him wave excitedly at every Italian Nonna we passed in mountain-town coffee shops and receive kisses and a delighted monologue about his chubby cheeks. There has been swimming, endless laughter, and an amount of yoghurt I would not have thought possible. None of it is remarkable. The things that make a man into a father accumulate in hours nobody would think to photograph, but only if you are there.
This Sunday is my first Father’s Day. ‘Dad’ is now my proudest title, and I can’t wait for a morning cuddle. But this day also makes me uneasy, because it comes wrapped in a hallmark version of fatherhood that mostly consists of being thanked for showing up at all. These months have given me the other thing, the actual time, and few Australian fathers get to find out what that feels like.
You would think Australia, the self-styled lucky country, might have worked this out. We rank 34th of 38 OECD countries for well-paid leave reserved for fathers. Since 1 July, families share a pool of 26 weeks, four of them reserved for the second parent on a use-it-or-lose-it basis: real progress, hard-won, and still four weeks, paid at the minimum wage, roughly half what the average Australian father earns. Lucky, if you can afford the pay cut.
This is the bind modern fathers live inside. For a decade we have told men that being a good dad means more than a pay cheque: that presence is the measure, that what a child remembers is whether you were in the room, not for the recital but for the practice. Most fathers I meet no longer need convincing. But the message arrived without the machinery to make it achievable. We rewrote the job description for the role of modern-day Dad, but the terms of employment remain untouched.
Our new report from Movember, ‘More Time With Dad’, drawn from the experiences of more than 1,000 Australian fathers, shows the costs. Almost 30% took no parental leave at all after their first child was born. Of those men, only 18% said it was because they didn’t need it. The rest were stopped by the financial realities (36%), or by a workplace that made leave impossible (37%).
More than half of the fathers who did take leave believed that taking more would have set their career back. This is not a vague anxiety, but a calculation made at the kitchen table with a mortgage in view. Women have been making it for decades, and have been told, rightly, that a workplace which quietly penalises care has a design fault. It is the same fault, slower to be named when men walk into it.
For those who took leave, what they got for that time with their baby was not marginal. The vast majority said leave let them bond with their child, and around 70% said it was good for their mental health, which matters when one in four Australian dads rates his health as poor or fair in his child’s first year. And still, 56% said it was not enough. Not that they were ungrateful. That they wanted more.
Norway settled this argument thirty years ago. Before it carved out a portion of leave for fathers alone in 1993, fewer than 3% of Norwegian men took any. Today more than 90% of eligible fathers use their quota. Nothing about Norwegian men changed. The leave became affordable, and it became theirs to lose.
None of this is taken from mothers, who carry the overwhelming share of care and fought for every week of their own. Swedish research links fathers being home early to better maternal recovery and mental health, and a lasting lift in mothers’ earnings. Equal parenting is not something a couple negotiates their way to in year three. It is set in the first weeks, by who is in the room.
That is why Movember and our partners are calling for an end to the assumption buried in the scheme – that parents should take turns. It still imagines one parent home at a time, the baby handed over like a shift change. Families need both there together in the earliest weeks, when a mother is recovering and when a father learns to read his own child rather than assist with someone else’s expertise. We speak of ‘the village’ to raise a child, but we don’t even have the right infrastructure for the parents. The payment has to move towards real income, the reserved weeks have to grow, and the scheme has to work for tradies, sole traders and gig workers, who find it not unaffordable so much as unusable.
My Dad did what was asked of him, and he did it well, and nobody suggested there might be another way. Arty will grow up with different options, not because I am a better father than mine was, but because I happen to work somewhere that let me take the time. Being there should not be a perk of the right employer.
On Sunday, Arty will have no idea it is Father’s Day. There will be messy meals, and a swim, and a nap that takes longer to negotiate than it should. Another ordinary day in a run of them, which is the entire point, and which is exactly what most Australian fathers never get at this time. We have spent years telling men that presence is the measure of a good dad. We should stop making them pay for the privilege.
Dr Zac Seidler is a clinical psychologist, global director of research at Movember and associate professor with Orygen at the University of Melbourne.
Related:
The invisible patient; a doctor’s reflection on fatherhood, caring and the health of those who care
The last Father’s Day: notes from the fatherhood waiting room
