Why We Miss Anxiety and Depression in New Dads

Source: Pexels/Helena Lopes

During those first 1,000 days, from conception through a child's second birthday, I often see the most loving dads wobble.

Some dads present to me wanting to 'figure out how to support' their co-parent, determined to step fully in, but feeling more stepped around, by doctors, midwives, and in-laws.

Screening for dads' mental health isn't straightforward; we may miss dads' simmering inadequacy and powerlessness, misled by facades of fine or disengagement.

We're in the Era of Engaged Fatherhood. Dads—whose forefathers mostly never warmed bottles at 3 a.m.—arrive eager to flip the script. But they often find themselves parental understudies.

Fatherhood, early on, can feel like an endless series of role deflations: stroller assembly, formula mixing, and generally getting the F out of the way. The New-Dad Schlep seems a far cry from the blissful skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart bonding that we secretly yearn for.

Yet dad’s problems seem petty next to mom’s postpartum mental health gaps, inhumane pumping machinery, and punishing career penalties. The dads I meet, emotionally windburned from fertility and pregnancy journeys, will assure you that concern for their health is illegitimate.

But when dads don't dig deep, their doubts about readiness, fears of replicating parental traumas, and provider insecurities get further jammed underground. Unnamed misgivings and resentments turn outward into overwork, walling off, grandiosity, or a perfect poker face.

The "Support" (Mis)Frame

“Support parent" is a woefully naive term for dads emigrating into parenting’s New World, especially the increasing number of Full-Time Dads.

We must see dads in relation to their co-parents, but also as recovering boys, scared humans prone to inner what-ifs and whys, terrified to take family leave, and crushed by childcare costs. Just like moms.

Not asking about dad's mental health perpetuates the patriarchal myth of male invulnerability. Seeing dad as secondary support leaves mom partnered with someone who may be silently unraveling. Bringing dad out from his dark corner is a family health intervention.

PMADS

Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) encompass depression, anxiety, and related mental struggles that surface during pregnancy or within the first year postpartum. Estimates vary, but PMADS can impact 5-15 percent of fathers. Paternal risk factors include maternal depression, marital strain, infant care overwhelm, and role overload. Studies have found associations between paternal depression and anxiety and later behavioral and emotional difficulties in children.

Standard screening tools typically don't ask dad how he's doing, or they ask incomplete questions designed around how mental struggles present in women.

How Male Anxiety and Depression Show Up

A systematic review led by psychologist Krista Fisher suggests men with anxiety may employ "problem-based coping": attempts to fix stressors at their source via action, with little attention to their emotional responses. Persistent somatic symptoms were common, alongside a preference for tough-it-out mentality over help-seeking.

Men may feel off kilter from nausea and muscle tension, but not translate this into "anxiety." They won't show up at the pediatrician’s office teary, checking boxes to endorse "excessive, uncontrollable worry," especially with their infant thrashing on the exam table paper, and a co-parent slouching feet away.

Men sense anxiety's toll but maintain a masculine-safe filter that doesn't allow stressful life problems and headaches to slip through into "anxiety."

The perinatal system's deprioritization of checking in on new dads colludes with our lifelong learnings:

Systems don't ask. We don't tell.

Embark on a vulnerability journey as your wife undergoes a full-scale transformation!? Self-centered. Unentitled.

Guys might narrate anxiety as family life spiraling, baby won't stop crying, I never get it right, financial ruin is near. Yet this ungraspable angst leads to shutting down, or passive-aggressiveness, worsening their predicaments: unfulfilling sexual lives, shouting matches, and even self-estrangement when the clinical picture points more toward depression.

Postpartum Depression Essential Reads

What Postpartum Depression Stole From Me

Rituals for a Shattered Mind

Founder of the nonprofit Dads Supporting Dads, Kevin Seldon, whose family endured five years of fertility struggles, writes in detail about the often-overlooked struggles of new dads in his book, The DILF (Dad I’d Like To Friend) Handbook: A New Dad’s Guide to Overcoming the Most Common Myths of Parenthood. Capturing his own experience with dad-isolation, he writes: "…by the time I hit one month in as a parent, I no longer recognized myself in the mirror – I am living proof that men can experience PMADS."

Male depression is often called "externalizing": A sad dad may not weep but bang a table or bark orders. A baby's nap may not be an opportunity to wash bibs, but to bet on parlays—anteing up while inwardly folding.

Anxiety’s control fantasy may seem less alarming than depression’s pessimistic fixations—its bottling up and blowing up. But, more generally, clinicians lack screening tools specific to paternal perinatal mental illness.

What to Ask Instead

I inquire, "What would you have to feel if you admit to not being fine?"

Lonely in my fear that I won't be able to "man" the family bus. Weak when my duty is to be unflinching…

Instead of "Do you feel sad?" ask: "Do you feel ambushed by problems?" "Tension in your body?" "Snapping at family?"

Sometimes I own their feelings before they can: "Hearing that makes me feel really sad, man..."

Taking a dad's mental well-being seriously flips on the wipers to make visible what matters to him: what protecting the family unit requires, and recognizing a co-parent's isolation.

New fathers could benefit from tailored mental health screening and education. The obvious: holding an infant, blow-out diaper origami, labor support. Less obvious: night shifts, dividing caregiving, managing expectations about sex, and communicating while utterly exhausted.

Ask expectant dads, who never rehearsed parenthood with dollhouses, How do you picture your family working together once the baby arrives?

Fire up their imagination, then reality-check: It’s okay not to feel awash in love hormones.

Check in informally, new-dad to new-dad, one improviser to another, in ways that don't burden mom.

When we open our closed systems, the outlook is foggy before it's freeing. For our families, too.