Straight off, let’s be clear, I am 100% behind the Mumsnet Miscarriage Care campaign… Time and again we work with parents who have been treated with such a lack of compassion ,that quite frankly, it is inhumane.
After the birth of my first child, my son, I had been left feeling like I’d had no real role, like a spare part, and feeling guilty about not knowing how to support Steph through the birth… It was this experience which led to me founding DaddyNatal so other men got the support and information they needed to be the birth partner they wanted to be.
Several years down the road, this is the story of the birth of our third child, born at home, from my dad’s perspective.
A couple of years ago, I was running a DaddyNatal workshop in Peterborough which was being filmed for BBC’s The One Show, which happened to fall on Fathers Day. At the end of the workshop I gave all the dads a card to celebrate their first Fathers Day. Having just done the DaddyNatal workshop with me, they understood why I did it, but I know many who would have said ‘Why did they get a card when they are not dads yet?‘ The point is, whether your baby has arrived already or is still waiting to arrive, you are already a parent, whether its a mum or a dad.
Continuing the series on brands and dads, today I conducted my audit of Stokke to see if I felt they were using positive images of dads in their marketing and whether they were supporting their involvement. This is not about product review, this is about the company and their inclusion or not of dads in their marketing.
Before conducting the audit of their website I had a preconceived idea of what I expected to find and must confess I was wrong.
Baby Beaumont 3
For those of you that have missed it Steph and I are expecting our third child sometime around the end of July beginning of August. If previous form is anything to go by August is more likely. Anyway this has lead me to some serious thinking, hence this post.
Being a man talking about men on Woman’s Hour
I had the pleasure of being a guest on Woman’s Hour today (Tuesday 29th January 2013). The discussion was around Fatherhood at birth and in the early days, and we were considering some of the research which Tina Miller has recently highlighted in a piece for the Practicing Midwife.
We are over the moon to announce that The Gro Company are the latest company to support our work with expectant and new parents.
I have recently been involved in a research program by Laura King who tweets @fathersatbirth , the program has been called “from hiding in the pub to cutting the chord” looking at fathers and their roles, this culminated for me in a performance at Warwick Arts Centre and being a member of the discussion panel after.
Regular readers will know I have never run a competition on this site before, so today sees a first!! Having been approached by Groupon to run a sponsored post, as with all approaches I was polite and had chat with them. They came up with a proposal I really felt would be good for all my readers so I said YES. So here we go a DaddyNatal first.