How to create footing under yourself when society has not developed the awareness yet of a father’s mental health. By Ryan Ansin
Breast-pumping schedulers, How-To books, post-pregnancy vices, and rediscover yourself support groups showed up for Mom beginning with the first announcement. Group texts arrange meal trains and the “just drop it on the porch” visits. Someone circles back at week three to ask how she’s actually sleeping. It’s imperfect. It’s still real, and it exists because someone, generations ago, decided a woman shouldn’t do this alone. Indeed she shouldn’t and so often doesn’t. Thank Goodness. Thank Goddess! She absolutely deserves the bulk of our attention, but the whole system will benefit from some attention to Dad’s reality. More importantly, Dad’s interconnection with baby.
Society has not built the equivalent for Dad, yet.
His sleep, critical to supporting mom and baby, are as thin as the arm chair he squeezes into at the hospital. “Congrats, brother” reads in the group chat. Within a week he’s back at his desk, and somehow still the guy his buddies can grab a beer with like nothing happened. Nobody checks whether he’s patient at 2 a.m., because nobody imagines he wouldn’t be. Ask him how he’s sleeping and he’ll say “good, man, we’re good,” because that’s the only answer the script hands him.
I’ve written before about calling a friend from inside the hurricane instead of after it passes. That mantra assumes you have a friend to call, and the habit of calling him. New fatherhood is the one season built to take both away, right when you need them most.
The data isn’t subtle.
Paulson and Bazemore’s landmark JAMA meta-analysis (43 studies, 16 countries, 28,004 fathers) found that 10.4% of men experience depression somewhere between the first trimester and their child’s first birthday. That’s more than double the 4.8% baseline for men generally. The peak doesn’t come in the fog of the first weeks, when at least somebody is still checking in. It comes at months three to six, 25.6%, right as the visits taper off and everyone assumes he’s fine because he never said otherwise.
It gets worse from there, not better. A 2026 study out of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute tracked more than a million fathers born between 2003 and 2021 and found depression and stress-related diagnoses climbing more than 30% a full year after birth, compared to before pregnancy, even as anxiety and substance-use diagnoses had already settled back to normal. The danger isn’t the initial shock. It’s the slow leak, twelve months in, after every well-wisher has moved on and the friend group has quietly stopped asking. The only thing we track is each other’s birthdays. No one tracks what actually matters, and we slip away from each other into falsely distant pastures.
Ask researchers why fathers don’t say anything and the answers aren’t complicated. They describe never being taught to tune into their emotional side. They describe shame, the fear of what people will think during what’s supposed to be the happiest stretch of a life. Most say nobody, professional or otherwise, ever asked. There’s no tidy fix for the men already three months in and drowning. “I just don’t know how to switch it [on or off],” my friends say about leaning into fatherhood, away from work. Of course there’s no switch. It has taken generations to devolve to where we are. The fix is best launched before that the fizzle of energy brings us to EMPTY, not after. The village didn’t withhold support out of cruelty. It simply never built him a room to stand in.
Three ways to avoid the loneliness spiral
- Waffle Wednesdays. Pick a small circle, connected to each other or not, and send a two-to-five-minute video every Wednesday. Midweek is the point. It’s early enough to interrupt the workweek’s momentum, early enough that whatever you’re carrying gets named before it hardens into Thursday and Friday, when your family and your own recovery need you clear-eyed. Call it a hub-and-spoke of loving attunement. You don’t need everyone to answer. You need someone to have heard you say it out loud. This comes to us from one of my best friends. So grateful. Love the practice.
- Write two letters. One to the boy you were, decades back, about the father you wished you’d had and how you’re building him now, inside your own house. One to the baby occupying your every thought, about the future the two of you are building together, not just the one you’re running for him. Lock both in a fireproof safe. They’ll outlast anything named in the will, because they hand your children proof of the work, not only its outcome. I’m taking ownership of two pieces of that myself. The birthday letter gets written the week before, not the week of, so it isn’t just another card lost in the pile. And ten honest minutes every Sunday night, writing down what I dodged that week instead of what I got done.
- Enlist a friend three to six years ahead of you. He’s close enough to remember exactly how hard this stretch is. He’s far enough out to have started missing it in his whole body. Borrow his hindsight before you’ve earned your own.
Rebuilding the village isn’t someone else’s job, and it doesn’t start with a plan. It starts with a Wednesday video nobody asked for, a letter nobody reads for twenty years, a phone call to a friend who still remembers the fog.
Don’t wait for the storm to pass to mention it was a storm at all.
