When birth doesn't go to plan - a father's side of it

This week (8-14 July) is International Group B Strep Awareness Week, a campaign built around something many parents have never heard of until it touches their own family. Group B Streptococcus is a common bacterium that most adults carry harmlessly, but in a small number of cases it can cause serious infection in newborns. Screening, monitoring and preventative antibiotics during labour have made a real difference to outcomes, and the awareness week exists so more parents know the facts and more health services test consistently.

Behind the clinical detail sits a more human story, and it's one that comes up often in the therapy room. What happens to a father, emotionally, when the birth of his child doesn't go the way anyone expected? A baby rushed to neonatal care. An unplanned course of IV antibiotics. A few extra days on the ward where nobody quite says the word 'infection' but everyone's face says something's wrong. These moments pass quickly on a hospital's timeline, and often end well. They can still leave a mark that outlasts the admission itself.

We don't talk enough about what a health scare does to a new father's footing. Culturally, men get cast as the calm one in the room - managing logistics, reassuring their partner, holding it together for everyone else. That role has value. It also means a father's own fear, helplessness or shock frequently goes unprocessed. He wasn't the one in the hospital bed, but he was there for the uncertainty, the waiting, the moment a clinician's tone changed. Emotionally, that counts.

The early days carry real developmental weight too. Attachment theory, going back to the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, tells us the first weeks and months of a child's life are a critical period for building a felt sense of safety with caregivers. A baby doesn't need perfection - the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called it 'good enough' care - but they do need a caregiver who is emotionally available and reasonably steady. That's genuinely hard to offer while you're privately still shaken, running on hospital-corridor sleep, and trying not to worry your partner further by admitting how frightened you were.

Research into paternal postnatal depression and anxiety - an area with far less attention than maternal perinatal mental health, but increasingly well documented - puts it at around 1 in 10 fathers in the postnatal period, with rates rising after complications around the birth. Anxiety, hypervigilance and intrusive thoughts about the baby's health are also common after a neonatal scare, even one that resolved. None of that is weakness. It's a fairly predictable response to having briefly stared at the possibility of losing your child.

A few things tend to make a genuine difference for the fathers we work with.

Naming the experience as real, rather than brushing it off because 'everything turned out fine'. Permission to feel shaken by something that ended well is often the first thing a father needs, and rarely the first thing he gives himself.

Separating the medical timeline from the emotional one. Hospitals move on once a baby is discharged and the notes say 'resolved'. Nervous systems don't run on the same schedule. A delayed wave of anxiety, tearfulness or irritability weeks later is common, once the adrenaline of the acute period wears off and there's finally space to feel it.

Reconnecting with the baby without the lens of vigilance. After a health scare, some fathers struggle to relax into ordinary bonding - feeding, bathing, holding - because part of them is still braced for something to go wrong. Rebuilding a sense of safety in those everyday moments is quiet, unglamorous work, and it's exactly what supports secure attachment over time.

Talking to someone who doesn't need managing. Partners are usually each other's main support after a difficult birth, but both people are depleted. There's real value in a space - counselling, a men's peer group, a trusted mate - where a father can be honest about fear or overwhelm without protecting anyone else from it.

A frightening 48 hours doesn't stop being frightening because the outcome was good.

Maybe a recent birth involved more worry than you expected - Group B Strep, prematurity, a NICU stay, or something else entirely. Take seriously that the experience affected you, not just your baby or your partner. Processing it isn't indulgent. It's part of how you show up steadily for your child in the months and years ahead.

We offer counselling for men navigating the emotional side of early fatherhood, including the aftermath of a difficult birth. You don't need a diagnosis or a crisis to reach out - just a sense that something from those early days is still sitting with you.