“I can actually empathise with men who run away now. Because I can see how, if you have that huge conflict of — I’m just being a strong man that doesn’t have feelings — you have a baby that you really love, but you don’t know how to deal with that. You don’t know how to deal with your own feelings, and you don’t know how to deal with what your role should be in a family because there is no clear role for a man as a father.”
— Zane, 29, first-time father Lewington, Lee & Sebar (2021), Men and Masculinities
Zane describes the fatherhood identity crisis that many new fathers experience. The structural collapse that occurs when the identity he had inherited as a man runs headlong into the reality of fatherhood and finds no map for what comes next.
This is not a fringe experience. It is not a personal failure. And it is not fixed by reading another parenting book.
This quote comes from a peer-reviewed Australian study published in Men and Masculinities — one of the field’s leading academic journals. Titled “I’m Not Just a Babysitter”: Masculinity and Men’s Experiences of First-Time Fatherhood, the 2021 research by Lewington, Lee and Sebar interviewed fifteen first-time fathers in South-East Queensland about how they navigated the competing demands of manhood and parenthood in their child’s first year.
What the researchers found wasn’t a parenting story. It was an identity story. And it speaks directly to the men I work with every week.
Australian research on masculinity and first-time fatherhood
The three pressures shaping men’s fatherhood identity
Rather than a standard survey, the researchers used in-depth interviews and careful analysis of the language men used — listening not just to what these fathers said they believed but to what their actual word choices revealed about the invisible rules governing their decisions. Three themes emerged consistently:
- the weight of expectations from self, partners and society;
- the strain of work-life balance; and
- the unresolved tension between being a provider and being a nurturer.
Each theme circled the same underlying fault line: modern Australian men want to be present, involved fathers, but the identity architecture required to sustain that desire hasn’t been built. What they inherited was a role. What fatherhood demands is a self.
“Gendered limbo”: the men’s fatherhood identity crisis in action
The men in this study knew, intellectually, what kind of father they wanted to be. Many explicitly rejected their fathers’ patterns — the absent breadwinner and the emotionally unavailable provider.
When values change, but behaviour doesn’t
Yet, when the researchers looked at what these men actually did when the baby arrived, the old patterns had largely reproduced themselves. They returned to full-time work. They defaulted to the provider role. They described nurturing involvement as “helping out”. Even when they pushed back against traditional expectations in their stated values, hegemonic masculine norms reasserted themselves in their actual decisions.
The researchers describe this as “gendered limbo” — men caught between two models of fatherhood, belonging fully to neither, with no shared language or framework for the space in between.
The provider role, shame, and the cost of stepping back from work
Why insight isn’t enough when identity architecture hasn’t changed
One of the most significant findings in this research is how clearly the men could see the problem — and how little that awareness changed what they did.
Zane knew he didn’t want to repeat his own father’s absence. He said so explicitly. He called it one of the most important qualities a father could have. And then, when asked whether he would consider stepping back from full-time work to be more present, he said, “My immediate judgemental attitude is I would feel like if I took that role, I would be defending a demasculating position.”
He could see the trap. He walked into it anyway.
This is not a failure of insight. It is what happens when a man’s sense of worth, standing, and legitimacy is structurally tied to the provider role — and no alternative identity has been built to carry the load.
Knowing you want something different is not enough if the emotional and relational architecture underneath hasn’t changed. The old scaffolding holds, even when a man has consciously decided he no longer wants the building it supports.
The “Groundwork Layer”: what sits underneath stated intentions
This is the pattern I describe as the Groundwork Layer — the unresolved identity material that sits beneath a man’s stated intentions and quietly governs his actual choices. It is not visible to him most of the time. Fatherhood makes it visible.
So does separation, redundancy, serious illness, and grief. Any major transition that strips a man of his accustomed role will surface what is underneath — the questions he has never been given the tools to answer.
The father wound and intergenerational patterns in men’s fatherhood identity
How a man’s relationship with his own father shapes intimacy and vulnerability
The research also points to something that rarely makes it into conversations about modern fatherhood: the degree to which a man’s relationship with his own father shapes not just his values but also his emotional responses to intimacy, dependency, and vulnerability.
Many of the fathers in this study traced their fathering ideals directly back to what they didn’t receive as children. They wanted to give their sons and daughters what was withheld from them. That desire is real, and it matters.
Why desire alone doesn’t break the cycle
But desire alone does not interrupt transmission. Without doing the work on what their own father’s absence or emotional unavailability left behind — the shame, the performance, the hunger for approval through achievement — men can find themselves reproducing the very patterns they consciously rejected.
The father wound runs in both directions. The wound a man carries from his own father shapes the father he becomes. Recognising that is not self-indulgence. It is the beginning of genuinely breaking the cycle, for himself and for his children.
Identity disruption in men beyond parenting (separation, redundancy, grief)
The men in this study were in their late twenties and thirties, navigating a single, bounded transition — the arrival of a first child. The identity disruption they experienced was real, significant, and largely unsupported. Now apply the same structural problem to a man in his forties or fifties navigating separation, job loss, the death of a parent, or the slow erosion of the role that had defined him for two decades.
What holds when the role is stripped away?
The identity architecture question is the same. What holds when the role is stripped away? Who is he when he is no longer the provider, the protector, the one who keeps things together? What does strength look like when the performance that used to work is no longer available — or no longer enough?
These are not abstract philosophical questions. They are the questions sitting underneath the presenting issue in almost every conversation I have with men in major life transitions. The research by Lewington and her colleagues puts a rigorous, Australian, peer-reviewed frame around something that has been evident in my practice for years: men are not equipped — culturally or structurally — to navigate identity disruption. They are given roles. When the roles collapse, they are largely on their own.
Structured support for men navigating a fatherhood identity crisis
The researchers conclude by calling for what they term “caring fatherhood” — a framework that recognises men’s genuine desire for involvement and builds the structural conditions that make it viable. They are right. But structural change is slow, and the men in transition now cannot wait for it.
A practical framework for rebuilding identity after major change
What I offer through Mentoring Through the Maze™ is structured, non-clinical mentoring that provides men with a practical, psychologically informed framework for navigating identity disruption — whether it arises through fatherhood, loss, separation, or major life change. The work begins at the Groundwork Layer: understanding what a man actually carries before attempting to rebuild what comes next.
If this research reflects something of your own experience — as a father, a man navigating transition, or a professional working alongside men — I would encourage you to read it directly.
Read the original Australian study (citation)
Lewington, L., Lee, J., & Sebar, B. (2021). “I’m Not Just a Babysitter”: Masculinity and Men’s Experiences of First-Time Fatherhood. Men and Masculinities. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X21993884
I write more about the Father Wound: The Father Wound: What It Is, How it Affects Men and Father Wound in Men: Shame, Distance, and Hidden Grief