Fathers’/male partner’s representation in breastfeeding policies: A content analysis of Australian and global infant feeding policies

Background: Fathers/male partners are known to be increasingly involved in caring for babies and young children and to be a valuable source of support for mothers in establishing and maintaining breastfeeding. Despite this, interventions and policies aimed at increasing breastfeeding rates have historically downplayed or even ignored the role of men. Objective: To investigate how and in what context fathers/male partners are represented through text and images in Australian and global breastfeeding and infant and young child feeding (IYCF) policy documents. Methods: Content analysis was used to evaluate and analyse publicly available breastfeeding and IYCF policies sourced from the World Health Organisation database and a Google search. Excel, GPT 3.5 and NVivo version 20.0 were utilised for data extraction, management, and analysis. Results: A total of 24 policies were analysed. The terms father and or husband were used in three quarters (71%) of the policies. Breastfeeding only policies had the highest number of mentions of father and or husband (68%) compared to IYCF policies (32%). However, in IYCF policies, 69.0% of terms describing parents/caregivers were gender inclusive, compared to only 31.0% in breastfeeding policies. Father and or husband were mentioned the highest number of times in the Australian breastfeeding policy (34.7%), followed by New Zealand (18.4%). Gendered representations of breast and infant and young child feeding dominated all policies. Five themes related to the ways that fathers/male partners were represented were identified; recognition of fathers in policy, fathers and breastfeeding decisions, strategies to involve fathers, gender inclusion, and representation of fathers in images. Conclusions and implications: While fathers/male partners are mentioned in breastfeeding and IYCF policies, many policies used gender inclusive terms to refer to parents/carers, only a small number of policies explicitly acknowledge the importance of fathers for breastfeeding and infant feeding more broadly. The absence of clear strategies related to fathers/male partners in the majority of policies may represent a missed opportunity to make breastfeeding support strategies more inclusive for fathers/male partners and to potentially improve exclusive breastfeeding rates.