A pilot study published in Pediatrics Open Science suggests that showing short educational videos to first-time fathers in the hospital newborn nursery – a setting that uniquely captures paternal presence – can meaningfully improve knowledge of safe sleep, infant crying, and car safety. The findings point to an underused clinical window with real implications for infant injury prevention and the redistribution of parental caregiving burden.
Healthcare systems have historically organised postnatal education around the mother–infant relationship, leaving fathers to absorb what they can by proximity. A new pilot study from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine suggests this represents a missed opportunity – and that it can be corrected with something as straightforward as a short video on a smartphone or tablet, shown while a new father sits beside his partner in the nursery.
The study, published in Pediatrics Open Science in 2026, enrolled 167 first-time fathers of full-term infants and asked them to watch brief educational videos on three topics linked to infant mortality: safe sleep, infant crying, and car safety. The results were encouraging, if nuanced: knowledge improved significantly in the immediate post-viewing period, though gains proved difficult to sustain once families returned home.
Why fathers, and why now?
The clinical rationale for targeting fathers specifically is well established, even if practice has been slow to follow. Father engagement in early parenting is associated with improved childhood behavioural and educational outcomes, reduced maternal burden, and stronger family functioning. Yet fathers routinely report feeling like bystanders – or, as one study cited by the authors characterised it, “a practical guy in the shadow” – in healthcare settings focused on the birthing parent.
The stakes in terms of infant safety are considerable. Unintentional injuries related to unsafe sleep, frustration-driven responses to infant crying, and improper car seat use remain leading causes of death in young children. Crucially, fathers represent the majority of known perpetrators in child-inflicted injury – a statistic that, rather than casting fathers as a risk to be managed, underscores the urgency of engaging them as informed caregivers from the outset.
“New fathers often report feeling like bystanders in healthcare settings, with parenting supports primarily focused on the mother from pregnancy through the postpartum,” said Mikaela Thompson from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who led the study. “Our study recognises the importance of involving fathers in child health, and especially in infant injury prevention, from the very beginning of becoming a father.”
For clinicians, the implication is direct: the newborn nursery constitutes a feasible, and largely untapped, venue for father-focused education that does not require separate infrastructure or extensive resource investment.
The intervention and how it worked
The study was conducted in the newborn nursery of a large Midwestern hospital between June and December 2023. Eligible participants were English-speaking, first-time fathers of full-term infants – those with infants in the neonatal intensive care unit were excluded. Of 367 birthing families approached, 167 fathers enrolled, exceeding the recruitment target of 150 and demonstrating that in-hospital recruitment is operationally viable.
Each participant completed an initial survey before watching three videos, each running four to seven minutes. The videos
– developed specifically for this intervention – featured a real father interacting with his two-week-old infant, with educational content delivered by a paediatrician or childhood injury-prevention expert. Topics were chosen on the basis of being common parental knowledge gaps and successful targets of previous maternal education programmes.
Knowledge surveys were administered before and immediately after the videos, then again at one week and one month post-discharge. Incentives included a pack of nappies at enrolment and a $30 electronic gift card on completing the final survey.
Retention was strong: 97% of enrolled fathers completed the initial survey, 86% watched all three videos and completed the post-video survey, and 83% of baseline survey completers finished the one-month follow-up – a meaningful achievement for a community that is notoriously difficult to retain in research.
What the data showed
The video intervention produced statistically significant improvements in safe sleep knowledge immediately following viewing.. Selection of unsafe sleep locations fell sharply: endorsement of car seats as a sleep location dropped from 28.7% to 8.4%, and swing or rocker from 20.3% to 3.5%. Knowledge about placing infants on their back to sleep was already high at baseline (98%) and remained so.
Crying knowledge also improved substantially. Pre-video, only 55% of fathers correctly understood that infant crying does not always have an identifiable cause, and 77% correctly identified late afternoon or evening as the peak crying period. Post-intervention, those figures rose to 78% and 97% respectively. Importantly, crying knowledge showed greater durability than sleep knowledge at follow-up, with fathers remaining more than twice as likely to answer correctly at both one week and one month.
Car safety knowledge was strikingly high at baseline and remained so throughout – near-universal endorsement of rear-facing car seat use and no fathers leaving infants unattended in vehicles at any time point. The authors attribute this partly to the study’s demographic composition: the sample was predominantly white, highly educated (92% with at least a college degree), married, and privately insured. These characteristics are associated with higher baseline safety knowledge and compliant behaviours, limiting how much the intervention could move the needle in this domain.
The less encouraging finding was that safe sleep gains did not hold at home. By one month post-discharge, adherence to infants sleeping alone in their crib had dropped to 79%, and car seat use as a sleep location – something the video explicitly discouraged – had paradoxically risen, with 38.1% of fathers endorsing it at one month compared with 8.4% immediately post-video.
The knowledge-behaviour gap
This divergence between what fathers knew and what they did is perhaps the most clinically significant finding in the paper. As the authors note in the discussion, “factors such as time of day and fatigue may influence adherence” – a thoroughly plausible explanation for any parent navigating the sleep-deprived reality of the fourth trimester. Co-sleeping and the use of inclined sleepers often emerge not from ignorance but from exhaustion, which no amount of pre-discharge video instruction fully inoculates against.
“Our finding suggests that at-home reinforcement or ‘booster sessions’ might be needed to maintain learning and support behaviours, especially in the first year,” said Craig Garfield, MD, senior author and Professor of Paediatrics and Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Text messaging might help support study retention.”
The authors draw on existing evidence for this approach: repeated messaging has demonstrated effectiveness in father-focused interventions, and booster doses of education at well-child visits or via digital platforms represent a realistic, scalable extension of the nursery intervention. As the authors write in their conclusion, “fathers may benefit from additional provision of ‘booster’ information once home to sustain knowledge and promote concordant behaviours.”
Implications for practice and the road ahead
“The videos in our study on key injury prevention topics are a novel educational intervention soon after infant birth that offers unique opportunities to reach fathers who may not be able to come to infant healthcare visits,” explained Dr Garfield.
New fathers often report feeling like bystanders in healthcare settings, with parenting supports primarily focused on the mother from pregnancy through the postpartum.
“We show that the newborn nursery is indeed a viable setting for father-focused instruction – fathers may actually be looking for this sort of information at this time.”
The study’s limitations are acknowledged by the team. It was a single-site, single-arm design without a control group, which precludes causal inference. The homogenous sample reduces generalisability, particularly to populations in which baseline infant safety knowledge and resources are lower – precisely the groups where an effective intervention would have the greatest impact. The one-month follow-up window, while pragmatic for a feasibility study, does not capture how knowledge and behaviours evolve across the first year of parenting, when crying peaks around four to six weeks and fatigue compounds risk.
The authors propose a clear agenda for future work: expanding the intervention to NICU settings and well-child visits, using text messaging to support knowledge retention, and critically, recruiting more socioeconomically and racially varied populations.
“Relying solely on mothers to keep infants safe overlooks the important role of fathers and a key opportunity for prevention,” the authors write – a statement that is as much a call to clinical practice as it is a research conclusion.
For health systems willing to act on these findings, the barrier to entry is low. The videos are brief, evidence-based, and already developed. The setting – the newborn nursery – is one in which fathers are naturally present. What has been lacking, until now, is evidence that they are both willing and able to engage. This study provides it.
Journal reference:
Thompson, M., O’Sullivan, K., Simon, C., et al. (2026). Discharge for dads: a video-based pilot intervention in the nursery supporting first-time fathers. Pediatrics Open Science, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.1542/pedsos.2025-001195
