Caveat: One person’s opinion – will not work for all.

Helping your wife to bring your child into this world involves more than one day. It is much more than building tree houses five years too early, anxious pacing of corridors or clumsy attempts at home videos in the delivery ward.

Pregnancy is a magical and priceless journey. If it is your first, you will never ever experience that same depth of joy and thrill, I reckon. Even if you are a confirmed atheist – there will be moments during this journey when you catch glimpses of The Light.

That marvellous journey ought to start, at the very latest, when she first breaks the good news.

Be there, for her morning sickness, her crazy craving for strange food during even crazier hours of the day or night. Hold her hands during the pre-natal classes. Be gentle and loving, kind and…

In August of last year, I gave a paper to the University of Melbourne’s Office of Research Ethics and Integrity research seminars, Tuesdays with OREI, on ‘Hyper-Anxiety about Research Integrity among library staff and RHD students’ that ended up doing two different things. So this is the third of a five part blog series, about who is anxious, why it’s unhelpful, and what we can do instead. 

You can read the whole series by clicking on the category ‘Hyper-Anxiety & Academic Honesty’.

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In the first two posts, I suggested that ‘hyper-anxiety’ about research ethics and integrity is excessive and a ‘double-anxiety’, or a shame about not being totally confident. Rather than seeing academic honesty as a negotiated and complex series of judgment calls that can and should be discussed openly, a punitive culture shuts down sharing and mutual support.

In this post I suggest that it’s not just RHD…