Why Dads Leave: Insights and Resources for When Partners Become Parents
Meryn G. Callander was born in Australia in 1952. She attended Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, graduating with degrees in both social work and economics, and went on to become a social worker helping children in crisis.In 1979, Meryn embarked on an around-the-world journey culminating in California, where she attended a residential seminar at the Wellness Resource Center, established by John (Jack) Travis in 1975.  It was here that the spark was lit that led to over 30 years of marriage and professional partnership. As co-director of Wellness Associates, Meryn joined Jack in pushing the frontiers of wellness beyond the personal and into the interpersonal and planetary.Her immersion in the field of feminist spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s was pivotal in forging a new direction for Wellness Associates. Together with Jack, she facilitated seminars that fostered a network of helping professionals committed to shifting the prevailing cultural norms that undermine personal integrity and authenticity, and compromise our potential for true partnership and connection with others. In 1990 hey co-authoredWellness for Helping Professionals: Creating Compassionate Cultures.In 1992, Meryn took Jack’s classic Wellness Inventory, with its focus on personal wellness, to a planetary focus, co-authoring with him,A Change of Heart: The Global Wellness Inventory.In 1999, she took the lead in revising the Wellness Inventory for an online version produced by HealthWorld Online.In 1993, Meryn gave birth to their daughter, Siena, an experience that was to radically change her life in a multitude of unexpected ways. Her own experiences of birthing and parenting led toThe Wellspring Guide,a quarterly publication featuring her in-depth synopses of selected parenting and children’s books (now accessible through WhyDadsLeave.com).In 1999, along with eleven other experts in the field of birth and child development, she co-founded, and served for several years as president of, the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children."Why Men Leave," a magazine article by Jack published in the US and Australia in 2004, generated such a strong response that it compelled Meryn to dive deeper into the neurobiological, interpersonal, social and cultural dynamics underlying their experience and prompted her to writeWhy Dads Leave.