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Gidget Foundation Australia

Gidget Foundation Australia is a not-for-profit organisation that exists to support the emotional wellbeing of expectant and new parents, to ensure they receive timely, appropriate and specialist care. GFA provides a range of clinical treatment programs including individual psychological consultations via face-to-face or telehealth and a peer support group.

Vision and mission

Vision: A community that values the emotional wellbeing of expectant and new parents by providing specialist care, connection and support.

Mission: Gidget Foundation Australia exists to support the emotional wellbeing of expectant and new parents to ensure they receive timely, appropriate and specialist care.

How Gidget Foundation Australia can help

Gidget Foundation Australia provides clinical treatment programs for expectant and new parents:

Gidget House provides free individual psychological counselling sessions (a maximum of 10 sessions) for expectant and new parents, delivered face-to-face from various locations in NSW, QLD, VIC, TAS and WA.

Start Talking is a national service providing free telehealth psychological counselling services (a maximum of 10 sessions) for expectant and new parents delivered via a video call service.

Gidget Virtual Village is a private, moderated Facebook peer support group, connecting expectant and new parents with Gidget Foundation Australia and each other.

Information lines / help lines

  • Call 1300 851 758 Mon to Fri 9am – 5pm AEST

Recommended links

Last reviewed: March 2024

Information from this partner

Found 23 results

LGBTQIA+ families

The composition of each family unit and the varied pathways to parenthood reflect the diversity of family life across Australia. In supporting the mental health and wellbeing of all parents, acknowledging this diversity is essential to ensuring the availability of inclusive, accessible and culturally sensitive health services.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Strategies for managing advice

It is common for a baby’s arrival to trigger an influx of advice from family and peers on everything from sleep to feeding routines. Some of this advice may be welcome and useful. At other times, it may feel overwhelming or confusing. Most advice comes from people who want to help or feel useful. However, if a lot of different advice comes from different sources, new parents sometimes lose track of how they wish to care for their child.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Managing Stress and Prioritising Emotional Wellbeing

New parents navigate a significant life transition, involving changes that are physical, psychological, emotional and financial. Some stress in early parenthood is very normal because it involves so many new experiences and change unlike any other time in a person’s life.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Baby & Infant Death

The sudden, or not so sudden death of a baby or infant can be devastating and overwhelming for their parents and families. Their future has changed forever, yet this unexpected change requires them to somehow cope with a strange new sort of “normal”.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Perinatal Bereavement

Perinatal bereavement is the deeply distressing experience of losing a baby, typically through miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal death. This type of grief has a profound emotional impact on the parents, families, and their support networks, as they navigate the devastating loss of a child during the perinatal period (which includes pregnancy and the immediate postpartum period).

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Understanding Miscarriage

Although miscarriages are common, they can be traumatic and heart-breaking for women and their partners. A miscarriage is defined as the loss of a pregnancy before week 20 (a loss from 20 weeks' gestation is defined as a stillbirth). Did you know that one in four pregnancies end before week 20, with most of those losses occurring in the first 12 weeks?

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Understanding Stillbirth

Stillbirth is the tragic and devastating loss of a baby from 20 weeks' gestation, or 400g body weight if gestation is unknown.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Health Professionals

Gidget Foundation Australia provides free resources of health professionals looking for patient support information. Our specialist perinatal mental health clinicians provide a wide range of individual and parent-infant therapies to expectant and new parents as well as partners. Our programs DO NOT provide crisis support. If your patient needs immediate help, please call triple zero (000), your local emergency department or Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Adjusting to parenthood

Bringing a newborn baby home for the first time is a unique experience, there are likely to be moments of joy, awe, exhaustion, and uncertainty. Gidget Foundation Australia provides helpful, evidence-based information to support parents during this time.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Parenting videos

Gidget Foundation Australia provides video resources for expectant and new parents covering a range of topics such as grief and loss, support for new dads, Bunny Book readings, packing for birth and resilience.

Read more on Gidget Foundation Australia website

Call us and speak to a Maternal Child Health Nurse for personal advice and guidance.

Need further advice or guidance from our maternal child health nurses?

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