2024 Community Champion: Craig Garfield

Interview with Craig Garfield

A practicing physician for 20-plus years and former stay-at-home-dad, Craig Garfield wears many hats. Among them is leading the effort to expand to fathers and non-birth partners the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring program initiated for mothers to reduce infant morbidity and mortality by influencing behaviors before, during, and after pregnancy.

We selected Craig as a Community Champion for his deep commitment to elevating the presence and role of fathers — who often are overlooked to the detriment of their own well-being and that of their families. From advocating to expand the Pregnancy Risk Assessment and Monitoring System to include fathers to developing an app that supports dads in the NICU, Craig helps make sure a vital member of the family unit is both visible and empowered to engage meaningfully.

What’s the core mission of your organization and how do you carry it out?

I’m in a lot of different organizations. I’ve been a practicing pediatrician for 25-plus years. And I work at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Our motto at Lurie Children’s is “All, for your one.” It focuses on marshaling the resources for the benefit of children.

I also started the Family & Child Health Innovations Program in 2020. Our motto is “Children Thrive when Families Thrive.” We think about how what we do in pediatrics, in the healthcare system, in a community more broadly, can help families thrive, knowing that ultimately helps children. That ties right into the mission of being a pediatrician and helping children to thrive, to be the best they can be in the family and in the situations they’re in.

What accomplishment makes you the most proud?

I’d say 2 things make me really proud. First is providing 1-on-1 care for babies and families in the neonatal intensive care unit, where I primarily practice now.

That transition into parenthood for mothers and for fathers is a special and unique time. Everybody really wants what’s best for the baby. And so being in a stressful situation like a neonatal intensive care unit, caring for babies and helping families get off on the right foot, is extremely rewarding.

The second thing is the work we’ve been doing on the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System  for Dads.

The CDC had been doing PRAMS for mothers for 35 years to reduce infant morbidity and mortality by influencing maternal behaviors before, during, and after pregnancy. We started a pilot for fathers in 2018 in Georgia, with a little bit of support from the CDC. It was the first time for public health awareness or monitoring of fathers in that transition to fatherhood in the perinatal period.

I was really proud to get that off the ground. We’ve had a number of academic papers from that and a lot of attention on PRAMS for Dads. So much so that it has expanded now to 8 states in 2025, including New Jersey, thanks to support from the Burke Foundation. And Wisconsin and Maine are joining us this year, and we’re in North Dakota and Michigan.

This has grown to meet a need that public health practitioners knew we had, which was a better line of sight on the needs of fathers and non-birth partners in the perinatal period. So I’m super proud of that.

What’s the biggest challenge facing families in the first 1,000 days?

There are the very practical challenges, which are, “How do I take care of this baby? How do I breastfeed this baby?” It’s a big change, particularly as people put off having babies until older ages when they might be in their career already. So there’s a big challenge of logistically having a baby and having to feed that baby every 3 hours around the clock for the first couple of months.

So how do we support families who may not be close to their family of birth or family of origin? The support that traditionally comes may not be there – not having your grandparents around or aunts and uncles or cousins to help out and pitch in is a big stressor.

The other big challenge is as a society we don’t provide adequate support for families as they transition to parenthood. For example, New Jersey and some other states have a paid family leave program but, by and large, the U.S. doesn’t have a federal paid leave that’s adequate for families.

To me, it all starts at the beginning. It’s about having the time without the distraction of work and other responsibilities to focus on that baby, to understand, “How do I take care of that baby?” Research shows that the more involved you are early on — particularly the father — the more involved you are when the baby’s 9 months old, too.

It’s a great investment in your family to spend time with that baby even when they’re very little. In our work from PRAMS for Dads, we have data that dads who are involved and supportive of breastfeeding are more likely to have partners who breastfeed for longer. So there’s a lot of great benefits for families if you focus on the very beginning of those 1,000 days.

What gives you hope for the future?

One of the most hopeful times in anyone’s life is the arrival of a new baby — a new child, a child to take care of. And that’s perennial. So for me, for example, if I get called to a delivery or I get to take care of a baby, I always enjoy that. I always enjoy talking with parents and seeing babies and children as they develop and get older.

The surroundings may change. There might be new toys or new technology or new things we need to adapt to, but the human constant of birth and development and life and growth over time is extremely hopeful. And I think the common humanity that we see — that I get to see as a pediatrician — is probably what gives me the most hope and excites me about the future.

What’s the secret to a great partnership, whether it’s with government, community, individuals?

The 2 things that come to mind are, first, a common goal and objective of where we want to go, and then communication that gets us there. If we all have the same goal and ultimate destination we want to reach, it may take a little bit of conversation to figure out how we’re going to get there, recognizing there’s lots of different ways to get there.

And I think that’s been helpful as we think about our goal of elevating fathers and public health, which is what PRAMS for Dads really is all about.