The Expectant Father

In 1989, when my wife got pregnant for the first time, we were both first-time parents and equally ill-prepared for the whole pregnancy process. Fortunately for her, there were hundreds of books designed to educate, encourage, support and comfort women during their pregnancies. But when it finally hit me that I, too, was expecting, and the pregnancy was bringing out all sorts of feelings, emotions and worries that I didn't understand, there weren't any resources for me to turn to.

My wife's pregnancy books had a little (very, very little) information on what expectant fathers were going through, but it was generally incredibly superficial, consisting mostly of advice on how men should support their wives. Parenting magazines were similarly unhelpful.

So why don't we discuss men's concerns as fathers more? In my opinion, it's because we, as a society, value motherhood more than fatherhood and automatically assume that issues of childbirth and childrearing are women's issues.

But for me, fatherhood isn't a women's issue and so I began doing research. My research consisted of talking to dozens of men about their experiences as fathers and reading every piece of scientific data on fatherhood available to find out more about the ways all of us (men, women and society) regard and treat fathers and how that impacts fathers, families and children. What I found was that men's emotional response to pregnancy is no less varied than women's; expectant fathers feel everything from relief to denial, fear to frustration, anger to joy.