Expert: Men who get involved with pregnancy may inevitably feel like failure

May 31, 2010 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News, Pregnancy

A medical expert claims that men who get involved with their partner’s pregnancy may have their confidence destroyed and injure their potential relationship with the child in the future.

Dr. Jonathan Ives, of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Birmingham, is fighting against what he calls the “false, modern rhetoric of equal involvement that has sprung up around parenting.”

Dr. Ives and partner Dr. Heather Draper have been working on a two-year research study titled “The Moral Habitus of Fatherhood” and plan on expressing their views at a pregnancy conference in June. According to the pair’s research, men risk injuring their own opinion of themselves by trying too hard to become involved with their partner’s pregnancy.

“There is a modern, moral ideology of fatherhood that says if you’re not intimately involved in every aspect of your baby’s development, you’re failing,” Ives told the Guardian. He claims that men often try to get involved in an intimate, proactive way only to discover that their role is a very passive one during pregnancy. Often this leads to emotional detachment, he said.

“Having begun the fathering role already feeling a failure may destroy his confidence,” said Ives.

“It can then be very difficult for him to regain faith in himself once the baby is born and move from that passive state to being a proactive father. His role in the family is no longer clear to him. He effectively becomes deskilled as a parent and this can lead to problems bonding with the child.”

Ives’ comments follow a recently reported study that found that fathers are also susceptible to postpartum depression. That study found that over 10 percent of fathers became depressed during the prenatal and early postnatal period, with the number jumping to over 25 percent between three and six months after birth.

Dr. Draper suggested that there were other, more positive ways for fathers to get involved with their partners and children. “There are many different preparations for fatherhood and attending antenatal classes and being present at the birth are not the only, or even necessarily the best, methods,” she said. “Society must be realistic about what men can actually contribute”.