From the moment you
learn of your partner's pregnancy, you're thrust into a strange new world and
encouraged to participate in the pregnancy and birth process. Yet, you may feel
awkward about sharing your fears and insecurities. That's only natural. Here
are seven common fears faced by fathers-to-be:
The biggest fear
men face is the one most deeply hardwired into our culture: Will I be able to
protect and provide for my family? In many families when the first child
arrives, there's this sudden if temporary shift from two incomes for two people
to one income for three. And that's a tough burden to carry in today's world.
The father has to be strong in ways he hadn't counted on before. He has to
provide support not just financially but also emotionally: His partner will
need his help, she'll be undergoing dramatic emotional shifts, and he has to be
ready for her to lean on him.
Performance fears
More than 80
percent of the fathers I come across in my practice say they were worried they
wouldn't be able to perform when their partner was in labor. They were afraid
of passing out, throwing up, or getting queasy in the presence of all those
bodily fluids. Such fears may be based on cartoons and sitcoms and our
culture's way of making fun of men, but two things became clear: The men all
expected it — and it almost never happens. In follow-up interviews, it turned
out only one out of 600 men fainted, and that was in August in Fresno
(California), and the air conditioning had gone out and two of the nurses had
to leave the room, too.
If you really can't
tolerate blood, step out of the delivery room. Don't ignore your fears — work
through them, talk to other fathers who've been there. Typically, the first
thing fathers say when they come out of the delivery room is "The baby and
my wife are fine; it's a girl." And the second thing they say is "I
didn't get queasy — I came through it okay."
About half the new
and expectant dads I interviewed eventually came around to admitting they had
fleeting thoughts that they weren't really the baby's father. But if you ask
them whether they suspect that their partner had an affair, they're insulted
and hurt. On a logical level, it's a disconnect, but on an emotional level
something else is going on. He's dwelling on his own inadequacies: "It's
too monumental, too godlike, being part of the creation of life. Someone bigger
than me must have done it."
One of the fathers
I encountered was this interesting guy with bright red hair, freckles, and a
crooked smile. His baby had bright red hair, freckles, and a crooked smile. And
he said with a straight face, "I wonder if my wife was unfaithful."
But he went on: "It just seemed — I don't know — this was too good, too
miraculous to happen to me."
When you're a part
of the beginning of a life, you can't avoid thinking about the end of life.
Thoughts about your own mortality can loom large: You're not the youngest
generation anymore, your replacement has arrived, and if everything works out
right, you'll die before your child dies. For a lot of young men who go around
thinking they're immortal or invincible, that's a big change. One of my clients
was a world-class racecar driver, and he gave it up. He told me, "I don't
have the right to die anymore."
Fear for your partner's or child's health
Childbirth is such
a nerve-racking experience. Scary things can happen to the person you love most
in the whole world. You might lose the baby; you might lose your partner and
have to bring the baby up alone. It really wasn't long ago that giving birth
was fraught with danger: When my grandparents had children in the early 1920s,
the main cause of death in women under 50 was childbirth. Today, if the birth
goes well and the baby's fine, you'll still find most parents secretly counting
the newborn's fingers and toes.
Men often fear that
their partner will love the baby more than anyone on earth — and exclude them
from that intimate relationship. It's a very real fear of being replaced.
It's true that having
a baby can put a real strain on your relationship with your partner. It's also
true that dads can feel left out of the powerful mom-baby bond, especially in
the newborn weeks. But each parent brings different strengths to the
partnership. The child usually relies on the mother for security, comfort, and
warmth. The child looks to the father for his sense of freedom and separation
and sense of the world. Of course, those qualities can come from either parent,
but when all these strengths work hand in hand, it's fabulous.
My advice to dads
is to make it clear that this is his child, too, and he's a partner in raising
him. He needs to spend time alone with his baby and kick Mom out of the house
some days.
Fears of "women's medicine"
Men are not used to
the ob-gyn establishment. It's foreign, it's cold, it's something we don't
understand well. Even as observers, many men feel embarrassed and inhibited
around stirrups and gynecological exams. Hospital examining rooms and delivery
rooms are not made comfortable for a father. Being prepared — making decisions
together about the kind of care you want for your partner and baby — helps
tremendously. Having a birth plan,
with a set role for you, also helps to make clear what's ahead in the process.
Jerrold Lee Shapiro, a licensed
clinical psychologist, is the author ofBecoming a Father (Springer), The Measure of a Man (Berkley), andWhen Men Are Pregnant (Delta). He lives
in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.
Max is 30. His wife Sharon is 27 and they were married two
years ago. Their baby Chloe is two months old. Max describes his feelings when
he first knew about the pregnancy.
