As a child, Kevin Hughes loved being part of a large family. One of four children, he had tons of cousins. There were giant gatherings and hours-long games of Ghost in the Graveyard. Hughes accepted it as writing that it was his job to look after his younger family and that he was comfortable taking care of him when he was in high school. He filed information and ideas on how he intended to approach fatherhood in the future.
Hughes, now 37, is living in Minneapolis today with his wife and son, who will become one this summer. He acknowledges his upbringing for how comfortable he feels around his baby boy. But even though he was about as willing to be a father as any man could reasonably be, Hughes admits the transition was a shock to the system.
“You go beyond this threshold where there is no return,” says Hughes. “He will always be there, and you can always do something as a parent to improve his existence.”
Tautologies can be profound. Parents have children. Everyone understands that. But that does not mean that everyone understands the nature of that experience. Few do so before they get it and that number may decrease: Newly released CDC data show that birth rates in the United States in a record slump, which does not simply mean fewer babies. This means that people wait and acclimatize to a child-free adult lifestyle. The average age of first-time fatherhood has been steadily rising, from 27.4 years in 1972 to 30.9 years in 2015, according to data released in 2017. That research also revealed that, during the same period, the number of first-time fathers over 40 more than doubled, from 4.1% to 8.9%. It all means that modern fathers have more time to think about what it might be like to be a father and less reason to take their expectations, informed by unsustainable lifestyle with children, seriously.
Even men like Kevin Hughes do not know what is coming until it hits them.
Accepted ideas of paternal behavior have changed significantly since millennial fathers were millennial children. Yet, says Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, a professor of applied psychology at New York University, older ideas shed light on what men expect. The idea that men are obliged to be financial providers while women act as caregivers may be less accepted than it once was. But that does not mean that the monolithic idea, which is still prevalent in mainstream representations of American families, does not obscure men’s views of potential caring roles.
“We tend to have a narrative that raising a child is a mother’s domain, and mothers do it better than fathers,” says Tamis-LeMonda, adding that this is why it is still not “cool”. “is, socially speaking, for young men to think. want or talk about a family. Not only are men’s views of themselves as potential nurturers blocked by cultural constructs, they are blocked by internalized ideas of masculinity.
Those ideas can also lead men astray, even when they make the effort to consider what kind of parents they can become.
Before becoming a father, Thomas Gonnella assumed he would have to become his family’s de-facto disciplinary. He feared this development, which felt against his nature and was inevitable. It never happened. Gonnella has two children and a wife who does not care about being a ‘bad cop’.
“In our culture we have ideas about what fathers do and what mothers do. Even though 99% of it overlaps, we think differently about it, ”says Dante Spetter, a licensed clinical child psychologist who teaches child and adolescent development at Harvard, as well as developmental psychopathology.
Spetter notes that both men and women enter parenthood with unrealistic ideas about what it’s going to be like, in terms of the work it actually requires and how parenting fits in with the rest of life. “I think the unpredictability is part of what no one expects, and when it comes to how to deal with that, moms and dads have different ideas, ”she says.
Another fact of the expectation gap, Spetter explains, is that when people typically think of parenting, they are representing young children younger than five years old. “They do not think of a teenager, they think of a baby – nurturing is the part of parenting that people think of. It’s not ‘how do you get someone dressed and in the car at daycare.’
When Sean Sullivan, who has a four-year-old, first became a father, he remembers a process of figuring things out, but can not remember spending time looking too far into the future. When his wife was pregnant, “I looked no further than the now you have the baby part,” Sullivan says. “Then it was suddenly like, ‘What do I expect from this child?’ I just thought it would be a lot of work and very busy. I did not really go into it with a lot of preconceived notions about what being a father would be like, other than the fact that I loved children. ”
Men sketch their concepts of fatherhood based on popular culture, perceived social norms, parenting guides, peers and even social media, explains Tamis-LeMonda. But approaches to parenting are often forged in the forms – or against the forms – of their parents.
“No matter how fatherhood has worked in their family and their own close community, this is where they will get their ideas,” says Spetter. As a clinician, she often hears men talk about how they want to be different from their own father. Often it comes down to: “When it comes to men who think of being a father: What do they see at home?”
Rick Fordyce was 41 when he and his husband adopted their son in 2017. He was raised by his grandparents in West Virginia and cooked with his grandmother and worked with his grandfather in the garage, knowing he wanted to become a parent from a very young age.
“I do not think society has prepared me at all. If you watch TV from when I was growing up, mom was the main character. “While I was thinking about becoming a father, I never wanted there to be typical roles,” he says.
For Fordyce, developing his own style of fatherhood meant abandoning preconceived notions of what he meant by parenting. “The part I did not expect so much was how I was willing to allow everything else to take a back seat: He always enjoys priority,” he says. “You compromise a lot in relationships. But there is more compromise in being a father than I ever expected. ”
An unexpected point of compromise: Coparenting. Both Spetter and Tamis-LeMonda referred to the concept of hekwag, which among other behaviors describe mothers micromanaging fathers. “What often happens in a dynamic in a male / female couple is that the mother has very clear ideas about how things should be done – should be done – and if the father sees it differently, he is either put under pressure to “to do it her way or printed. aside, do not trust,” says Spetter.
At 32, Jorian Arneson is not a father, and he’s not sure if he wants to be – mostly because of concerns about how parenting will affect his marriage. Arneson and his wife have been together for 13 years, since college, and he cherishes their relationship as it is. “Everything changes for some people when they have children, because they can not handle the stress,” says Arneson. His fears are far from unfounded: Research shows that children are irrevocable change a relationship dynamic, as pillowcases are replaced by diaper-related discussions and child-related everyday to-do lists. Regarding the proverb that children bring a couple closer together: It might just be a myth.
On the other side of the threshold, Hughes also talked about how fatherhood affects his own marriage. One thing he did not think too much about before his son was born was how approaches to fatherhood and motherhood can clash; after seeing peers struggle to get on the same page with parenting, from the “right” way to wrap up to the right moment to introduce solid foods, he feels happy to be in line with those expectations. It was not a given.
“I won the lottery,” Hughes said. “It’s so important how to experience how your partner handles it individually, and how you handle it as a team.”
