Excerpt from Birthing Fathers: The Transformation of Men in American Rites of Birth by Richard K. Reed

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Kevin hunched forward in the booth of the coffee shop, rolling the mug slowly in his calloused hands. “We didn’t really know what we were getting into; hell we didn’t even know we were going to get pregnant.” His shock of blonde hair and his slight, muscular frame suggested an inner tension that energized his slow movements. He looked up at me, catching my eye for just a moment. “But once Sara was born, I was blown away, I was totally into it.”

Kevin’s baby entered the world one hot July night. “I had watched a lot of those birthing-class videos and every time I’d be like, ‘Oh man, this looks terrible.’ But it wasn’t like that when Sara was born. It was magical.” Kevin’s eyes started to fill with tears as he talked about wrapping himself around the little being, or how she grasped the air with tiny hands, arched her back, and opened her perfect, pink mouth. Even six months later it was clear that for that moment, and from that moment, Kevin’s world was engulfed by this new little person.

Kevin is destined to become a new kind of father. Gone are the days when Dad’s job was simply to keep his daughters well dressed and his sons straight. Today’s fathers change diapers and brush hair, pack lunches, and bandage scraped knees. The ideal father is no longer the stern patriarch or distant provider, but a warm and accessible caregiver. Dr. Spock and Penelope Leach, child-rearing specialists, put dads next to moms on the covers of their books and Bill Cosby was raised to God-father status as he bantered with his TV teenagers.

For generations, most dads have carried out their loving duties, quietly painting cribs and coaching Little League. The image of the new father emphasizes qualities that have been considered secondary in men’s role in the family. Rather than authorities, fathers can be nurturers. Although they may still drive the car, dads are now responsible for doing laundry, sweating over homework, and comforting sick kids. In addition to being strong, they are expected to be empathic and understanding fathers. Despite the stresses of being overworked and underpaid, these new fathers are finding time and energy to be full parents. While media focus on absent and uncaring fathers, almost half of American men have reduced work time to be with their kids, and three-quarters would like to do so more (Griswold 1993, 245).

What do we know about these new fathers? Although academia has devoted decades to studying motherhood, we have only recently become aware of fathers. In the past, research focused on the economic man, the political man, and the physical man—but rarely the family man. When fathers were noticed, it was for their faults. Public interest and national research about dads focused on their failures: absent fathers, uncaring fathers, teenage fathers, abusive fathers, and unmarried fathers.

Only in the last decade have social scientists discovered fathers and uncovered a multifaceted phenomenon. Anthropologists study the evolutionary importance of fathers; historians have traced the changing place of fathers in families and society; psychologists point out that babies form powerful ties to their dads, which are important for the child’s psychological and social development; and sociologists trace the roles of men as parents and how those ties change over the life span. In all these various fields, it is clear that a man’s relations with his children are not only important for the children, but for dad’s identity and place in society as well.

Men and Birth

Academic treatises did not turn my attention to fathers—I stumbled across fatherhood when my daughter was born. After years of working to be a man, a husband, a friend, and a son, I somehow became a father without thinking about what it meant. I attended to my little daughter in those first months, hardly aware of the change that was taking place in me. When my son was born several years later, I realized that I had become one of these people called “fathers.” But I was not a father in my own father’s image; I had become a new kind of father. My interest was piqued. Who had I become? How had it happened? So I set out to understand the transformation of men into social beings who have all the complex rights, responsibilities, hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations of being fathers.

Trained as an anthropologist, I had developed some of the tools to explore this phenomenon. I had spent years with South American Indians and witnessed the rituals of fatherhood in other societies. I knew that culture underlies phenomena that often seem immutable, such as the practice of medicine. Plus, I am a good listener. So I searched my field notes, mined the library, and began to collect stories from the experts—other fathers. More than fifty men shared their memories, plans, thrills, and concerns as fathers. I found men in doctors’ offices and birthing classes, at family reunions and business meetings, on the street and in coffee shops. Following my own inclinations, these conversations focused on the process by which men took up the mantle and assumed the role of fatherhood. We discussed the deliberations, the preparations, and the reality of joining children in a lifetime of becoming. These men talked about sharing pregnancy, birth, childhood, and adolescence with partners and children. They recounted the difficulty of letting go as grown children leave home to enter the world. Most of all, we talked about birth: that of fathers and that of their babies.

I discovered that inside every father is a birth story he wants to tell. Despite the fact that we rarely hear men talk about childbirth, these men relished the opportunity. They have powerful and personal stories of what they did and how it felt. Each father had his own unique and intense memories. One talked about the feel of his partner’s belly during contractions, another about the mixture of boredom and fear; some could describe the smallest detail in the first sight of their babies, and many waxed poetic about the feeling at first holding the new being. I became their willing audience.

Anthropologists do not survey large numbers of random and anonymous individuals: we record the more complex perspectives of a smaller number of people who share a common experience. The men with whom I talked came from what we might call the mainstream of American birthing. Most were middle-class men in long-term relationships with their partners. They went to birthing classes, gave birth in hospitals, and returned to work soon after. Although I talked with home birth, gay, adoptive, teenage, and single fathers, I did not try to include all their fascinating stories in this book. Instead, I focus on a more standard birthing story as it has played out for fathers in the conventional medical establishment.

Being an anthropologist, I compared these men’s experiences with those of fathers in different societies. I returned to Paraguay and talked with Guaraní fathers and to the library and combed the ethnographies of other anthropologists. I found that pregnancy and birth were powerfully important to dads in those cultures. They rarely caught babies and cut cords, but each group had its own way of including fathers. Library research showed that throughout European history men took part in birth. In the stories of Strabo and Elizabethan sonnets, men take their place next to pregnant and birthing women. I eventually came to see that even the American men we considered so removed from birthing, those twentieth-century fathers in maternity waiting rooms, were intimately and directly involved in their children’s birth. Each society and each historical period had its own means of recognizing the importance of fathers to birth, and the importance of birth to fathers.

I came to realize that today’s fathers had taken part in a grand experiment in new fatherhood. In a self-conscious effort to foster this nurturing role, our society has invited men into the chamber to share the birth of their own babies. Couples who experienced the sexual revolution and chose alternative lifestyles (or at least heard about them) wanted to share birth. Men whose own fathers never set foot on a maternity ward sought to share these most intimate and powerful moments with their partners and babies. And they were transformed. Although every man has a unique experience and each enters fatherhood in his own way, men returned from the birthing room with a new and profound commitment to their children, their partners, and themselves. Birthing had become the rite of passage for every man who wants to become this new kind of father. 52 50 1