Can You Actually Enjoy the Early Days of Fatherhood?
Well of course the answer (and I hope the lived reality for those of you reading) is yes, you can absolutely enjoy, even relish, the so-called “fourth trimester.” Many dads I’ve known have reported loving this time with their new child(ren) and there are concrete ways to increase the odds of getting that kind of experience yourself.
But that’s not the story many of us hear and in one of our recent groups one dad who just had his first kid had heard from so many people how unbearable the infancy stage was that he asked if it is unusual to actually enjoy the first few weeks after coming home from the hospital. Contrary to the gruesome caricature that had been painted for him, our friend was having something of a blissful time reveling in such an intimate relationship with his new daughter. I got the sense he felt weird or maybe even a little guilty for not being miserable.
The discussion that followed brought me to two conclusions:
While our social structures create the impossible circumstances of parenting that so often make parenting newborns and infants difficult for most of us to enjoy (or even survive), cultural stereotypes leaning heavily on agony, suffering, and all that you will lose create negative expectations and attitudes that become self-fulfilling.
When you take a different approach to becoming and being a parent by investing the time, energy, and attention merited by such a monumental life transition, you are far more likely to enjoy it. And why isn’t that the socially reinforced norm?
It’s not the norm though. Yes, there are certainly some portrayals of mothers (rarely fathers) deeply bonding with their infants and you will meet people who express love and joy at having infants but they are often portrayed as the exceptional ones - people somehow preternaturally gifted with babies and preordained to be preschool teachers.
The overwhelming portrayal of parenting infants we are presented - in media, from other parents who recently experienced it - is that it will be brutal and that we just have to get through it as best we can so that we can return to “normal” life once your kid(s) are in some sort of childcare or school. This is especially true for dads, who may even be viewed with suspicion if they don’t profess to be just barely hanging on through infancy.
With that expectation of having a baby what do we think the reality is going to feel like? And how does that kind of set up affect the rest of your parenting experience and the experience for your kids?
There’s no question that parenting an infant is hard - surely it always has been and always will be. It’s even likely to be among the most challenging experiences anyone will face in life and for me personally, infancy with my first son was indeed a brutal and often unenjoyable experience.
But the reasons I characterize my own experience as “brutal and often unenjoyable” rather than “challenging” are a combination of the social structures that simply make unhuman demands of parents and a cultural attitude I’d absorbed to just accept that infancy would be mostly unpleasant and not do anything to change that.
What struck me about our friend who was enjoying the first weeks of infancy was how much attention and intention he and his partner seemed to have dedicated to preparing themselves not just physically and logistically for having a baby (setting up a nursery, birth plan, etc.) but also mentally and emotionally.
They’d reflected on their expectations around birth and been intentional about setting attitudes around this change focused more on what they had gained rather than everything they’d lost. They’d made plans for coping with major life changes and keeping themselves connected to their pre-baby lives. Hell, this guy had joined a group of other dads to talk about fatherhood before he even had a baby!
What if we all took that kind of approach? Instead of bemoaning all the slings and arrows of infancy, what if we focused our attention on the sheer wonder and awe of creating a new life? What if we expected it to be a magical time when we connect deeply with one of the most important people in our lives? What if we prepared ourselves for the rollercoaster of nurturing this freshly minted human not just by painting a room in pastels but by learning from those who have done it before how to cope with the psychic and emotional shocks of becoming a parent?
Of course, none of that preparation or setting of expectations guarantees a happy experience, but it does give you and your family the best chance at getting the most out of it and ultimately contributing your best selves to each other and the world.
And obviously, “fixing” our mindsets is woefully insufficient for giving dads and parents all of the support we actually need to be able to enjoy parenting and perform at our. The structural issues that force parents into the impossible task of parenting today with virtually no psycho-emotional support are all too real and stand in the way of millions of people being able to attain a positive experience of parenthood. Many parents (especially fathers) don’t even have the luxury of parental leave or other time to prepare themselves mentally and emotionally, much less access to the tools and support necessary to live that life.
To change policies and social structures around issues like parental leave though we also need to change a culture of parenting that disparages the earliest phases of childrearing in service of spending our time and energy on other things (namely, work and consumption of goods/services).
We need to know that having an infant can be a magical time in life that is hard but dominated by overwhelming feelings of gratitude, joy, and love and believe that we deserve that kind of experience. We need to demand parents get the support necessary to make that happen and expect more for ourselves so that we can provide more to our children.
Policies and social norms take time to shift but changing our expectations and attitudes towards our experience of caring for infants is something that is within our control and as good a place as any to start making cultural changes.
