Forget Equality, Men Should Just Wait Outside With The Cigars

Men, is your wife pregnant? Do you want to help at antenatal classes and attend the birth?

Researchers say this might be a bad idea and it would be better if you were left out.

Dr. Ives, who did a two-year study, says that there is a “‘false, modern rhetoric of equal involvement that has sprung up around parenting’, and said men were being set up to fail as fathers.”

He argues that men who feel a sense of duty to become actively involved in pregnancies are left disenchanted and self-doubting as they realise that they can offer little more than passive support to their partners.

What he calls “passive support” I would call emotional or moral support. And this kind of support is absolutely essential in any relationship.

In spite of the fact that the husband can’t stop her morning sickness or mood swings or the pain of birth, he certainly can be there to make her feel loved and valued as a wife and mother.

There may be a push to get men more involved in birth than 50 years ago, and this may lead to some men having a sense of “self-doubt” or post-natal depression, but why is this a bad thing?

As a future mother, I would much rather my husband support me and allow us to deal with both the positive and negative aspects of parenting together.

If we follow the advice of Dr. Ives, the result would be that I would end up dealing with all the negative aspects of parenting on my own and only share the positive stuff with my husband.

It seems as though Dr. Ives wants to send us back to a time before equal involvement of both parents when the mums did the dirty work and dads only put the kids to bed after work or played with them on the weekends.

It should be about equality and partnership, and that will involve both good times and bad. But together, and with good communication, the couple can tackle these issues and have a happy, healthy family that involves both the mother and the father.

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