Men cite love as lure to become fathers

CONTRARY to popular belief, the number one reason men want children is to bring love and satisfaction to their lives — and not to carry on the family name.

Ensuring the next generation is the number two reason — a motivation women contemplating motherhood share. Both sexes rate the family name as their second reason for wishing to procreate and both share the same primary motivation.

Delegates attending a national conference called Baby in Mind, organised by the Health Service Executive (HSE) South, were also briefed on the different approaches men and women take to childrearing.

Conference speaker Hiram E Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, said studies showed that fathers are not that involved with babies, but become more involved as their children enter toddlerhood.

He said men did perform routine childcare tasks, such as nappy-changing, “but they do it less when mom is in the room”.

“If mother, father and baby are in the room, dad won’t do it until mom tells him to change the baby,” said Prof Fitzgerald. He said mothers tended to teach children about inner control, and engage in talk, cuddles and play with toys, whereas fathers encouraged rough and tumble, which had a “big arousal effect” on the children.

“A mom will throw a ball to a kid, a dad could bounce it off his head. However dad can calm them down pretty quickly with some swift discipline, teaching them how to get back control,” said Prof Fitzgerald.

During his workshop, entitled Fathers Matter — the role of fathers in early childhood development, Prof Fitzgerald said when fathers have access to their children, they take advantage of it, but physical distance from fathers — if the parents are separated — lessened their involvement with their offspring. Studies also showed that when the father’s role as breadwinner was compromised, he was less likely to be involved with his children and more likely to have access limited by the mother. Fathers displaying high levels of antisocial behaviour had children who performed more poorly when trying to regulate emotions and had poor verbal ability. Children whose fathers were absent from the home missed out on an important control dimension fathers brought to their children, said Prof Fitzgerald.

“Children learn very quickly that a lot of the time, when mom makes threats, she is bluffing, but dads don’t bluff and one stern look can modulate behaviour more quickly than a mom.”

Prof Fitzgerald, director of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, was speaking at a conference in the Silversprings Moran Hotel in Cork on Thursday.