Parenthood is More Than Just a Meeting of Sperm and Egg

A real father is not one who thinks life is all about crickets, camping and coming home to chaos and expecting super on the turn. This is a very old scenario of fatherhood that obtained at a time when men were living on the outskirts of reality, before they woke up to their rights as fathers and discovered the nucleus of life in their own homes. It does not surprise anyone at all,  that few fathers bond with their children especially when it is apparent that many of them have been kept completely out of scheme of things so efficiently by the maternal mafias.

It should be emphasized here that fathers need time to learn to like a child and relate with her and that fathers would learn more quickly if they were encouraged by the mothers to participate in this role right from the beginning. Antenatal classes which include the father can help make him feel more than a spare-part in an unfamiliar ritual. Being at birth will help him overcome the feeling that the child is a stranger who could belong to anyone. Just like a mother must be given the opportunity to handle and re-establish symbiosis with her baby in the first hours of birth, so the father must have a chance to form a bond, preferably alone with child, so that he can shed his inhibitions and become a primal man and get to the essence of the child up-bringing routine.

The problem at play here  is that female chauvinism has made many  men reluctant to become involved. Women tend to think they have a greater role to look after the little baby than men, just because they are the mothers of the children they bear. This kind of attitude has tended to encourage men to denigrate the job of motherhood because they are never given the opportunity to discover for themselves what it takes to get involved in the  responsibilities of caring for the newborn child when they are most required. In most African cultures for example, a woman who leaves her baby on the laps of her husband is accused of turning her man into a baby sitter and disrespecting his manhood. With this kind of cultural dictates, many fathers in my country will confess that they do not know how to handle a one week old baby and their wives are often quick to support such bankrupt views. 

The lack of a balanced involvement of both parents in looking after their one week old baby often becomes heavily felt in the event of a divorce. Divorce after the birth of a child is depressingly common; where  the mother is forced to run away, abandoning the newborn baby to the care of the father who in most cases have not been involved in the handling of the child. Such children are either taken to the grannies or just given to other relatives of the father because the father himself has no experience with the child.

It is important to note that it takes a mature couple to cope with stress that having a child can place on the marriage because parenthood is not just a meeting of sperm and egg, it is a joint venture that can be the most enriching of all.