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The Expectant Father

Facts, Tips and Advice for Dads-to-Be

By Armin Brott

In 1989, when when my wife got pregnant for the first time, we were both first-time parents and equally ill-prepared for the whole pregnancy process. Fortunately for her, there were hundreds of books designed to educate, encourage, support, and comfort women during their pregnancies. But when it finally hit me that I, too, was expecting, and the pregnancy was bringing out all sorts of feelings, emotions, and worries that I didn't understand, there weren't any resources for me to turn to.

My wife's pregnancy books had a little (very, very little) information on what expectant fathers were going through, but it was generally incredibly superficial, consisting mostly of advice on how men should support their wives. Parenting magazines were similarly unhelpful.

So why don't we discuss men's concerns as fathers more? In my opinion, it's because we, as a society, value motherhood more than fatherhood and automatically assume that issues of childbirth and childrearing are women's issues.

But for me, fatherhood isn't a women's issue and so I began doing research (which consisted of talking to dozens of men about their experiences as fathers and reading every piece of scientific data on fatherhood avaialable) to find out more about the ways all of us (men, women, society) regard and treat fathers how that impacts fathers, families, and children. What I found was that men's emotional response to pregnancy is no less varied than women's; expectant fathers feel everything from relief to denial, fear to frustration, anger to joy. This research paved the way for a series of magazine articles on fatherhood and, eventually, my first book, The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-To-Be -- which, I'm proud to say, has become as much of a standard for men as the What to Expect