Before he became a dad, 37-year-old Yaka Oyo was terrified of the thought of soothing his crying baby. He, like other first-time parents, worried that he would misread the cries of his newborn baby.
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“I pictured myself pleading with my baby saying, ‘What do you want?’ “
Oyo’s anxieties are common to many first-time mothers and fathers. One reason parents-to-be sign up for prenatal classes, is to have their questions, such as ‘What’s the toughest part of parenting?’ and ‘How do I care for my newborn baby?’ answered by childcare experts.
Prenatal classes, however, are usually focused at the mom and not at the dad, and discuss her shifting role and how she could cope up with the roller coaster of emotions she would experience in motherhood.
With that focus, “Dad’s parenting questions can fall to the wayside,” says Dr. Craig Garfield, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and an attending physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. And the lack of attention to a new father’s needs can have ripple effects that impact the whole family — in the short-run and later, Garfield says.
Around the U.S., a number of health care providers, such as Garfield in Chicago and the non-profit ‘Bootcamp for New Dads’ in New York City, have begun trying to change their approach to such classes. Some go so far as to hold single-sex prenatal classes specifically for men.
Know more about this over at NPR.
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(Image Credit: Jason LeCras for NPR)
Source: neatorama