The Readiness of Fathers to Raise Children

Abstract

Summary

Child-rearing protects children’s lives, helps them develop physically and mentally, promotes their health, and trains them to adapt to society, and the father’s awareness of the childcare role has a major impact on this. Therefore, to clarify what the father, who is a caregiver, thinks about his role as a father and about children and child-rearing, we conducted a qualitative descriptive study based on semi-structured interviews of seven fathers concerning the father’s role, children, and child-rearing. The interviews were recorded with the permission of the father, and the data was recorded verbatim. As a result, we identified the nine categories of "Changes in feeling when pregnancy is known," "Awareness of parents," "Feeling movement of fetus and beginning to feel affection for the child after viewing the ultrasound scan," "Changes in feeling after attending a parenting class," “Desire to be present at childbirth,” “Thoughts about children,” “How to interact with children,” “Desire to raise children,” and “Changes in marital relationship,” as well as 44 subcategories. Then, the men who were to become parents seriously considered the behavior of the role of the father and what they could do to get closer to their wife and child, and tried to accept themselves as fathers.