Becoming a father is a nodal point in the life cycle that can be best described as a complex set of experiences and adjustments that males undergo upon fathering a child, determined equally by social and cultural processes as well as by relational dynamics and unconscious processes. Meanings and practices of fatherhood are far from being simple or constant they are rather multiple, complex, fluid, contextually dependent and contested (Goodsell et al., 2010). Yet, as is the case with more general research on fathers, the literature focusing specifically on the transition to fatherhood is similarly seldom guided by theory (Doherty, 2004).Ģ Becoming a father brings about more profound changes than any other developmental stage in a man’s life (Deave and Johnson, 2008). Will Jordan (1996) and Genesoni and Tallandini (2009) in their comprehensive reviews on the process of becoming a father quote studies on the emergent experiences of fatherhood, cutting across academic disciplines: sociologists studying how the structure of married and unmarried dyads is transformed into a triad with the addition of a new member as well as the consequent redefinition of roles and values psychologists investigating the developmental aspects of the transition to fatherhood as well as the impact of pregnancy and childbirth on fathers’ emotional well-being and mental health social workers and public health researchers being interested in issues such as parental leave and measures balancing work-and-family and promoting active fathering other social scientists studying perceptions of marriage, family and children. Much more is known about transition to motherhood and this knowledge has often been used to inform our thinking about the way fathers experience the shift to parenthood.
1 Although the concept of fatherhood has been widely investigated, transition to fatherhood, as such, has received little empirical attention.