In recent years, the father figure has changed. The detached and authoritarian figure that characterized patriarchal society has been replaced by a different image, present from the very start of the pregnancy process, which has stopped being «a women's matter» to instead concern, from the outset, the couple about to become a family. However, despite men's greater involvement, little attention is paid to the psychological challenges experienced by the expectant father during pregnancy and after the child's birth.
According to an old Chinese proverb: «the mother carries the child in her womb, the father carries them both in his heart».
This means that the father is credited with the capacity to contain, sustain, and support the mother/embryo/fetus/child dyad. Men are expected to understand and respond to the pregnant woman's needs by adopting a protective and engaged attitude, but people usually don't worry about whether he, too, is able to manage the feelings that the wait for and birth of a child stir up within him.
The reactivation of childhood experiences
Even in a man who becomes a parent, desires, experiences, and fears related to his own early childhood are reactivated — that is, they resurface, often in a rather unclear way — starting with his intrauterine relationship with his own mother. This means that a man, too, finds himself having to confront the figures from his own history, with its gratifying aspects and its unresolved ones, which lead him, like the woman, to undergo profound transformations, more or less visible.
While in her, psychological changes go hand in hand with physical ones, in him they don't have an equally clear and identifiable support. It's difficult for a man to emotionally invest in a situation that is unfamiliar and that, at first, isn't even perceived, until the woman's physical changes, the ultrasound images, and the baby's movements make it real.
Reactions during the wait
At this point, reactions can vary widely: from repulsion and fear to attraction toward the changing female body, from interest in the baby to feelings of rivalry, from a sense of responsibility to the urge to flee.
Whatever reactions pregnancy stirs up in the expectant father, it's important that he learns to recognize, express, and work through them, so that they don't feed into postpartum depression — which doesn't only affect mothers but fathers too, even though theirs still tends to go unrecognized or hidden.