Rocking Fatherhood by Chris Kornelis

Author:Chris Kornelis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780738218786
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2016-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

As far as I know, Scott Coltrane’s run-up to fatherhood didn’t include mornings in the shower crying in the fetal position, but the noted sociologist, who recently wrapped up a year as the interim president of the University of Oregon, was in a similar position to Tyler when he found out he was going to become a dad in the seventies. He didn’t have a great fatherhood role model in his life growing up, and he wanted to know how to be one. So, he read everything he could get his hands on and went back to school.

Coltrane already had a degree and was working as a city planner, but to learn more about kids he enrolled in some child-development classes at a local community college. Then he took a part-time job at an after-school daycare and joined some parenting groups. Sometimes he was the only dad in the bunch. As he was picking up tips on how to be a dad, he realized that he could look beyond men for parenting role models.

“[There] wasn’t like a guy way to do it and a woman, motherly way to do it,” he says. “There was just parenting and you learn from the people who can do it and that [was] mostly women.”

After his kids were born, he started looking for ways that he could better balance his family and career. He decided to indulge his interest in parenting—particularly the role of fathers—and go back to grad school and study sociology. Like my friend Tyler, he had an idea of the kind of father he wanted to be and went back to school and changed careers to pay for it. He has been studying fatherhood, masculinity, gender roles, and paternity leave ever since.

“One of the most enriching experiences that a man can have and one of the most emotionally rewarding experiences is to be an involved parent, and an involved partner,” he says. “The part that I found very interesting in talking to young parents is that men aren’t trained as boys to either take care of their partners or their kids. And part of the beauty of the dailyness of parenting is that men learn how to serve other people in a way that is quite enriching and probably redresses some of the cultural masculinity mystique.”

Parenting—caring for a helpless child—he says, takes practice. Whether men have a positive father figure to look up to or not, none of them have parented until they’ve become parents. In that regard, we’re all starting at the same place.

“Mothers,” he said, “don’t know how to do it automatically either.”

A way to practice for taking care of a kid, Coltrane says, is to take care of a pregnant woman. In a way, your relationship with the two is very similar: they’re both people you love, people you’re in the same room with and responsible for taking care of. But all the changes are happening to their bodies, not yours (anxiety-inducing weight gain notwithstanding). You don’t know what your wife feels like any more than you know what it feels like to be six days old.

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