By Kevin Baldeosingh
About 15 years ago, I started to see men exhibiting strange behaviour in public. They'd be walking on the street with their child and chile mother and–this is the strange part–they'd be carrying the infant in their arms.
Now this would have been odd enough even with the typical middle-class family in the mall with a stroller. But these men weren't even that–they were usually working-class, in their 20s, and many of them looked like labourers. Yet there they were, carrying the child while the woman walked behind with her purse or baby bag. And I started wondering what this was about. Did modern young women have weaker arms than their mothers? Were the men sending a signal that they had fathered this child and so were real men? Or were they hoping that, if anyone came to shoot them, the child on their chest would stop the assassin?
As it turns out, anthropologists who study families in different cultures have recorded this phenomenon, which they label "baby-parading." Anthropologist David F Lancy, in his book The Anthropology of Childhood, explains that "A man who parades his healthy infant and demonstrates his own nurturing personality may, like a show-off hunter, improve future mating prospects."
However, this peacocking is characteristic of men who otherwise spend little or no time caring for their children. By contrast, I see parents waiting outside a primary school at 2.30 for the infants, and five out of eight are male. I see men by themselves walking with two children on the sidewalk heading to the snackette. I see men having a meal with their small child in fast-food outlets. All this may mean is that the stereotype of the "deadbeat dad" is, if not entirely wrong, certainly not the whole truth. Instead, it appears that more men are devoting more time and energy to fatherhood.
The most recent psychological research suggests that fathers are not very different from mothers in fundamental ways. Apart from surveys which show that just under a quarter of men experience pregnancy symptoms when their wife is gravid, like nausea and bloating, men's physiological responses to baby pictures, such as blood pressure and heart rate, show that, while women answering baby questions are extreme in their responses, men's body reactions are the same as the women's. Also, when talking to their baby, fathers speak in a higher pitch, use shorter phrases and repeat phrases, just like mothers.
But even when the stereotypes fit reality, the consequences don't necessarily match the expectations promulgated by feminist rhetoric. In her book The War Against Boys, for example, American philosopher and feminist Christina Hoff Sommers cites evidence showing that "Effective fathers need not be paragons of emotional sensitivity...the typically masculine guy who plays roughly with his kids, who teaches his sons to be stoical and competitive, who is often glued to the television watching football games–is in fact unlikely to produce a violent son."
These studies were done in developed societies and the findings may not be the same here in Trinidad and Tobago. But, at the very least, it seems that folk beliefs about fatherhood need an update. And, yes: I do carry my two-year-old daughter and one-month-old son.