The psychological impact of transitions: exploring the experience of new fathers and sarcoma patients

Recommendations include the need for prospective longitudinal studies to examine the trajectory of distress across the care pathway and to identify risk factors for distress.<br>Main

Project

Valuing and understanding men’s experiences of the transition to fatherhood is integral to developing empathic services which support paternal caregiving. There have been few qualitative studies in the UK which explore men’s experiences of becoming a father and most include predominantly middle-class men. This qualitative focus-group study aimed to explore the experiences of the transition to fatherhood of men living in socio-economically disadvantaged areas of Northern Ireland who attended Sure Start.

Five themes were developed from the thematic analysis (1) Being The Invisible Parent (2) Feeling like an Inferior Parent (3) Setting Out Without a Map of Caregiving (4) Reformulating the Early Father-Child Bond (5) Embracing Playful Parenting with Toddlers. The fathers experienced their social environment as unsupportive of their aspirations to become involved fathers and grappled with developing a meaningful identity as a careg.

The findings emphasise the important role that perinatal and early years services have in empowering men to become confident, involved fathers.<br><br><br>