Twenty-Something Men WANT Babies - 12/15/09

Tue Dec 15 11:59:07 EST 2009

Twenty-Something Men Want Babies, Study Says
Huffington Post
Laura Stepp        

When I first saw Ben Stone, the 23-year-old slacker in the movie "Knocked
Up," get mushy over his prospective woops-baby, I thought, what a bunch of
malarkey. Guys in their 20s don't want to be papas.

I may have been wrong. In a new, nationally representative survey of
18-29-year-olds, men were as likely as women to say that if circumstances
allowed it, they would love to have a baby right now. We're not talking
small numbers here. Among the 1,800, 20-somethings surveyed by the
Guttmacher Institute, 53 percent of men and 52 percent of women gave this
answer. For those 25 and older, it was two-thirds. . . .

"Men and women are not that different," says Freya Sonenstein, a research
professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies adolescent males. "There's
a high value given to having children. That's one reason why using
contraception consistently is a hard job." . . . .

. . . . "Mad Men"'s Don Draper turned into "Glee"'s Will Schuester, Fox TV's
charming glee club director who wants to be a father as much as he wants to
take his singers to sectionals.

Our husbands and partners have formed fatherhood groups, appeared on TV and
Capitol Hill, made parenting books by fathers into bestsellers, appeared in
news stories about stay-at-home dads.

Meanwhile our sons, along with our daughters, were assigned in high school
to take care of plastic baby dolls in an effort to stop the rise in teen
pregnancies. They listened to rappers singing about baby-daddies. Today,
they see a telegenic baby-daddy in the White House who makes fathering seem
more fun than running the country.

They've also come of age as the sequence of love, marriage, and baby fell
apart, and this surely has affected their views on when a man can become a
father. 

There were several sobering findings in this survey, including how little
men, in particular, knew about fertility and contraception. But let's not
downplay their basic baby interest. One of the most telling things - which
surveyors didn't expect - is that men were as willing as women to answer the
survey's questions. And they didn't just breeze through. In fact, they took
longer to finish than the women. Health professionals, hoping to reduce the
high rate of unplanned pregnancies, can seize on that interest to talk to
men about how much better it is for babies to be born when both parents are
ready to take care of them. . . . .

For the full article: http://tinyurl.com/yd3fcgm

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