ABSTRACT
For many men, beginning life as a father does not go hand in hand with living in the same home as the child’s mother. This chapter discusses some of the challenges and difficulties faced by fathers who wanted to become connected, stay connected, or reconnect to their children when they have never been married to the children’s mother. Gender and fatherhood, as part of the fabric of family and childhood life, are woven into a boy’s idiosyncratic view of himself in relation to future fatherhood, and usually become updated in subsequent contexts in relevant ways. The orthodoxies of fatherhood in which any individual man might be trapped are likely to be continuously challenged by the expectations of women, as well as the snowball effect of positive new experience generated by babies. The chapter also discusses the hazards posed to a father by managing a mental illness in his partner alongside staying connected to his newborn child.
