ABSTRACT
This chapter details men's perceptions that they are genuinely different people than they would have been if they had never had children. It reviews major themes in men's discussions of the effects of fathering on their development and shows how those themes tend to cluster into two distinctly different patterns of change attributable to fathering. This chapter limits analyses to open-ended questions raised near the beginning of the interview and the closing questions from each session. The responses of the 40 fathers to this series of four questions are summarized in the chapter. Developmentalists have recently acknowledged that young adulthood, frequently recognized to be from age 20 to 45, is the 'frontier' for new scientific discovery. In conclusion, fathers are able to articulate significant life-course changes that they attribute to fathering to a much greater degree than they can life-span development changes. Life-cycle components are easy to identify for the fathers in the sample, as well as demographers.
