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.
Most of the men and women also said that pregnancy should be planned. More than a third of the men, though, and almost half of the women, admitted they weren't using contraception regularly. Maybe they're irresponsible. Or maybe they secretly think it wouldn't be so bad to be a parent. More likely, it's a little bit of both.
"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."
No young men I knew coming of age in the 1960s and '70s would have admitted to baby lust. When a young woman got pregnant, she either disappeared to Auntie's house or into a doctor's office. We whispered about her and said next to nothing about her partner.
During these years, we didn't see much of our own daddies. Like AMC's "Mad Men," they were moving up the company ladder, chasing money and pretty girls. Something happened, though, when we had our own children. "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.
Not long ago, I heard a speaker at a conference on urban fathers describe a young man who was raising a daughter of pre-school age. Some of the young man's pals paid him a visit early one morning while he was braiding her hair.
"What you doin'?" they asked.
"I ain't no punk," he answered. "That's what daddies do nowadays."
"Sure, some men still want to get their Tigers on before things settle down," says Bill Albert, deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which commissioned the survey. "But the idea that there are a lot of free floaters in this generation who don't care about kids doesn't seem supported."
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Unless these questions were asked in the survey, the results are meaningless. When I was in my twenties I didn't want children becauseI was the oldest of five and I knew what it meant to raise kids because I had to help out all the time.
With Katherine Heigl, they do!
I find it disgusting that the Obamas are referred to as 'baby-daddy' or 'baby-mama'. These are married adults who had their children after they got married and are very much involved in the kids lives. That does NOT constitute a 'baby-daddy'.
Not to be rude but it does not make you sound hip, with it, or in it. It makes you sound foolish using derogatory terms to describe the President and compare him to a worthless, uninvolved father.
On to the topic-I can believe this. My husband and I were in our early 20's when we got married and we BOTH wanted to have children. We were very blessed with a wonderful daughter and son while in our 20's. It was hard and bumpy but we made it! No parents paying a dime for anything! We sold all of our 'cool' stuff we aquired before the kiddies came along and did it on our own. It CAN be done but you better have the strength to do it! It's not all cute clothes, coo-coo's and precious moments!
I believe FOX got in trouble for that when they used the term during ol'motormouth Michelle Malkin latest diatribe and rant at civility and charity.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0608/Foxs_addresses_baby_mama_drama_Producer_used_poor_judgment.html
The desire for men to spread their seed while they are young and strong should also be evaluated when one is mature and financially stable enough to properly raise and care for children.
I have many male cousins in their early to mid-twenties who are already married with children, and want more babies despite having very limited incomes.
Had I participated in this survey I would have definitely answered yes. I definitely want to have a kid, and I would have proffered to have one already.
I know im not ready though, and im not going to go out and try to knock up the first woman who will take off her clothes.
Our world is being wracked by global climate change, of which, some researchers say, could result in massive starvation and die off--*in this century.* And our cute little "20-something" wanna-be daddies *still* want to have children?
Wow.
There is a basic and profound moral disconnect occurring here. Sad that the author doesn't bother to even allude to it. Makes one wonder.
I completely understand your post.Hope this helps.