Promoting paternal involvement in child rearing

Numerous studies indicate that many men do not know how to be fathers and that programmes even nominally concerned with family and child welfare provide them with little encouragement.

Policies could include: encouraging and providing for the active participation of men in reproductive health care programmes, including family planning, pre-natal delivery and postpartum care; training of fathers to be parents by bringing them into schools and day care centres to assist; sensitizing boys to the realities and rewards of raising their children by providing them with hands on experience; including positive father imagery in information materials and in the popular media.

1. Building and sustaining fathers' involvement in the care and raising of children must be advocated within policies and at the individual level.

1. Stressing importance of partnership in families
2. Sharing family responsibilities
3. Ensuring effective child rearing
4. Enhancing basic family roles
5. Encouraging whole family participation
6. Assisting unmarried fathers
7. Assisting fathers

1. Taking paternity leave
2. Reducing discrimination against unmarried fathers
3. Overcoming barriers to male pregnancy

1. Building demographic factors into national policies for sustainable development

1. Promoting paternal rights
2. Promoting adolescent reproductive health awareness
3. Demonstrating child raising techniques

1. Disapproving of unmarried fathers
2. Denying paternal access

1. Paternal negligence

1. Underparticipation
2. Participation
3. Nonparticipatory
4. Involvement
5. Care