Instant happiness - Jamaican fathers overjoyed at childbirth - Less joy when expenses mount
Published:Friday | June 1, 2018 | 12:00 AM
Fathers are generally happy upon hearing about the pregnancy of their spouses and become even happier when the baby is born. But as material wealth begins to deplete and expenses mount, they begin to show symptoms of depression.
This is according to a seven-year birth cohort study, JA KIDS 2011, which probed the lives of 3,425 men who had become fathers between July 1 and September 30 that year.
According to the data shared by psychologist AndrÈ Bateman at a two-day conference at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, to reveal the findings, 70 per cent of fathers were happy when their spouses told them of the pregnancy, 25 per cent reported having mixed feelings, and only 2 per cent were unhappy.
By the time of the child's birth, the figure representing fathers who were happy surged to 92 per cent. Six per cent had mixed feelings, and 0.4 per cent were unhappy.
However, the research showed that some fathers had depressive symptoms, although not very pronounced, that were brought on as a result of the pregnancy and the baby.
"In terms of depressive symptoms, using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, the average score was found to be 3.45, which is not very high. However, as it relates to possible depression, what we found was that there was a prevalence of 9.1 per cent of Jamaican fathers who were at or above this level," Bateman said.
The researcher noted that relationship status and educational attainment were not related to the depressive symptoms displayed by the fathers, but age, relationship quality, and material wealth negatively predicted depressive symptoms.
"So the higher the age, the lower the symptoms. The better the quality [of the relationship], the higher the material wealth, the lower the symptoms of depression," Bateman said.
Forty-seven per cent of the fathers who participated in the study were in a common-law relationship, and only 13 per cent of them had tertiary education.
The study found that fathers with wider social support such as friends and family showed fewer signs of depressive symptoms.