Understanding the First Five Years of Fatherhood among Young Professional Fathers

Young fathers are one of the important roles in the development child process. But generally, young fathers do not get chances to share their feelings about the experience of fatherhood period because mostly young mothers only get support and chances to share their motherhood experiences and involves in the development child process. Additionally, young fathers nowadays more acknowledge about their role in the development child process especially among the professional group of young fathers. It is because they had awareness about the important roles as a young father especially the early childhood development process which is the first 5 years of fatherhood period. Father is an important individual in the formation of a family. However, social studies related to fathers in Malaysia are very less compared to social studies related to other entities in a family. It is caused the researcher have chosen and conducted this research. Qualitative methods of phenomenology had been used in this study. The purpose of this study was to understand the feeling of the young fathers about fatherhood experience, to identify how young fathers acquire the knowledge about their child development and to understand the changes of young fathers during the first 5 years of fatherhood period. Three young fathers from different professional group that have first child age under 5 years old had been interviewed. Using purposive samples, interviews had been conducted with the young fathers in the form of semi-structured in-depth interview. As the results, it shows the participants sharing their feelings related to their involvement in the child's development. Participants get involved in the child's development from pregnancy to delivery, which results in their partners as mothers not being burdened and receiving emotional support. For future research should use a larger sample size and with a more varied sampling. More young fathers as a participant from the different of professional group like doctor, engineer, lawyer or others. It is also can be include the experts as a participant to share about the fatherhood from their side to compare with the young father sharing.