Discovering the gender of an unborn baby and giving him or her a name, may help fathers bond with their offspring

Dads who find out the sex of their unborn child and give him or her a name may find it easier to connect emotionally with their baby, a study conducted at the University of Birmingham has found. The report, entitled The Moral Habitus of Fatherhood: A Study of How Men Negotiate the Moral Demands of Becoming a Father, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, looked at men's experiences of, and feelings about, becoming a father and mapped their journeys from the discovery of the pregnancy to the early months of fatherhood. Dr Jonathan Ives, a senior lecturer in the centre for Medicine, Ethics, Society and History at the University of Birmingham, who carried out the research, said: "Serious consideration needs to be given to how men can be empowered to become the fathers they want to be. "Healthcare workers who are involved in this process need to engage with men's views on what it is to be a good man, a good partner, and a good father and help them achieve an appropriate balance between their own needs and interests and those of their partner and future children." The study found that some men's understanding of what it means to be a good man and/or a good partner could act as a barrier to being drawn into, or actively seeking involvement in antenatal or postnatal consultation, but that "this is not necessarily demonstrative of a lack of commitment to fatherhood, but merely a different construction of the fatherhood role in that context". "Helping men effect an 'active transformation into positive fatherhood' may require helping them to reconcile their moral sense of how they ought to act as a partner and as a man, with how they need to act as a father and a father-to-be," the report states.