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.