Fathers can’t replace the mother. They don’ have the required body parts. Fathers being present at birth expands the bonded resonance the baby has experienced in the mother. The baby discovers that the bond, the safe place is expandable and variable if the father is in a safe emotional state. If the father is angry, resentful, hostile, the baby imprints that, fear, the expanded world is not safe and need defending against.

Fathers can’t replace the mother, they just don’t have the right genes or the right glands for that. But on the other hand, if a father is present at the birth of a child the child will bond to the father, that is the father becomes part of the first expansion beyond the womb to embrace a world.  If the father is part of that world there will be an automatic response to the father, particularly if the father picks the child up a great deal and holds it.  And if you’ll notice all men, when they hold a child, they hold it with their left.  That isn’t just to free their right hand, it’s because they’ll automatically, spontaneously putting the infant at their left side in immediate adjacency to the heart because there again that’s what the child needs.  And so all the child is finding out is this safe space is expandable and it’s variable.

Here it is, they’re in a completely strange kind of a setting and yet all the signals are there so they feel at home all the more.  So they can bond to the fathers very well and in fact the greater the presence of the father if the father’s in a great emotional state.  And if the father of curse is angry, hostile, resentful in any way, anxiety ridden and so forth, then the infant has to respond accordingly.  So the importance of the father being himself in a good space is as necessary as for the mother.  There’s no difference in that.  

But the job of the father primarily, in nature’s agenda so far as I can tell, is to support the mother in that first critical period, the in arms period.  Now of course he can take over in arms and he’s going to want to, particularly if he’s present at the birth.  He’s going to want to take part in that and that’s exactly as nature intended as well.  But his other job is to support the mother that she might not be subjected to anxiety, fear, want, neglect and so forth, because again the environment of the child changes accordingly.  Later on the father becomes critical.  It seems to me, in what I’ve read, it seems to me the father becomes critical in establishing the bridge from the family nest to the environment at large or the world out there.  The father is kind of a bridge to the larger world beyond the family environment itself.