“Nothing's available”: Young fathers’ experiences with unmet information needs and barriers to resolving them

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Highlights

  • Young fathers often have unexpressed and unaddressed information needs.

  • Information inequality for young fathers was influenced by gender several levels.

  • Young fathers encounter barriers when accessing parenting services.

  • Young mothers often serve as information intermediaries for young fathers.

  • Young fathers avoid asking for support to adhere to traditional masculine values.

Abstract

Young fathers, like all parents, have a range of information needs, such as learning how to introduce their babies to solid foods. Yet compared to young mothers and older parents, they have fewer resources available to them. To date, young fathers have not been identified as a priority population in need of parenting-related information and face unequal access to information resources. This inequality is in part related to gender stereotypes and social biases about young men who become parents at “too early” an age. Through interviews and field observation conducted during a longitudinal ethnographic study of young mothers, fathers, their parents, and service providers in two cities in British Columbia, Canada, we examined young fathers’ gendered experiences accessing parenting information and resources. Using an ecological model of information needs, we identified factors at different levels: micro (e.g., personal), meso (e.g., relational) and macro (e.g., access to city/provincial parenting programs and resources) that revealed information inequalities for young fathers. Our findings illustrate that young fathers often have unexpressed and unaddressed information needs due to barriers they encounter when accessing services, the stigma they experience as early age parents, and social pressures that result in avoiding asking for help in order to adhere to traditional masculine values.

Introduction

Becoming a parent gives rise to questions and new experiences as mothers, fathers, and the people who support them adjust their daily routines and practices to care for children. Information is frequently needed and sought to inform decisions and practices around feeding, sleeping, child safety, enrichment activities, and so on. Library and Information Studies (LIS) research has focused on parents’ use of varied information sources (e.g., the Web, other parents, and health professionals) (see, for example, (Lohan et al., 2010, McKenzie, 2003a, Walker, 2012)). Such research has shown that parenting is a complex information landscape where needed information is not always available and unwanted information is sometimes received (McKenzie, 2003a); difficult circumstances, such as child illness, complicate decision making (Knapp et al., 2011); and parents encounter conflicting information that may increase their uncertainty around childcare practices, such as baby feeding (O'Brien, Greyson, Shoveller & Chabot, 2018).

To date, most studies about the information needs of parents have focused on mothers and older, middle class parents (notable exclusions include (Ruthven et al., 2018, Walker, 2012)). Fathers – and specifically young fathers – have not been fully recognized as parents who may have unique information needs. Young mothers (aged 16–24) have been perceived as “information needy” and it is assumed that they lack the ability to make good decisions because of their early-age pregnant and parenting statuses (Duncan, 2007, Whitley and Kirmayer, 2008). As a result, young mothers have been regular targets of parenting information resources by health professionals, but also by family, friends and even complete strangers (Greyson, O'Brien & Shoveller, 2017a). In contrast, young fathers are regularly excluded from formal supports, including parenting resources and services (Davies, 2016, Kiselica and Kiselica, 2014). Some fathers refer to informal supports for parenting advice, such as their partners and their own parents; however, relying primarily on personal relationships for information in the absence of welcoming parenting services makes young fathers a population with unrecognized information needs who are marginalized from the parenthood experience (Davies, 2016, Deslauriers et al., 2012, Kiselica and Kiselica, 2014).

Few studies have analyzed the services available for young fathers, and even fewer have studied the information contexts of young fathers (Mniszak, O'Brien, Chabot & Shoveller, 2018). The dearth of information resources and programs targeted toward young fathers starkly contrasts the volume of information resources and programs targeted towards young mothers (Greyson, 2012, Mann et al., 2004). These extremes of information abundance and scarcity are both problematic. On the one hand, young mothers’ access to information services and programs may come with the risk of information overload and increased surveillance of their parenting practices and lifestyle (Carson et al., 2017, Greyson, 2012, Greyson et al., 2017a, O'Brien et al., 2018). Conversely, young fathers encounter persistent stigma as “absentee” (Duncan, 2007), despite many being (or seeking to be) actively engaged fathers. This stigma contributes to their exclusion from parenting information and support services. Their exclusion may be due to explicit (e.g., “mothers-only” programs), or implicit (e.g., scheduling conflicts with employment), factors, but their lack of attendance may feed back into the stereotypes that they are not fully engaged parents.

This research, which was part of a longitudinal ethnographic study of young parents in two Canadian cities, explored the information needs, contexts, and barriers to acquiring information experienced by young fathers. The aim of this analysis is (Dey, 1999) to analyze the perspectives of young fathers, young mothers and service providers in relation to information needs and barriers to information acquisition. Due to the gendered nature of the information resources, supports and services designed for (expectant) parents, we observed that parenting information is largely inaccessible to young fathers and sought to explore the myriad factors that contributed to this inequality.

Section snippets

Information needs

LIS research has framed “information need” as something that motivates people to seek and use information (Cole, 2012, Wilson, 1981). Information needs have been defined as the identification of a “problem” that needs to be resolved, a response to uncertainty (Belkin, Oddy & Brooks, 1982) or a drive for sense-making (Dervin, 2015). Derr (1983) defined need as “a condition in which certain information contributes to the achievement of a genuine or legitimate information purpose” (p. 276). This

Methods

This was a secondary analysis of data from the Young Parents Study, a longitudinal, ethnographic study of young parenting in British Columbia, Canada conducted from 2013 to 2018. The Young Parents Study was approved by the University of British Columbia's Behavioural Research Ethics Board (BREB) (Certificate #: H13-00415); approval to re-analyze the Young Parents Study data for the primary author's thesis research was granted in 2017 (Certificate #: H17-02504).

Findings

Young fathers in this study had both expressed and unexpressed information needs. Common needs expressed by fathers of babies included (but were not limited to) interpreting and following feeding guidelines and recommendations, as well as encouraging their growing infants to achieve developmental milestones, such as learning how to crawl and walk. Like other fathers, young fathers needed to know how to support their partners during labour and delivery, but were often ill prepared to do so.

Discussion

Gender influenced young fathers’ information life world and played out in personal, relational and community contexts. We found that at the macro level, young parent services, although possibly best equipped to meet young parents’ information needs, were frequently unavailable to young dads due to policies restricting their attendance, inconvenient hours of operation, and exclusionary cultures at the programs. The majority of young fathers in our sample were unable to attend young parent

Conclusion

This article was one of the first attempts to understand the information contexts of young fathers and their gendered experiences of needing information. This analysis has a number of limitations, which should be addressed in further research on young fathers and their information contexts. First, the study sample of young fathers was small and geographically constrained to two Canadian cities in the same province, limiting the generalizability of findings. Although young fathers were

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the young parents and service providers who made this analysis possible by dedicating their time and stories to the Young Parents Study during interviews. The authors also thank Anna Carson and Michelle Pang for their work as researchers on the Young Parents Study.

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      Stigma forms a further theoretical concept that extends understanding of how information activity is both facilitated and inhibited within health contexts. Research from the related field of information behaviour, for example, notes how young fathers may refrain from seeking information for fear that their activities will incur “judgement rather than assistance” (Mniszak et al., 2020, p.8). Similarly, Greyson (2017, p.787) reports that young parents will often choose to seek information online because, unlike older parents or medical professionals, mobile devices would not “disrespect them for being young.”

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