The four fathers of Four Mothers

Unpacking the difficult lives of dads around the globe

I have fond memories of the Babies movie, because it was my one-year-old daughter’s first movie theater outing. (My husband and I were too broke to afford a babysitter and movie tickets—I’ve written before about how neither of us got paid parental leave—and I figured that anyone who would voluntarily attend a daytime movie about babies could tolerate a potentially fussy infant. Luckily for us, she slept through most of the film). For those who don’t remember Babies, it’s a charming 2010 film that documents a year in the life of four infants around the globe. There’s no narration, just great footage— a newborn in Mongolia coming home from the hospital on the back of his parents’ motorbike, a naked infant in Namibia crawling around in a group of older kids, a baby cruising through a crowded apartment in Tokyo, another baby wriggling through a group music class in San Francisco. The cultural contrasts are fascinating, but the lack of narration makes it hard for viewers to draw clear conclusions.

One of the babies of Babies

The recently published nonfiction book Four Mothers, by journalist Abigail Leonard,* picks up where the Babies movie left off. It’s a similar study in contrasts, taking us through the pregnancy, birth, and parenting journeys of Tsukasa, an urban professional in Japan; Chelsea, a young mother who works in customer service at a local bank in Kenya; Anna, a designer in Finland; and Sarah, an educational technology specialist at a public school in Utah. The goal of the book is to show how not just culture and place but also public policy shape the everyday experiences of new parents. It’s fascinating to see how Tsukasa and Anna’s generous maternity leaves lead to totally different motherhood experiences from Chelsea or Sarah, who both return to work when their infants are only three months old and struggle to balance work and parenting.

Although the book is about mothers, as a dad brain specialist, I was particularly interested in the parallel journeys of the four fathers who also become parents over the course of the book. One striking take-away is that, while all four mothers had many highs and lows over the course of their parenting journey, the fathers mostly had lows. That is, none of the men in the book have particularly positive experiences of new fatherhood. The women all wrestle with various stressors that complicate their lives, but they all revel in their emerging bond with their infants and delight in their time together. In contrast, all four of the dads struggle to connect with their new babies and to fully engage in parenthood. The book ends up being a surprisingly pessimistic portrait of new fatherhood across the globe.

I don’t want to spoil the book too much, but, frankly, the dads are mostly side characters, so I can fill you in on their details without giving most of the book’s main storylines away. Here’s how we meet each of the dads in the book:

Kaz (Japan). He’s a songwriter and composer with long blue hair who has just been offered a faculty position at Osaka College of Music, requiring the family to relocate from Tokyo to Osaka soon after their baby’s birth.

Joseph (Kenya). He’s two decades older than 23-year-old Chelsea, and is married but estranged from his current wife. He lives a few hours away from Nairobi. He and Chelsea are from different ethnic communities, which makes their relationship unusual in Kenya.

Masa (Finland). He is a performance artist and massage therapist, originally from Japan, who recently moved to Finland from Amsterdam. He and Anna met on Tinder and they had only been dating for about six months when Anna got pregnant.

Brian (USA). He delivers packages for Amazon. Both he and his wife Sarah grew up Mormon but are in the process of leaving the church. When they have been married for about three years, he reveals to her that he is bisexual, and the couple decides to try ethical non-monogamy so that Brian can date men in addition to his marriage.

One thing I like about Four Mothers is that Leonard didn’t try to select some kind of statistically representative set of mothers who exemplify the most perfectly average characteristics of their culture (as if that would even be possible). Each mother in the story has her own idiosyncratic characteristics that make her story unique. The same is true for the dads. It’s striking, though, that of the four mothers in the book, only one (Tsukasa) is in a traditional marriage when she enters into parenthood.

Anna (Finland) and Chelsea (Kenya)

Leonard starts the book during each mother’s pregnancy, and takes the reader through their transition back home after birth. Each woman struggles with assuming her new identity as a mother and getting to know her newborn. But each of the dads starts out at more of a distance.

Kaz does not even get to meet his infant until she is a week old. That’s because it’s customary in Japan for women to return to their hometowns to deliver their infant, so Tsukasa heads to the countryside a few hours away to live with her own mother for the last few months of her pregnancy. The reporting for the book overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, so Kaz is not allowed at the birth. Even outside the context of the pandemic, that’s not terribly unusual; many fathers do not attend childbirth in Japan. On the night that Tsukasa’s new baby, Rota, arrives, Tsukasa cannot even reach Kaz by phone, so he learns that he has become a father via text message the next morning. When he finally makes it to Tsukasa’s hometown to meet his new baby, he can only stay for one night, because he needs to return to Tokyo for work the next day. It is traditional in Japan for new mothers to spend their first postpartum month receiving care from their families, so Tsukasa does not come back to Tokyo to live with Kaz until baby Rota is a month old. As Leonard writes, that reunion is “more awkward than she’d expected.” For Kaz, “this is the moment when the reality of fatherhood finally hits. Their baby is here in their apartment, and he’s not sure what to do.” Tsukasa has a significant head start on infant care, especially given that she’s had her mother’s assistance over the previous month, and Kaz is uncertain what to do or how to help.

Similarly, Joseph is not at the birth because he lives in another city, and he only sees Chelsea’s baby, Ada, when he has enough data to make video calls. They don’t meet in person until Ada is almost a year old. Joseph sends money in the first few months after Ada’s birth, but his support dwindles after that. Chelsea’s return to work is challenging given an inflexible work culture at the bank, and when Ada gets sick and Chelsea needs to take her to the doctor, she gets fired. She falls behind on rent and struggles to afford food and medicine, but Joseph drops out of touch. By the end of the book, he has blocked her calls and Chelsea is working two jobs to provide for Ada.

Masa and Brian both get to witness the children’s births, but both men struggle to stay connected as parents. Brian is probably the most supportive and involved father in the book, but he has to return to work after a week off, and ends up taking dispatch shifts on the weekends to supplement the family’s income. Even with his extra work and Sarah’s job, money is perpetually tight. Brian’s dating life also proves to be a distraction from his marriage, and Sarah is fazed when he starts seeing a younger man who makes demands on his time. Like Chelsea, Sarah struggles with mental health throughout her child’s first year. Overwhelmed by money worries, she ends up having panic attacks and taking medication for depression and anxiety.

Masa, in Finland, has the most emotionally difficult journey into fatherhood. He feels like an outsider as Anna forms an easy bond with her newborn. Although he wants to be helpful, he’s not quite sure what to do, and over time, Anna resents him for not being more proactive. As she gets more sleep deprived, the couple bicker. In one scene in the book, Masa says he can hold the baby so the exhausted Anna can take a shower, but then forgets about his offer and goes off to do something else. Anna rebukes him: “In Finland, society is very equal. There is not this idea that the woman is the only one taking care of the child and it's her problem.” Indeed, Finnish culture emphasizes egalitarian gender roles. The country has offered paternity leave since the 1970s, and “latte papas,” who take their babies to cafes and parks, are valorized. However, as an outsider to Finnish culture who was raised by a single mom, Masa has no positive models of fatherhood to draw on. Leonard speculates that he might be suffering from his own postpartum depression. The couples’ relationship continues to unravel. Masa moves out, and the two enter into an increasingly bitter custody battle, in which Masa is only allowed supervised visits twice a month. Their baby, unfamiliar with Masa, cries through the visits, and Masa grows increasingly frustrated and estranged from his son.

One of the themes of Four Mothers is that a new mother’s ability to survive and thrive as a parent is shaped by the support that she is able to access—from her culture, her partner, her family, and her government. All four of the mothers hope for, and expect, more support from their male partners than they ultimately get, and all four of the fathers (except perhaps Joseph in Kenya, who we never hear from directly) feel frustrated by their inability to participate fully in fatherhood. Both Chelsea and Anna end up as single mothers. Although both Tsukasa and Sarah are married, both find themselves receiving little help with housework and baby care. Neither Kaz nor Brian get adequate paternity leave, and both increase their work hours after their baby’s birth. This is especially acute in Kaz and Tsuakasa’s case, given what Leonard calls Japan’s “extreme work culture” marked by “brutally long hours.”

Sarah (USA) and Tsukaba (Japan)

For Tsukasa and Anna, the relative lack of partner support is offset by a strong safety net around parenthood that gives them freedom and security. Although both women go back to work at around one year postpartum, they both have the ability to stay home longer; in Japan, your job is guaranteed for two years after having a baby, and in Finland, for three years. Anna actually starts working a few days a week when her son is about fifteen months old because she enjoys her job, but she has the flexibility to phase back in on her own time. Both women can also access community resources and counseling during their first year of parenthood. Chelsea and Sarah get much briefer maternity leaves and struggle with their return to work, and both also lack strong community support and feel isolated and alone.

Ironically, even though Anna has a contentious relationship with Masa, her son probably has the best entry into life of any of the babies in the book because he has a happy, relaxed, and financially secure mother who can spend a full year with him. Finland’s pro-fatherhood culture means that the legal system supports Masa’s attempts to build a relationship with his son; by the end of the book, he has worked up to two days a week with their child and the two are starting to bond. Still, Finland’s generous safety net benefits means that Anna does not need to stay in a contentious relationship for the sake of baby’s financial security. A conservative reader might say that these policies weaken marriage by encouraging out-of-wedlock births. On the flip side, it’s hard to say that Chelsea and Sarah, the two mothers without such a generous safety net, see a boost to either of their relationships as a result. There is a sense in the book that both mothers are on the precipice of financial ruin at all times.

There is a strong sense of missed opportunity around fatherhood in the book—at its onset, three out of the four fathers are eager to participate in parenting, but due to a variety of structural, economic, and cultural barriers, become unable or unwilling to do so. Although all four of the mothers deal with setbacks and challenges, they all fall in love with their babies and derive tremendous satisfaction from their time together. The dads all miss out on the same degree of joy. For them, fatherhood is marked by uncertainty, ambivalence, frustration, stress, and loss.

Reading Four Mothers, I wondered how a more positive Four Fathers might look. For starters, access to paternity leave might have transformed the parenting experiences of at least a few of the dads in the book. If you were to plot the families in the book on an axis of culture and policy, Japan has a generous set of safety-net policies, but a traditional culture vis a vis gender that leaves Kaz feeling unable to take paternity leave and disconnected from parenting. Exhausted from her sole caregiving role, Tsukaba tells Leonard at the end of the book that she is uncertain she wants another child. The U.S. has a more egalitarian parenting culture, but lacks the policies that could buffer stress for Sarah and Brian in their first year after birth; after Brian uses up his week of leave, he has no more flexibility left in his schedule to support Sarah. Sarah is also unsure about having another child given her financial stress and overwhelm. Kenya lacks these policies as well, and Chelsea’s out-of-wedlock birth leaves her in the most precarious place of any of the mothers in the book. Leonard points out that in a more traditional Kenya, there might have been stronger tribal support for Chelsea and Joseph might have been forced to take more responsibility for his baby. In Finland, there is both an egalitarian parenting culture and a generous safety net, and Masa and Anna end up with a relatively happy ending despite their rocky relationship. However, Masa’s first year of parenthood is isolating and frustrating for him. Leonard notes that access to the kind of mental health counseling that Anna received as a new mother might have helped him gain more confidence as a father and perhaps prevented some of the conflict that drove the couple apart.

Although Four Mothers is an unexpectedly dark portrayal of fatherhood, it’s also got hopeful elements. In 2022, when Leonard followed Tsukaba and Kaza, only 17% of Japanese men took paternity leave, but just a year later, that rate had jumped to 30%, in part because of a new Japanese policy requiring companies to disclose paternity leave usage. As Leonard writes, it is “an example of how policy can move culture forward, just as happened in Finland.” Similarly, Sarah learns that the Utah state legislature is working on a bill to grant three weeks of paid maternity leave to teachers, a proposal that sounds skimpy compared to Finland and Japan but would be a game-changer for Sarah’s plans to have another child. I’d like to think that a Four Mothers of the future could give us a more optimistic picture not just of motherhood, but show us fathers who feel more supported and encouraged to contribute fully to parenthood.

*I learned about this book thanks to some excellent reviews and interviews shared on here, including in Jo Piazza’s newsletter, Allison Lichter’s newsletter, and Ariana Hendrix’s newsletter. Thanks everyone!

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Past recs: Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths

Ballerina Black is the semi-solo project of the Berlin-based Bobby Moynahan, who makes moody, post-punk electronica that recalls The Cure and Joy Division. I am a fan of their 2015 release, Whails, which hones their “gloompop” sound. Heaven Sent is a dead ringer for a particularly reverb-soaked Robert Smith outtake.

The band just released a couple of singles in advance of their next album release, What Lungs of Insects. I have a conflict of interest here, because my awesome husband produced and played multiple instruments on these tracks, but they are evocative and shoegazey in the best way. There’s even a German train announcement interspersed with the chorus of Rosegold. What Lungs of Insects is Moynahan’s most personal release yet - it’s based on his own difficult childhood with a mother who struggled with her mental health, making it a good fit with the topic of this newsletter.