Alternate Parenting: Single Dads By Choice

Families come in all forms and sizes, and for some men, matrimony is no longer seen as a necessary step to starting one of their own. Amishi Parekh decodes

- Amishi Parekh

On June 27, actor Tusshar Kapoor posted a rather unusual photo on his Instagram account. In between the typical irreverence that marks his usual posts appeared a blue teddy bear with the message: ‘I’m thrilled to welcome the greatest source of joy in my life, my son Laksshya Kapoor — Tusshar’. to the disappointment of many tabloids, this wasn’t some secret affair kept under wraps waiting to be unearthed. Kapoor openly announced that the baby had been born through IVF and surrogacy, and he had chosen to become a single parent.

In 2015, another single father had already made the news. twenty-year- old Aditya Tiwari from Indore became the youngest single father in India to adopt a baby. For him it was love at first sight, and not even the fact that the baby boy was born with Down’s syndrome and a hole in his heart could deter him. Until last year, the legal age for a parent to adopt was 30. It was lowered to 25 years last August, and Tiwari's persistence must have had something to do with it.

Single moms such as Sushmita Sen and Raveena Tandon are now old news, although at the time, they were breaking norms. these days society may not balk at a single woman wanting a child — we reserve terms like ‘maternal instinct’ and the proverbial ‘biological clock’ to explain this — but a single man wanting a family still causes a stir.