Dr. Heath Chung has navigated many tricky waters — diagnosing patients, learning tough medical procedures, even earning a fellowship to study infectious diseases at the prestigious Mayo Clinic — but the one that really got him sweating bullets was the bathtub.

As in giving a bath to his baby girl, Lucy, now 4 months, in the big bathtub, not her infant tub.

"She could drown!" he says, eyebrows raised, stretching his fingers 4 inches apart to show how deep the water was. Then he adds, "Sometimes the water's too hot, sometimes it's too cold."

It's downright fun to hear a competent and incontrol man like Chung, the physician of internal medicine who has people hanging on his every word in the office, sound like such a wide-eyed newbie just before celebrating his first Father's Day. And it's a testament to the role fathers are playing in the upbringing of their children that men increasingly are willing to share their stories with each other and the greater world, something parenting experts in Hawai'i applaud.

Chung (pictured at right with daughter Lucy) talked openly about his social network of other dads, and there are myriad books for new fathers. A new movie, the summer hit, "Knocked Up," tells a tale of fatherhood as the path to adultdom. And organizations such as the Hawai'i Coalition for Dads reinforce the notion that this is no solitary sojourn.

But back to Chung, who's telling the story of how horrified he was to see Lucy gnawing on a stuffed monkey that had been dragged along on the ground. Or how when he had a sore throat, he went around the house in a surgical mask that could block drug-resistant TB.

When his upbeat wife, Tanya Florin, describes her husband's expertise at sterilizing bottles, one senses she's trying hard not to roll her eyes.

"I love sterilizing things," he enthusiastically admits.

Wise enough to give her husband and daughter space to build a relationship of their own, Florin is letting him find confidence in his caretaking skills and recognizes the difference in their perspectives.

"He worries about the big things, like sending (Lucy) to Brown," says Florin, a triathlete and former drug sales representative who is now a stay-at-home mom. "I worry about the day-to-day."

Chung himself is in the midst of learning more about that: Though he'd been working double shifts and crazy hours, he's about to head off to Minnesota, where he hopes to have a regular schedule for the next few years. And in the meantime, instead of spending just an hour a day with the baby, he's got weeks ahead to bottle-feed her between nursings, play with her, and shower her with kisses. Chung obviously revels in that as he scoops Lucy from her colorful play blanket and plants a kiss on her forehead.

DIFFERENT FROM MOMS

When it comes to caretaking, Greg Farstrup, coordinator for Hawai'i Coalition for Dads, says new dads do have a different perspective.

For example, while moms might wrap infants toward them, making a cocoon, dads are more likely to prop babies up or turn them around to face the world.

Also, dads spend more time playing, on average. They'll pick the baby up just to see what happens.

And these days, they're around a whole lot more — and in greater capacities — than when he was a new father, Farstrup says.

"When my kids were born, there were just 25 percent dads in the delivery room," says Farstrup, who's been married for 39 years. "Now it's 90 percent. It takes dads being persistent."

When it comes to the joys of the job, Farstrup, who has the word "father" right in his name (in Danish, it means "father's little strip of land"), quotes Johnny Depp: "He said when he had his daughter, it made him realize what life is all about. You realize it's more than about yourself. You can also realize you can have unconditional love."

Some fathers focus on the provider aspect of the job and fail to involve themselves in what Farstrup calls "the best part of being a parent" — interacting with their children.

"They leave that to the mother," says Farstrup, who serves as a father coach at Hana Like Home Visitor program, one of the Hawai'i Coalition for Dads projects. "If fathers can be more involved with the caretaking ... then they get feedback from the kids."

If a dad connects with baby, their relationship will improve through all development stages, including the difficult teen years, Farstrup says: "You can't really recapture that at 11."

PLAY, LOVE DAILY

Farstrup advises dads to play with their kids on a daily basis and to express love every day.

That's something new father Chung experienced himself, as a kid. The young doctor smiles a wistful smile as he recounts how every day, until he went away to college, his father would come in every night to give him a hug.

Chung has a thickly woven social network of friends and colleagues who bond over the trials and tribulations of new fatherhood. But like the dad-to-be in the movie "Knocked Up," he wasn't about to crack a book for expectant fathers ... well, unless you count the manual that came complete with diapering schematics.

"For entertainment sake, I read that," Chung admits.

He's more likely to check out the Net or ring up one of those pals, whom he calls "nurturing dads."

Chung says he appreciates his friends' valuable advice.

That's reassuring for Farstrup, who points out that childbirth classes are a good place to bond with other fathers.

Mike Willett, an educational specialist at Honolulu Community College who became a dad at 45, attended those classes with his wife — even though most of the couples there were at least a decade younger than he was.

Even so, "It was pretty good to see other couples in there," says Willett, who adds he didn't pick up those baby books, either.

Like his parents, who grew up poor but managed to send their only child to an Ivy League school and watch proudly as he became a doctor, Chung wants to do his best by his daughter.

"They gave me a lot, and I want to try to do the same for Lucy," he says.