A new baby! How exciting! You must be thrilled!

These are the expectations that the world holds when a new baby enters a family. Certainly, these things are (we hope!) true; but they do not tell the whole story. No wonder that many couples are afraid to let others know just how difficult their lives have now become.

In studying couples views of their marriage after a baby entered the family, John Gottman found that 67% of couples reported a decline in relationship satisfaction. For mothers this drop came at about 6 months; for fathers it was more likely to be experienced around the end of the baby's first year. This can be a rather depressing statistic, unless you look at the flipside of that figure. He also found that 33% of the couples did not report that decline. He then began to study the differences in these two groups.

The transition from a couple to a family is a very difficult one. As a twosome, it is easy to just pick up and go to a movie or out with friends. During pregnancy, the focus is on the mother-to-be, with lots of positive attention, gifts, advice and support. When the baby arrives, it can be a time of great joy, but also great change. No matter how much preparation a couple goes through, the changes are still overwhelming.

What usually happens at this point, however, is that couples begin to think that they are somehow not getting it. They think that others must be having a much better time of it and that they are somehow flawed as parents. And who wants to admit to being less than perfect? Couples often argue about things that weren't even on their radar before. Think about all the changes that take place when a baby enters the family (main points summarized from Gottman's "Bringing Baby Home" research and the book And Baby Makes Three):

A profound relationship shift occurs

Here’s a quote from Rajneesh, an Indian mystic:

The moment a child is born the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.

And I would add, so is a Father!

Both the father and mother go through these profound relationship shifts. Before they were sons and daughters; now they are a father or a mother of a helpless newborn. There are many new responsibilities. Often roles become more defined along traditional lines. And life is looked at in new terms - before baby and after baby.

It is very important for couples to work at becoming more of a "we" than two individuals at this time, working on their friendship and closeness. Getting help from family and friends to ensure some time together without focusing on the baby is important. Sharing the bond that this new baby creates is a source of love and joy.

Relationships change

Many couples find that there is increased conflict when a baby arrives. There is much less time for conversation and closeness, including sex, and the relationship can suffer. New parents are often stunned by the sheer amount of work that is involved. They find they have lost the ability to even finish a sentence, much less a normal task!

Here again, getting help in whatever form can help to ease the stressors. But realizing that this change is normal is the most important step toward maintaining relationship satisfaction during this time. Things do get better as the baby gets older and the rewards increase as that new baby begins to interact with you.

Fathers often withdraw

Fathers sometimes find that women are more supported in the parenting role than fathers. Today's fathers often want to be more involved with parenting than the fathers of the past. But sometimes they find it is difficult to stay involved and are only too happy to get back to the working world.

It is important to keep fathers fully involved with their children through this period of time by participating in the feeding, bathing, changing, and mostly playing. Fathers play differently than mothers, in most cases. They are very important and shine in the area of play!

There are physical and psychological changes

There is no question that most new parents are sleep deprived and often under a lot of stress. This can lead to sadness, irritability and depression, at the very time in life when outsiders are expecting you to be overwhelmingly joyful. Sexual desire may decline or disappear. The mother may be nursing, uncomfortable, too tired to think about sex. One or both of the parents may become emotionally unavailable to the other. Sometimes postpartum depression sets in, or a longer-term depression develops. Just the lack of sleep, in and of itself, is enough to bring about depression!

Addressing issues

The most important first step in beginning to understand these changes is to recognize that they are normal and that all couples go through them in some way or another. Beginning to talk to each other and to other friends or family members about some of the changes will ease the feeling of isolation and failure. Just because these feelings arise does not mean that the marriage is in trouble. You will develop a deep love together for this new little being and this will strengthen your bond.

As Gottman put it, "Emotional communication and emotional connection are the keys to success during the transition to parenthood." What can you do to be more emotionally connected to your spouse during this time of "joyous stress?" Remember that keeping your relationship healthy is the first step toward building a strong family!

Terry McNichols is a Marriage and Family Therapist who also blogs at Grace and Gravity and Are We There Yet?

I discussed Bids and Turning in my last post about the teachings of psychologist John Gottman. Another one of Gottman's teachings has to do with the emotional bank account, a concept I'd like to talk about today. You can probably anticipate the basic concept, but it has some surprising implications for your relationships.

The concept of the emotional bank account is modeled after your financial bank account. We all know that we must continually make deposits into our bank accounts. If we don't, we will soon find ourselves overdrawn and in deep financial difficulties. The same is true of your emotional bank account. By turning toward your partner many times and in many ways throughout the day, you are making deposits into the emotional bank account. Turning away or turning against your partner depletes the bank account and causes you to experience relational difficulties. Think about ways that you can build up that bank account so that you will have a surplus when you most need it and not experience those relational overdraft fees!

One not-very-surprising premise is that you must have positives in your relationship to counteract the negatives. The surprising thing, however, is that it takes more positives to counteract negatives during times of apparent peace than during times of conflict. Let me explain. If you and your partner are arguing or in the middle of some other kind of tense situation, the expectation that one or the other person will be negative is understood. Research claims that it takes five positives to counteract a negative in the heat of conflict. And if you have been making regular contributions to your emotional bank account you will hopefully have built up a reserve to tide you over during times of conflict.

If, however, you say or do something negative during times of relative peace, the ratio changes. Researchers have argued that a negative that comes unexpectedly and catches the partner by surprise requires 20 positives to counteract it. An unexpected nasty remark or hurtful behavior, when the other person thinks things are going along smoothly, will cost you dearly. Bank penalties, interest, fees, the whole market crashing around your very feet!

Hopefully, you can see that this emotional bank account needs daily deposits, few withdrawals, and a lot of attention to make your relationship stable - and enjoyable! The deposits don't have to be grandiose gestures (although flowers, a date night, or a favorite meal couldn't hurt), but small acts of kindness throughout the day, an attitude of positive regard towards each other, and the willingness to give your partner the benefit of the doubt when things are rocky!

With one holiday behind us and several more ahead, this might be a good time to talk about stress. This particular year may be an extremely stressful holiday for you and your family with the economy on the skids for more than a year. How do you handle stress in your life and in your relationship? But more particularly, how does the way you handle stress impact the stress level of your children?

When marriage and parenting researcher John Gottman, Ph.D. was studying marriage relationships, he originally assessed parents' stressors by giving them a written test to gauge the level of stress in the family. He learned, however, that measuring the stress hormone levels in the children was a more effective way to quickly get to the truth.

When my oldest son was around five years old, we lived in a place where we often needed to take a ferry. Catching ferries with a couple of little kids in tow was a very stressful time for me, but I didn’t realize how that stress was affecting my son until one day he stated, "Mom, I know how to catch a ferry on time!" "How is that?" I asked. "You just breathe like this!" (whereupon he demonstrated rapidly breathing in and out). I was horrified to realize that my behavior was having such a direct impact on his young psyche. I began to work at slowing down, breathing deeply, leaving home earlier to avoid the stress, and realizing that missing the ferry wasn't the end of the world.

That same son now has a five-year-old of his own and this grandson recently gave me a new story. Sitting at my dining room table, he asked me several times if I was a witch. I was shocked, until I realized that with a slight speech impediment he was really asking me if I was RICH. We had a back and forth conversation at that point and it seemed to me that he was quite concerned about money and what it means to be rich. Since I know his parents are struggling in these economic times, I told them of his comment and we had a good conversation about being open about what was going on, but at the same time, recognizing just how much a 5 year old can take in and process.

Often, in times of stress, a child will act out in some way and parents might miss the fact that this is related to stressors in the family. The child can easily become the "identified patient," when there is actually something deeper going on. In my last post, I talked about how some of the feelings we might have as adults can have roots back in our early childhood. As adults, it is important that we are open to learning about our own stress behaviors so that we don't unnecessarily burden our children. I will discuss emotion coaching in a further post. (Emotion coaching is a way to help children process the emotions that they are having.) But the purpose of this post is to help you, the parent, think about how your own stress impacts your children and begin to find ways to deal with that stress.

One of the most effective ways of lowering your stress level is to practice deep breathing. Here are some steps:

1. Take a deep breath and say something comforting to yourself when you exhale: "It's okay" or "Relax" are good options.


2. Watch your breathing. Allow it to slow down and try to breathe from your diaphragm using your full lung capacity.


3. Enhance your relaxation with a memory or image of a peaceful, serene situation - watching stars from a hilltop, lying on a warm beach, or whatever else works for you.


4. Enhance your relaxation by systematically tensing (for five seconds) and relaxing (for 15 seconds) specific small groups of muscles, one group at a time.


5. Enhance your relaxation by using environmental cues - a favorite chair or wrap, listening to a soothing piece of music, or whatever else might be available to you where you are.

Of course, there are a lot of factors involved in lowering the stress levels in your home. Most often if things are chaotic, it is the adults in the family who have the ability to make changes. In the ferry instance I cited above, one solution would be to work at leaving home earlier and not always being in a rush. Or how about discussing financial issues that are stressful after the children are in bed, keeping the discussion at an age-appropriate level when they're around? If your mornings are stressful, find ways to plan ahead the night before in order to change how your family members start the day. The most important thing to remember is that children do feel our stress, even when we think we are good at hiding it!

Terry McNichols is a Marriage and Family Therapist who also blogs at Grace and Gravity and Are We There Yet?