Children Can Strain Marital Bliss

There is nothing so miraculous and charming as a sleeping baby — and nothing so frustrating or exasperating as a tantruming toddler. Children have the power to evoke a wide range of emotions in their parents — often running through the entire emotional repertoire from love to resentment within the space of a few hours. Having a child can turn life into an emotional rollercoaster for which most parents are unprepared. The parenting classes taken during pregnancy do little to prepare parents for the emotional strain that having a child can place on their marriage. As many new parents find out, having is not the same as wanting.

In an 8-year study of 218 couples recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, nearly half  of the couples reported a decrease in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child. Study author Brian Doss, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M, teamed with researchers from the University of Denver to study the effects of children on their parents’ marriages. While childless couples also suffered diminished marital quality over time, University of Denver psychology professor and study researcher Scott Stanley told MyFox National, “having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child.”

The study found that couples who had been married longer and those with higher incomes experienced fewer marital problems after the birth of a baby than those who had been married only a short time or who had lower incomes. Couples who lived together before marriage seemed to find it harder to cope with a new baby than those who had lived separately before getting married.

While sleep deprivation, lost freedom, lack of time for pursuits outside of childcare, and necessary changes in the division of labor within the home — and perceived inequities — contribute to marital strife when a baby joins the family; the study found that communication and sex were the keys to maintaining marital bliss. Parents often put sex and their relationship with each other on the back burner when a baby enters the picture, allowing the child to take center stage. That’s a mistake, researchers found. The happiest marriages were those where parents still “dated,” made time for sex, and made an extra effort to focus on their relationship and each other.