The transition to parenthood is stressful even for well-functioning
couples. In addition to distinctive inner changes, men's and women's
roles change in very different ways when partners become parents. It
seems to come as a great surprise to most of them that changes in some of
their major roles affect their feelings about their overall relationship.
Both partners have to make major adjustments of time and energy as
individuals at a time when they are getting less sleep and fewer
opportunities to be together. They have less patience with things that
didn't seem annoying before. Their frustration often focuses on each
other. For couples who thought that having a baby was going to bring them
closer together, this is especially confusing and disappointing. Why does
becoming a parent have such a powerful impact on a marriage? We have
learned that one of the most difficult aspects of becoming a family is
that so much of what happens is unexpected. Helping couples anticipate
how they might handle the potentially stressful aspects of becoming a
family can leave them feeling less vulnerable, less likely to blame each
other for the hard parts, and more likely to decide that they can work it
out before their distress permeates all of the relationships in the
family.
But when things start to feel shaky, few husbands and wives know
how to tell anyone, especially each other, that they feel disappointed or
frightened. "This is supposed to be the best time of our lives; what's
the matter with me?" a wife might say through her tears. They can't see
that some of their tension may be attributable to the conflicting demands
of the verY complex stage of life, not simply to a suddenly stubborn,
selfish, or unresponsive spouse.
Becoming a family today is more difficult than it used to be. Small
nuclear families live more isolated lives in crowded cities, often
feeling cut off from extended family and friends. Mothers of young
children are entering the work force earlier; they are caught between
traditional and modern conceptions of how they should be living their
lives. Men and women are having a difficult time regaining their balance
after having babies, in part because radical shifts in the circumstances
surrounding family life in America demand new arrangements to accommodate
the increasing demands on parents of young children. But new social
arrangements and roles have simply not kept pace with the changes,
leaving couples on their own to manage the demands of work and
family.
News media accounts imply that as mothers have taken on more of a
role in the world of paid work, fathers have taken on a comparable load
of family work. But this has just not happened. It is not simply that
men's and women's roles are unequal that seems to be causing distress for
couples, but rather that they are so clearly discrepant from what both
spouses expected them to be. Women's work roles have changed, but their
family roles have not. Well-intentioned and confused husbands feel guilty
while their overburdened wives feel angry. It does not take much
imagination to see how these emotions can fuel the fires of marital
conflict.
Separate (Time) Tables
As they bring their first baby home from the hospital, new mothers
and fathers find themselves crossing the great divide. After months of
anticipation, their transition from couple to family becomes a reality.
Entering this unfamiliar territory, men and women find themselves on
different timetables and different trails of a journey they envisioned
completing together.
Let's focus on the view from the inside, as men and women
experience the shifting sense of self that comes with first-time
parenthood. In order to understand how parents integrate Mother or Father
as central components of their identity, we give couples a simple pie
chart and ask them to think about the various aspects of their lives
(worker, friend, daughter, father, so on) and mark off how large each
portion feels, not how much time they spend "being it." The size of each
piece of the pie reflects their psychologic involvement or investment in
that aspect of themselves.
Almost all show pieces that represent parent, worker or student,
and partner or lover. The most vivid identity changes during the
transition to parenthood take place between pregnancy and six months
postpartum. The part of the self that women call Mother takes up 1O
percent of their pictures of themselves in late pregnancy. It then leaps
to 34 percent six months after birth, and stays there through the second
year of parenthood. For some women, the psychological investment in
motherhood is much greater than the average.
Most of the husbands we interviewed took on the identity of parent
more slowly than their wives did. During pregnancy, Father takes half as
much of men's pie as their wives' Mother sections do, and when their
children are 18 months old, husbands identity as parent is still less
than one third as large as their wives'. We find that the larger the
difference between husbands and wives in the size of their parent piece
of the pie when their babies are six months old, the less satisfied both
spouses are with the marriage, and the more their satisfaction declines
over the next year.
The Big Squeeze
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