Here Comes Baby, There Goes the Marriage - WSJ.com. According to this Wall Street Journal article by Andrea Petersen, "About two-thirds of couples see the quality of their relationship drop within three years of the birth of a child ... Mothers' satisfaction in their marriages plummets immediately; for men, the slide is delayed a few months."
People are actually doing something about this, and it is working:
-- "A growing number of hospitals, midwives and doulas (birth coaches who provide physical and emotional support) are teaching relationship skills alongside childbirth education classes."
-- "a 12-hour Bringing Baby Home workshop for expectant and new parents, developed by the Relationship Research Institute, teaches "four steps of constructive problem solving." .. The Relationship Research Institute has trained about 800 people to lead Bringing Baby Home programs since the course's launch in 2005. The program is now offered to couples in at least 17 hospitals across the country. ... In a 2005 study in the Journal of Family Communication, the marital quality for women taking the Bringing Baby Home workshop was relatively stable from just before their child's birth to the first birthday. Women in the control group who weren't in the program faced a marked decline in marital quality during that time."
-- "Another study published in 2006 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology showed that expectant couples and new parents who participated in 24 weekly group counseling meetings experienced a much smaller decline in marital satisfaction over about five years compared with parents who didn't have the counseling. The rate of divorce, however, was the same for both. The study followed 66 couples with children and 13 childless couples. (Those without kids didn't see a decline in marriage satisfaction.)"
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