It is an unfortunate yet well-documented irony that a baby, typically the product of a couple’s love for one another, ushers in a decline in relationship satisfaction. The combination of a demanding infant, expanded household chores and workplace stress reduces the time and energy that couples devote to their relationship. This finding holds true for all couples, whether happy or unhappy, before the baby came along.

There is further irony to be found, however, in the fact that the couple’s relationship is rarely part of the discussion in prenatal classes or parent education programs. Professionals and parents alike argue that this is a critical omission.

To test this claim, researchers in eastern Australian randomly assigned 71 expectant parents to receive either a standard prenatal parenting education class or a parenting program that was couple-focused. That program, called Couple CARE for Parents (CCP), is an adaptation of the CRE program, an intervention for couples designed to promote healthy, satisfying relationships. A meta-analysis in 2008 concluded that the program improves relationship skills and enhances relationship satisfaction.

In the Australian study, CCP included sessions promoting partner support, shared parenting expectations, along with parenting competence and infant care knowledge and skills. The program consists of six sessions, delivered across a period of 6 months from approximately the thirty-second week of pregnancy to three months postpartum. The first session was run at a university clinic and the remaining five sessions took place in the couple’s home. Three of the five sessions were self-directed using a DVD guide. The total professional contact time was twelve hours per couple.

The evaluation compared relationship satisfaction, relationship effort and the communication of parents who received the program with a control group. That group received the standard prenatal parenting education offered as best practice in Australia. Both programs had a set curriculum so that the fidelity of program delivery could be monitored. The results suggest that interventions aimed at supporting new parents would do well to include tools to counteract the negative impact a baby can have on a couple’s relationship.

Compared with standard prenatal classes, the parents in the Couple CARE for Parents program showed significantly lower rates of negative communication as well as lower rates of decline in relationship satisfaction. The impact on relationship satisfaction was greater for women than for the men in the study. Women were also less likely to show a decline in their efforts to sustain their relationships. The two different programs, however, produced no significant difference in parenting stress. This suggests that the couple-focused program was no more effective than the standard prenatal classes for reducing early problems in the parent-child relationship.

The fact that the women were more likely than men to report smaller rates of decline in relationship satisfaction is not surprising. The women in the study reported greater levels of relationship dissatisfaction after they became mothers than the men did after they became fathers. However, this Australian study runs counter to findings from evaluations of CCP in the US. There, the men also reported significant declines in relationship satisfaction after the baby was born. A key difference between these studies, beyond the cultural differences between Americans and Australians, is that the Australian study compared the CCP program with a standard parenting intervention, while the US group was compared with parents receiving no intervention at all. The couples in the Australian sample also had lower than average levels of stress and negative communication before the intervention was started.

The authors of the study question whether their efforts may do more good if they targeted high-risk couples. With those couples, they believe there is a greater scope for reducing relationship decline. Also, the results show that the intervention doesn’t do much to reduce early parenting stress over and above standard prenatal classes. But the results are still promising. It seems that parenting support interventions that include a focus on keeping the couple’s relationship alive can do much to reduce the well-documented decline in relationship satisfaction after the baby arrives.

References

Halford, W. K., Patch, J. and Creedy, D.K. (2010) ‘Promoting a positive transition to parenthood: a randomized clinical trial of couple relationship education’, Prevention Science, Vol. 11 (1), pp. 89-100.

Hawkins, A.J., Blanchard, V.L., Baldwin, S.A. and Fawcett, E.B. (2008) ‘Does marriage and relationship education work? A meta-analytic study.’ Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 76, pp. 723-734.