parenting without yelling

okay, so the lecture today is parenting and marriagethe transition to parenthood so just to start you off with a quote about this transition suddenly you realizethat if you were going to survive this thing intact the two of you are going to have towork together so basically what this is that a lot ofparents realized that in when they first become parents it's veryhard transition and to actually be successful it takes teamwork.

so, today's goals, what i'll betalking about are parenting choices, marriage and the transition to parenthood, experiences as a couple so what couples typicallyexperience as new parents and then i'll go through some new parent education and talk about like some workshops, teaching, things are availablefor new parents so parenting choices there are 5 basic parenting choices andthe first of course is whether or not to actually have children

and then once you've decided you know if you that you want to havechildren then the next question you have to askyourself or decide is the number of children you want to have.and parents also have to decide interval between children so if you wantyour children to be you know, one, two, three, four, five years apart things like that and when you're deciding the intervalbetween children you also have to think about things like you know how old you want to be when you have children and you know like what that means fortheir development so if you have a child

you know when you're twenty or 25 then you'll be 30 or 35 when that child is 10 or 40 or 45 when that child is twenty sothose are things that need to be taken into consideration and parentsalso have decided that the method of guidance and discipline so how youwant to raise your children and also the investment in the parental role and so this is basically how salient orimportant that role of parent is and what you think parenting isactually going to look like for you specifically

so regarding the nature of parenting choices so like we've talked about in previouslectures the absence of a decision is a decision so for example by not deciding on a consistent discipline style you areessentially making that decision to have that inconsistent discipline style so you have to make decisionsregarding how you want to raise your children andby not

making decisions or enforcing certain rules that is a decision in andof itself there are also some tradeoffs so all parental decisions actuallyinvolve trade-offs and this can be committing toparenting without yelling, threatening, or usingcorporal punishment that can actually be taxing for parents to use other methods of discipline for theirchildren

another thing is to view decisionspositively so view like bad decisions positively so all parentsare plagued with the belief that they made a bad decision rather and ratherthan to berate themselves or you know have negative thoughtsparents might actually emphasize the positive outcome of theirdifficult choices so for individuals who choose to beparents the transition to parenthood is asignificant period of transition in their lives. the ecologicalperspective

emphasizes the significance and potential of studying transitions, and so of which the transition to parenthood iscertainly an important one for those individuals who choose to or becomeparents when partners become parents they begin to take on a whole new hostof important roles in these roles include things like beinga caregiver a provider, a teacher, and a protector forthose children or a child and so when mothers andfathers take

on these new rules there will certainlybe implications for their priorrelationships and more specifically these new parenting roles will haveimplications for their marriages and the functioning of that marital relationship so if you remember that inverted j- curve that we've talked aboutpreviously talking about how marital satisfactionhas this sort of dip a little bit and some researchers setout to explain this and examine you know why we're actually seeingthis dip in

marital satisfaction so the study i'mgonna talk about today by belsky and cox it's a well-designed longitudinal study and it interviewed families before andafter the birth of their first child and this is actually one of the majorstudies on the transition to parenthood that's been conducted to this day. soregarding the methodology and sample there were 140 couples recruited through a lamaze class which is pre-birthing breathing techniques

to be eligible for inclusion in the studycouples had to meet three criteria: the partners had to be married legally married and both spouses had tobe having their first child and so if this was a second marriage but it was still their first child thereare still eligible but if one partner had had a child previously they would not be. and also the wifehad to be between the ages of 18 and 35 and so when you think about sampling

if you have for example very youngmothers or older mothers like over 35 they may have different experiences in their transition to parenthood that'swhy restricting age range is important in this study so regarding data collection, couples were interviewed and videotaped and actuallycompleted self-report data at five points in time and so this is really great

when you think about longitudinal research to have this many time points because it really looks at howthese processes and things are changingover time so the five points in time that couples were interviewed at wereprenatally and this was during the last trimester ofpregnancy the second timepoint: was three months after the child's birththe third time point was nine months after the child's birth

the fourth was twelve months after the child's birth and the fifthwas 24 months after the child's birth so you know again when a child is 3, 9,12, and 24 months old the parents were interviewed. there were also lab reports or lab visits where they conducted the strange situation at 13 and 15 months and the strange situation again is to lookat how the child is attached, the attachment relationship with it's caregiver

and so in the self-report, and so this would be things where they would fill out likea questionnaire and the parents were asked about theirself-esteem social support work stress marital satisfactiondepression anxiety personality traits and infant temperament in the interviews parents were asked about their marriageand the parent-child relationship and what was actually videotaped - so themarital interaction and parent-child interactionwas videotaped

as well as a family interaction and again mary ainsworth's strangesituation which i said earlier was to observe the attachment relationship between a childand their caregiver and so also there were observerratings so a trained observer probably agraduate student like me or potentially an undergrad basicallywent in to the home environment and observed things like infanttemperament parent-child interactions and their marriage

so now i'm kind of going to talk aboutsome of the experiences that were observed inthis study and kinda the findings so on average couples do decline in maritalsatisfaction across the transition to parenthood however this study found that there wereactually three different types or patterns that were evident when youlook at the data more closely so they were the three patterns where the decliners people who didn'tchange and then the improvers. so thedecliners

accounted for 50- 51 percent of thecouples in this study and what this kind of looked like was theywere seen or reporting less love in theirrelationships more ambivalence more conflict and lesscommunication between the partners in the no change group so again they wouldn't be showing that inverted j as much it would be more of a flatter line that accounted forabout 30 percent of couples and these couples overcame difficulties such that their marriageand marital relationship or satisfaction

didn't decline but it was not enough toactually improve their marriage so and then there's the improvers andthis was the least frequent group and that accounted for about 19 percent ofcouples in these couples the they were reporting and experiencing more lovewith each other less ambivalence less conflict andactually more communication so of course you know what you ideallywould want to do is improve over this time period and solooking at some of the

differences between improvers versusdecliners there are actually some demographicdifferences so decliners so the people whosemarital satisfaction decreased, you know, had more conflictand less communication over this transition actually were lesseducated had been married fewer years prior totheir child being born were younger, earned less income so didn't make as much money, thehusband exhibited last interpersonal sensitivity and so this can be things like you knowbeing

sensitive to your wife's needs and engaging in some behaviors that would besupportive of that relationship, lower self-esteem wasalso shown for husbands and sometimes wives as well so it could beeither husbands or wives are both partners were showing lower self-esteem in the decliner group and also therewere some infant characteristics too, so such as an unpredictable infant temperament which was more prevalent in the declinersversus the improvers

but there were some positive moments that were noted so families felt closer as a unit, couplesfelt like they were more of a team i'll show you a couple quotesthat demonstrate this on the next slide family traditions - so there was asense of family identity and they felt closer to parentsso new parents sort of acknowledge what theirparents went through and develop a closer relationship so again when we're thinking about thesepositive moments here are some quotes

that kind of demonstrate what i wastalking about earlier so the first one "suddenly you realizethat if you're going to survive this the two of you are going to have to worktogether" and so again that kind of demonstrates this closer as a unit team approach that was really seenas a positive thing over the transition to parenthood and then regarding family transition another quote thatreally illustrates that point as one parents said "when i was a little girl we used to spend every summer on thejersey shore since jane's birth,

everett and i have spent a lot of timetalking about the traditions we want to start for our family and so again having these experiences as a child you kind of haveto merge them in your new family because you are bringing traditions from bothpartners and so that actually helps to create a sense of a family identity asyou create these new family experiences

that are a blend of your family of originexperiences some i'm going to stop there for part one in part two we will pick up withproblematic areas of the relationship

so stay tuned