Marital Satisfaction Across the Transition to Parenthood: Three Eras of Research

Few events have the potential to transform a marriage as much as the arrival of a child. In a short span of time, the profound feelings of joy and awe that parents experience when bringing a new life into the world combine with unfamiliar but urgent child-care tasks, uncharted negotiations between sleep-deprived partners, reductions in leisure time, changes in work patterns, fluctuations in moods and desires for intimacy, increased interactions with medical professionals, financial challenges, and new relationships with friends and family members. How couples navigate these myriad changes is likely to affect the course of their relationship; the infant's experience of the family as a safe, nurturing, and predictable environment; and the maturing child's emotional development and social competence. Social scientists have long recognized the pivotal consequences that the first child's arrival has on couples and families, and with 50 years now having now passed since LeMaster's (1957) seminal study on this topic, it is time to take stock of the large and varied body of research that has accumulated. Doing so is valuable not simply because the first child's arrival provides a window into how marriages naturally change but also because understanding change during this period can strengthen the empirical foundation for psychoeducational interventions designed to promote healthy family formation and development. Most of the work on the transition to parenthood can be linked to the following question: To what extent does the first child's arrival affect spouses' marital satisfaction? This question is critical to address given that marital satisfaction is strongly associated with the 50% divorce rate in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005), with spouses' psychological (e.g., depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse; e.g., Whisman & Uebelacker, 2006) and physical health (e.g., Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001), and with children's well-being (e.g., Amato & Keith, 1991). To address the effects of the first child on marital satisfaction, researchers have typically used one of two distinct methodological approaches. In the first approach, researchers compare couples with and without children to estimate the degree to which the child's arrival contributes to relationship satisfaction and relational processes, and they conduct repeated measures