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| September 02, 2005
Baby Bliss, Blues BY JILL KRAMER
Not that new motherhood is a party, either. By the time her husband gets home, Mom is burned out from tending to Baby’s every need, nonstop, no breaks, no adult stimulation. She’s bored and exhausted and ready for him to take over so she can have a moment to herself. They haven’t had sex in three months. They’re both irritable and resentful. They fight. The stage is set for the marriage to go down the tubes. New parenthood presents challenges to the marriage that two-thirds of all couples are unable to overcome, says Dr. Roberta Seifert, a psychologist with a private practice in San Rafael. “I’ve been seeing couples for almost 30 years and I can’t tell you how often the problems that I see when they’ve been married 15, 20, 25 years originated with the birth of the first baby,” says Seifert. Even if the couple doesn’t divorce, the relationship will continue to deteriorate unless repairs are made at the outset. “People stay together because of the kids but they stay together miserably. Just like, in an individual, something that goes a little bit wrong in a 1-year-old affects more and more of their lives as they get older. Things that happen at this crucial stage of family formation and don’t get addressed become part of the family culture.” There is, however, a bright side. While the first year of the first baby’s life is the most stressful transition that most couples will ever go through, it’s also the couple’s best chance to build the foundation for a solid, lasting marriage. “This is when couples are so motivated to do what’s right for their babies, they’ll never be that open again,” says Seifert. “It’s a window of opportunity.” Seifert and another Marin family counselor, Jan Ardell, recently returned from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle where they were trained in a new program, Bringing Baby Home, designed to teach couples how best to go from a twosome to a threesome. It’s the brainchild of Dr. John Gottman, who’s worked with more than 3,000 couples since 1972 and has made a science of the interactions between them. He’s analyzed hundreds of hours of videotape and thousands of measured responses in the heart rates and skin reactions of his subjects. Listening in while newlyweds discuss some point of conflict, Gottman can tell in three minutes whether their marriages will last. He has devised a set of teachable skills to help see that they do. Parents know that a healthy marriage is more likely to produce an emotionally healthy child. But the missteps that happen early on are often unconscious and well-intentioned. Fathers may feel that they’re only getting in the way at home and may start spending more time at work, knowing their financial support is needed more than ever. “Mom has spent all day with this baby and she knows the baby well, she’s attuned to the baby, she knows what this cry is and that cry is. Dad comes in, he’s been at work all day, and he doesn’t have that same attunement. If he does something and the baby starts getting upset and the dad doesn’t read it, Mom gets upset. So she starts correcting him or saying, ‘No, no, let me do it.’ And Dad is pushed out of the relationship.” David Farina and Vicki Russo, whose daughter Sofia is now 21 months, say it’s only very recently that their baby has been able to relate to Dad. “My role was over at the beginning,” says David. “I could change a diaper or give her a bottle, but she wanted Mom. And to a large extent, still does. My role is getting bigger as she gets older, but if she’s hurt, she’ll go to Mom.” David says it seemed at first as if there were some secret code between mother and baby. “Sofia would be acting up and I wouldn’t know what to do and Vicki comes in the room and says, oh, she’s hungry. How did you get that out of what she was doing?!” Vicki admits that she was complicit in making David the odd man out. “Sofia and I do everything together, and I know it sounds weird, but I feel like she’s mine more than my husband’s. He’s a wonderful father and I feel safe leaving her with him, but there’s this sense that I can take care of her better than he can.” What alienated David even more was that the baby replaced him in Vicki’s affections. “I fell in love with my daughter,” says Vicki. “And in some ways, I no longer needed my husband. I got all of my emotional needs met through my daughter and I didn’t expect that at all. My vision was that the three of us would lie there and gaze into each other’s eyes and it didn’t happen like that. I kind of pushed my husband off to the side.” Much has been written about mothers and postpartum depression, but about one-third of all new fathers go through a period of depression as well. For both parents, the rosy scenario they’d been contemplating during the pregnancy gives way to the reality of sleep deprivation, an increased workload and the sudden disappearance of time to give each other love and support. As tension and resentment build between the couple, they may find themselves competing for the attention of the baby. It’s not good for the marriage and it’s not good for the baby. “Babies don’t like it,” says Seifert. “When one parent gets between the baby and the other parent, babies start to fuss. Babies love it when their parents cooperate and they’re all playing together.” Mothers and fathers generally have different styles of play, and babies’ responses change as they grow. “Father has a certain jazzed-up way of enlivening the play,” says Ardell. “At 2 to 3 weeks of age, an infant is more bright-eyed, more playful, more bright-faced when playing with the dad. Dads do more surprising things and babies like it. On the other hand, because their nervous systems aren’t very well developed, they can get overstimulated.” At that point, Baby might start crying, wanting to be soothed by Mom. When they get a little bit older, they’re better able to handle more male energy. “By the time a child is 2-1/2, they prefer the play of the father to the play of the mother,” says Ardell. Paving the way for greater paternal involvement is a key component of the Bringing Baby Home program because so much of the child’s future adjustment depends on Dad’s influence. “It’s the emotionally intelligent dad, the dad who’s really attuned to the baby’s feelings, being empathic with the child, that teaches the child to trust in the world, that his or her needs are important,” says Ardell. “His warmth, his rough-and-tumble play, predicts in children better self-control abilities, acceptance of their peers in school, better social confidence, higher verbal ability and better academic performance.” The ramifications of the father’s involvement reach all the way into the child’s adulthood. “There was a long-term study that showed the best predictor of adult empathy at 26 years of age was how involved Dad was when the kid was 5,” says Seifert. “It is mind-boggling. These people were looked at again when they were 41 years old, and those men and women who had better social relationships at age 41 were those who had increased warmth from dads when they were children.” Babies’ experiences in the first few years of life get hard-wired into their developing brains, says Seifert. “They’re born with all the brain cells that they need, but the connections haven’t been made. And undoubtedly rough-and-tumble play creates more resilience. You also find that babies reflect maternal depression and there is brain-wave research that shows that babies of depressed moms have flatter brain wave patterns. An enhanced emotional environment for the baby is going to have a long-lasting effect on how their brains work, on how resilient they are, on how smart they are, their cognitive development and their emotional intelligence.” Because mothers typically spend more time with a newborn, they get an on-the-job crash course in learning to read their baby’s cues. It takes fathers a bit more time to catch up. The kind of instruction provided by the Bringing Baby Home program can help both parents. For example, when babies get overstimulated by too much play, they calm themselves by turning away from the parent. The parent might misread that cue as rejection or boredom and try harder to engage the baby’s attention. “One of the mistakes that parents commonly make is to actually turn the baby’s head back to them or turn their torso to them and accelerate the play. And that makes it worse,” says Ardell. “Picking the baby up, being calmer, quieter, is what’s helpful.” When parents learn to read their baby’s cues accurately, it helps the child’s development as well as the parent-child relationship. “Then the baby can learn to trust that the world responds to their needs, that what they want has an influence on their world. That’s a wonderful message.” • • • • MUCH OF WHAT Ardell and Seifert do in their workshop is provide parents with realistic expectations. Too often, parenthood provides a rude awakening. “I went in with a fantasy about what it would be like to have a child,” says Vicki Russo. “I asked other moms a lot of questions but they weren’t really that forthcoming about the realities. The truth is, raising a child is work.” Vicki married David when she was 39, after having been a single career woman all her adult life. Now that she’s a full-time mom, she finds she misses her old job. “I thought I would love staying home, and, honestly, it’s kind of boring! And no one ever said that. I thought I’d want to play with her all day, and I don’t. I need my own time. For so many years, I just took care of me. I pretty much did what I wanted, when I wanted. And now I have a husband and this child who needs me all the time. So that is very stressful.” For David, the hardest adjustment was the sleep deprivation. “Going to work early in the morning, a lot of times not getting home until 7 at night. I can see why they use that as a form of torture,” he says. “Whatever you want, just let me have some sleep!” The difficulties that David and Vicki encountered are typical, says Seifert. “And part of what we’ll be doing in this workshop is helping couples understand the normalcy of that experience. Research shows that if people are sleep-deprived for 30 days they show all of the clinical and physiological signs of depression. So they’re sleep-deprived, their roles change, there is suddenly tons more work than ever before. They’re on duty all the time. The stress level is extremely high.” Another unwelcome surprise to most couples is that sex stops, “generally from 4-12 weeks, but if a woman’ s nursing it may last longer and it’s certainly individual,” says Seifert. “And that can be a real shock and a real loss, especially to the husband. Not only is his wife now preoccupied with this other person, she’s tired and cranky—and he doesn’t get anything. He’s lost everything. Couples really need to know how normal that is. And that it will change. First, it’s happening for physiological reasons—this is not intentional. And as the woman’s physiology comes back to what is a normal balance for her, and as the relationship includes affection and caring, that sex will come back into the picture also.” Seifert and Ardell are excited about being among the first to offer the Bringing Baby Home program, which combines lecture, video clips, discussion and exercises for participating couples. “Couples are engaging one another, practicing these skills of friendship, learning conflict resolution. This isn’t therapy,” says Ardell. “It isn’t for very troubled couples, it’s for average couples. I think it’s dynamite stuff.” Ardell says that one of the things that motivated her to take the training at the Relationship Research Institute was the birth last year of her first two grandchildren. Her own marriage broke up years ago when her son and daughter were ages 3 and 7. “This makes me relive what I did wrong. Because of course I could see all the things that he did wrong,” she says with a laugh. Of course, there are other reasons why couples divorce besides the strains of new parenthood, and Ardell believes that she and her husband were so mismatched that nothing could have preserved their marriage. Still, she wishes she knew then what she knows now. “It’s so sad because, as I think about it, I know that if I had had this information I could have tried much more effectively to have a friendship with him,” she says. Teaching couples to work as a team and strengthen their friendship is a big part of the workshop. “The foundation of a sound marital house has to do with really knowing each other, knowing what matters to each other, knowing each other’s values and dreams and building the friendship, building affection,” says Seifert. When a couple can rely on each other for plenty of emotional support, they’re able to ride out the stresses of new parenthood. “If you’re getting enough of what you need, your spouse does something annoying and you couldn’t care less, it’s minor. But if you’re cranky with each other, if your needs aren’t met, if your reserve is low, that thing can cause a Vesuvius reaction.” “To the extent the parents are a team, that they really work together, have a strong friendship, this is going to make a great deal of difference in terms of how the child does,” add Ardell. “And that’s the greatest gift that any couple can give their baby.” David Farina says that watching his daughter grow has been enough to keep him hanging in through the rough spots. “There are things like Sofia’s first smile, her first walk or her first word. And those moments put me back in perspective.” But now he’s starting to get his wife back, too. “Just now, at this stage, I’m starting to realize that there’s another person, my husband, and we have a relationship also,” says Vicki. “Now I have to try and find time to keep our marriage intact. It sounds funny, but I think we need to start dating again. Ultimately, our daughter will live her own life. My husband and I are the ones who will be left behind.” The first two-day Bringing Baby Home program will be held on Saturday, November 5 and 12, 10am-5pm at 555 Northgate Drive in San Rafael (other dates to follow). The cost is $225 per couple. For more information, call Roberta Seifert at 456-1777 or Jan Ardell at 883-4966. To learn more about the program, log on to the Gottman Institute Web site at www.gottman.com/parenting |
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He gets home from work, bone-tired from being up half the night before, and somebody else is nuzzling his wife’s breast. Barely looking up, she says, “Oh, you’re home—there’s a mess in the kitchen, would you clean it up? And I need some things at the store. You’re making dinner tonight, right?” Ah, the joys of new fatherhood. |
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