Infant care division while transitioning to parenthood and fathers' relationship satisfaction: A longitudinal mixed-methods study

• In Event: Importance of multilevel perinatal research for advancing child development and family health equity

Abstract

The transition to parenthood occasions a unique developmental period in adulthood. It is a particularly sensitive period for the relationship between parents, who must navigate their changing roles and negotiate how they will divide new infant care demands. Though prior research has demonstrated an association between couples’ division of labor on their relationship functioning (Lawrence et al., 2010), few studies have investigated how couples talk about the division of childcare, which may offer a window into couples’ adjustment to parenthood. For instance, couples who engage in better communal coping, viewing problems as “ours” rather than “yours” or “mine” (Rentscher et al., 2013), may exhibit more “we”-ness—the ratio of plural (we/us) to singular (I/me) first-person pronouns. Furthermore, although efforts to encourage fathers to become more involved in childcare assume that egalitarianism is beneficial for mothers, less is known about how the division of infant care might affect fathers. The current study extends the existing literature on division of infant care and relationship satisfaction in a longitudinal mixed-methods design, specifically highlighting fathers’ experiences and couples’ communication patterns. Consistent with previous literature, we hypothesized that 1) higher postpartum egalitarianism would improve relationship satisfaction and that 2) greater “we”-ness when discussing infant care would be associated with both prenatal and postpartum relationship satisfaction.
The current study reports on 100 heterosexual, cohabitating couples expecting their first child. Couples participated in two laboratory visits: one in mid-to-late pregnancy and one at six months postpartum. At both visits, couples participated in a 5-minute discussion using an adapted version of the Who Does What (WDW) scale (Cowan & Cowan, 1988), a self-report questionnaire assessing the division of tasks such as feeding and playing with the infant. Couples completed the scale together and discussed their answers, and these discussions were recorded and transcribed. Transcripts were processed through LIWC (Pennebaker et al., 2007), a text analysis program that measures the frequency of particular words (e.g., pronouns). Couples also completed the Marital Adjustment Test (Locke & Wallace, 1959) at both visits to measure relationship satisfaction. We used multilevel modeling with individuals nested within couples to test both hypotheses.
We found that, as hypothesized, fathers experienced higher relationship satisfaction when infant care was divided more equally (𝛽 = 10.56, p = .010; Figure 1). In contrast, mothers’ relationship satisfaction was not related to the division of infant care (𝛽 = 3.58, p = .380). “We”-ness during prenatal infant care discussions was positively associated with both parents’ prenatal relationship satisfaction (𝛽 = 41.12, p < .001) and with postpartum relationship satisfaction for fathers (𝛽 = 37.23, p = .010; Figure 2) but not for mothers (𝛽 = 12.47, p = .360).
Taken together, these findings suggest that when couples discuss infant care using language that reflects more joint engagement, and when new fathers participate more in actual infant care after their baby’s birth, fathers report more satisfaction in their relationships. These findings uncover important targets for clinical and policy interventions designed to encourage fathers’ engagement in infant care.

Authors

• Elizabeth C Aviv, University of Southern California
  Presenting Author

• Matthew Pilgrim, University of Southern California

• Genesis D. Flores, University of Southern California

• Darby E. Saxbe, University of Southern California