The Transition to Parenthood and the Reasons “Momma Ain't Happy”

Abstract

As the song goes, If ain't ain't nobody happy, and there are probably some very complex reasons this may be the case across the transition to parenthood. Dew and Wilcox (201 1) explored what makes Momma happy by studying competing explanations for the link between the transition to parenthood and mothers' declines in marital satisfaction. Specifically, the authors examined how changes in some key constructs that have been related to marital satisfaction in past research (e.g., division of labor, time spent with spouse, work hours) predict change in marital satisfaction for women who become new mothers. Our aim in this commentary is to address how these findings fit into our broader understanding of the transition to parenthood and to highlight the importance of considering social context and social time as they contribute to different meanings of family roles and relationships and, in turn, differentially affect family processes. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) as our conceptual lens, we examine the microlevel proximal processes that occur for couples transitioning to parenthood, who are the focus of Dew and Wilcox's research, with an eye toward the broader cultural influences that may shape these processes in distinct ways. PATTERNS OF CHANGE ACROSS THE TRANSITION TO PARENTHOOD: LLFE IS NOT LINEAR A unique aspect of Dew and Wilcox's (2011) study was the focus on change in both predictor and outcome variables. This focus on a change model is a significant strength because it directly addresses how decreases or increases in certain phenomena explain change in marital satisfaction, as opposed to relative levels of constructs such as the division of labor or shared time. This approach challenges us to look beyond what women are doing relative to one another and instead assumes that within-person change is the critical variable predicting marital happiness. Although we applaud this strategy, it still leaves us with the alternative problem of wondering whether actual levels of division of labor or shared couple time play important roles in understanding the effects of change. For example, in our study on change in leisure patterns across the transition to parenthood (Claxton & Perry- Jenkins, 2008), we found that relative levels of leisure that couples shared before having a baby were related to how couples changed over time with respect to shared leisure. We found that couples with high shared leisure before the birth experienced the greatest declines in shared leisure over the first year of parenthood. Yet those declines still did not bring them down to the levels of shared leisure at any time point across the first year in the group of parents who started low on leisure. Moreover, the starting levels of couples' shared leisure time before the birth predicted better marital quality, with higher initial levels of leisure predicting more love and less conflict 1 year out. Had we examined only change in leisure in isolation from the actual amount of time involved, we would have concluded that a decline in shared leisure time was associated with positive marital outcomes. These results suggest that level and change play important and unique roles in predicting marital outcomes; neither can be understood in isolation. Another issue that arises when considering change in marital satisfaction is that not all change is linear. For example, in some of our findings on change in mental health across the first year of parenthood, mothers' depressive symptoms were relatively high right before the birth, declined significantly after the birth, but then began to rise again when mothers returned to paid work (Perry- Jenkins, Goldberg, Pierce, & Sayer, 2007). These findings are informative for two reasons. First, had we looked only at two time points, the results would have been very different. For example, if we had examined change in prenatal depressive symptoms (Time 1) to symptoms 2-3 months after birth (Time 3), mothers would have looked completely recovered. …