by Anna Machin
UCLA-based psychologist Mark Cummings has labelled this the fathering vulnerability hypothesis, due to the comparative vulnerability of dads to marital disharmony. He argues that the impact of this vulnerability on the relationship between dad and child is further exacerbated by the tendency of dads who experience emotional difficulty to withdraw from relationships. We know from Chapter Four that, unlike mothers, dads with poor mental health use withdrawal from the family as a mechanism for handling their feelings. This is also the case when experiencing marital discord but, because of their whole-family perspective, withdrawal from mum also includes withdrawal from child. The result of dad’s vulnerability to this discord is that his behaviour towards the child becomes harsher and more punitive, the emotional warmth within the relationship is reduced and, ultimately, withdrawal from the family appears to be the only answer. And the outcome of this withdrawal is the risk of an insecure attachment developing between father and child and the flood of negative consequences for child, family and society that this can unleash.
This damage at the psychological level is mirrored by corresponding damage at the neural level. In their 2007 study of sixty-three children – thirty-two pre-schoolers and thirty-one teenagers – Patricia Pendry and Emma Adam of Northwestern University in the US analysed the link between the quality of the parental relationship, measured by the degree of satisfaction and frequency of conflict, and the cortisol levels of the children. Cortisol is a hormone released in the brain by the adrenal gland in response to stress. In the short term, it is highly advantageous. Its production leads to the increased metabolism of glucose to give energy, heighten memory and lower sensitivity to pain – all vital if you are to overcome the intimidating, stressful or downright dangerous situation in which you find yourself. However, in the long term, continued exposure to stress is detrimental, particularly when an individual is young and their brain is still developing, as flooding the brain with cortisol disrupts the creation of the normal neural pathways. This invariably leads to behavioural and emotional issues in child- and adulthood. In their study, Pendry and Adam found that as the level of conflict increased between the parents, so the children’s cortisol levels increased, and that this effect was particularly significant in the pre-school group of children. This link to age is of particular concern as early childhood is a time when neural connections are being rapidly made – new skills are acquired and new experiences embraced – and, as a consequence, the negative impact of cortisol is at its most powerful. The disruption to normal brain development at this age has lifelong consequences. Further, the link between conflict and stress in their study was independent, meaning that the negative impact of conflict was not being buffered by any other factor. Neither the level of parental warmth and affection nor a lack of mental ill health among the parents appeared to be a protective factor. The impact of marital conflict on the children was real and direct and protection within the family was hard to find.
[Our relationship] has changed in the way you would expect, as it is no longer just the two of us. There is someone else who we put first before either of us, I suppose. In practical terms, it means we have less time for each other. We don’t really have any time on our own any more. I think we both feel it is worth it. I think we walked into it with open eyes. We do have a nice moment once in a while when we’re driving somewhere and Florence falls asleep, and for a moment you can just imagine that it is just the two of us for a change, but those are few and far between.
Richard, dad to Florence (six months)
Ultimately, the state of the parents’ relationship matters because this is the relationship that creates the environment into which the child is born and develops, where he is nurtured and taught. The impact of the quality of the parental relationship on a child’s development is beyond that of either of the relationships he or she has individually with their parents or the natural temperament of the child. It is the model relationship from which all other relationships will grow and against which all other relationships will be measured. It will form the bedrock of his life, will profoundly influence his mental and physical health and will greatly impact upon the success or failure of all his future relationships. In a way, the romantic relationship between parents is the practice ground for the relationship a parent will build with their child. While the relationship you have with your romantic partner is not your first attachment relationship – that would be with whoever raised you as a child – it is the first in which you have played an adult role, and while it is categorically different than that with a child, its components are the same – commitment, intimacy and passion. How well you have managed to build and maintain these three aspects in your marital life gives a good indication as to how well you will build and maintain your relationship with your child. So, if you are raising your child within a couple then the message is get your relationship with your partner right and you are already on your way to having a great relationship with your kid.
How can you achieve this? Pregnancy is about change, and if you have taken the conscious decision to have a child then you have hopefully indicated that you are comfortable with the idea of new experiences and roles. You can harness this willingness to change to instigate a discussion about how your roles and relationship may alter once you become parents. Research by sociologists from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has shown that the parental relationships that best navigate the choppy waters of new parenthood are those in which the parents take the time afforded by pregnancy to discuss and agree a few issues. First, what will your roles be? You and your partner will have established roles within your relationship but the addition of a third family member means that these roles need to be renegotiated. Part of this is explaining to each other what sort of parent you want to be, how you perceive the other person’s role and exploring how your roles will interact productively for you and your child. Secondly, you need to acknowledge that conflicts will arise – it is amazing how important it seems to apportion blame at 3am when discussing who used the last nappy and didn’t restock, to the accompaniment of a screaming baby and an unpleasant smell. By acknowledging that conflicts will occur, you can normalize this and can have an open discussion about how arguments will be resolved constructively rather than destructively – a bit of conflict management. Thirdly, you need to explore what you each expect from being a parent and what you hope your parenting style will be. One of the most difficult moments for any new parent is when their expectations are not matched by the reality – your pledge never to raise your voice can quickly fly out of the window when confronted with no sleep and an obstinate child – but it helps if you have a willing and understanding ear to help you get over this temporary obstacle. It is important that your beliefs regarding the correct way to parent align as closely as possible, so you are singing from the same hymn sheet and don’t feel you are in a constant battle for parenting supremacy. Finally, if you are going to co-parent, decide to do this positively. This means supporting your partner as they parent and, if you do not agree with what you see, discussing this in a constructive and open fashion with the aim of reaching a consensus, rather than being critical or belittling. As Dan acknowledges, having children will drastically shift your focus from ‘we’ to ‘they’, so being as prepared for this as possible is key to a smooth transition for everyone.
[Having children] is a whole other level to a marriage. It adds another deeper, more cemented layer to our marriage and to our relationship. And [you can be sure] in hell isn’t about us any more!
Dan, dad to Daisy (six) and Bill (five)
Apart from the fact that time will be a rare commodity after birth, focusing on your relationship before birth is effective because how you interact with your partner before birth is predictive of the functioning of your new family after birth. Families who function well act as an alliance – they are close, supportive and cooperative. All members are included in activities or discussions, everyone has a distinct role that is respected, members
are able to come together with a shared goal or activity and everyone’s emotions are understood and supported. The Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) is the catchy title of a behavioural task given to parents to allow those of us who study them to assess their joint parenting behaviour and the extent of this alliance within their family. There is a version that has been developed for use before birth, where the role of the baby is taken by a doll, and a version involving the baby for after birth. First developed by Swiss psychotherapist Elisabeth Fivaz-Depeursinge, it is of huge value because it allows us to study the family as a whole unit rather than as a set of couples, meaning that all the key players are included in the scenario, and we can try to untangle the multiple impacts they all have on each other – a much more realistic representation of the family.
Pre-birth, the parents-to-be are asked to picture the very first time they are together with their baby following his or her birth – a magical time that hopefully will get the imagination working. They are given a set of interactions to perform during their scenario to make sure the researchers can assess all the different relationships within the family – parent to child, parent to parent (the couples) and whole family. First, each parent is asked to hold the baby doll and interact with it, then they are asked to interact with the baby as a couple, and then they are told to place the baby to one side, as if sleeping, and interact with each other. Researchers are looking for how well the parents play together, how intuitively they share parenting, how warm they are towards each other and the baby and how they cooperate. It is a bit of a feat of imagination for the parents, but again and again, how they play out this scenario has been shown to be predictive of how the family will function after the birth.
In their 2013 study, Nicolas Favez, France Frascarolo, Chloé Lavanchy Scaiola and Antoinette Corboz-Warnery from the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland explored the value of using this test to predict how well a family would function post-birth. In their study, forty-two families carried out the test during the fifth month of pregnancy and repeated it when their child was three months and eighteen months old. What they found was that, combined with the baby’s temperament, the parents’ interactions before birth with the baby doll were predictive of how well the family functioned after birth. Parents who encouraged and supported their partner’s interactions with the baby doll before birth continued to do so after birth, when the real baby was present. Those who worked to include everyone in the task and showed an intuitive ability to parent continued to show these abilities following the arrival of their baby.
But what was of equal interest was the unique predictive power of the father-to-be’s perspective. Favez and his colleagues had asked parents-to-be to visualize their family life after the birth. To help them get a handle on this, they asked them to focus on two aspects in particular: how close it would be – that’s those shared viewpoints and emotions again – and to what extent team roles would be flexible, allowing everyone a bit of precious leeway to adapt their role to suit them. What they repeatedly found was that how a father visualized his family before birth was predictive of how well it was functioning when their child was three months old. Dad’s imagination is undoubtedly a powerful force, but what is it about his perspective, but not mum’s, that allows it to have such a power? Favez suggested that this phenomenon was down to the difference between the way mums and dads visualize their family and the relationships within it. The father’s desire and ability to envisage the family as a whole unit, rather than the series of couples more favoured by mothers, means that he finds it more comfortable to act out his parenting model at this level. His ability to conceive of his family at the whole family level enables him to have a profound influence on how well it functions. And while families are made up of their constituent relationships, the ability to picture them as a whole organism as well as individuals and couples enables fathers to have the strength to confront the difficulties that will inevitably challenge them as they move through life. In a way, dad is the family specialist.
All this prediction and preparation sounds like hard work and maybe, when there are so many other things to consider while you await the arrival of your child, a bit of overkill. But it is well worth it, because warm and supportive marital environments have an even more powerful positive impact on the relationship between dad and baby. The data backs this up. In their study of forty-four American families, American psychologists Kay Bradford and Alan Hawkins found that where emotional intimacy within a marriage was high, dads reported feeling much more competent in their role. They were more involved, felt more secure in their identity as a dad and were happier. Indeed, one role that could be particularly key is being a model of conflict resolution. Professor of developmental psychology Mark Cummings argues that the way a child reacts to its parents’ behaviour will depend on the nature of their behaviour and their gender. In this case, Cummings argues that while a dad’s conflict behaviour may produce a more negative reaction in his children than that of their mum, his positive conflict behaviours produce a similar but opposite reaction in them – their behaviours are more positive. By modelling how to disagree well – avoiding personalization, focusing on issues, looking for common ground and avoiding overt emotionality – a father both normalizes the occurrence of conflict and shows his children how to arrive at a healthy resolution. So, a father and his child stand to benefit in particular from parents taking the time to ensure their relationship is healthy and strong and conflict is effectively resolved. This means working on it while you await your child’s arrival and continuing to work and monitor its health once baby is there.
Indeed, one of the few interventions aimed at trying to prevent the negative impacts of poor marital quality on families makes it clear that the power lies in prevention rather than post hoc cure. The US-based Family Foundations Intervention is a course of eight lessons, four pre- and four post-birth, which aim to help new parents deal with the strains and stresses of parenthood. Developed by Mark Feinberg and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University’s Prevention Research Center, rather than offering the traditional antenatal class fodder of nappy-change demonstrations, breathing exercises and the essential contents of your hospital bag, this programme instead focuses on giving parents-to-be tools to use when the going gets tough. So, it teaches communication skills, facilitates discussions between partners about their expectations of parenthood and encourages parents to be mutually supportive rather than undermining each other’s roles. And as its developers predicted, its outcomes are not only positive but long-term. In a 2013 study of its efficacy, Feinberg and his colleagues found that of those couples who had undergone the intervention programme, parental stress reduced consistently from the point of birth, and sense of parental competency, mental health and relationship quality continually improved – positive effects that were still being felt at their child’s third birthday. In contrast, the control group – who had simply received leaflets on choosing childcare – showed a consistent downward trend in all areas, despite their results on this range of measures relating to stress, mental health, relationship quality and parental competency being indistinguishable from the intervention group at the start of the programme.
And it wasn’t only the parents who benefited. A warmer, more supportive parenting relationship led to positive developmental benefits for the children of these families. They were more socially competent and better able to manage their emotions – all key skills for children entering their pre-school years. The parents involved in this study were not selected because they were at high risk. The authors recognized that all parents find parenting tough and the skills to navigate the hurdles aren’t necessarily innate – they must be taught to everyone, regardless of background. This programme worked because it was there when the couples needed it. It was there before birth to take the time afforded by pregnancy to encourage discussion and teach skills, and it was there immediately after birth to help couples utilize their learning in those first few weeks
. While this is a rare intervention programme, based in the US, its findings have relevance for us all because they show the power of investing time in nurturing your relationship before your baby is born, in preparing for your new roles and developing a toolbox of skills that you can both use to ease your passage through the inevitably rocky times ahead.
All families have tough times, some very tough. Sometimes the troubles come from within – internal disagreements, difficult behaviour, health issues – and sometimes they are from outside, but families are more likely to weather these storms by remembering that the stronger a family bonds, the more likely they are to ride out the difficulties successfully. This means valuing everyone’s contribution, keeping the lines of communication open, sharing your emotions and acting from a place of empathy. Think of yourself as Team Family. It is also important to have an extended network to rely upon. This does not have to be your family – there are friends and professionals who can help as well as online communities that can be an invaluable source of help, wisdom and emotional support.
Not all children arrive into the world as members of a heterosexual, biological nuclear family. But it is still the case that the majority of children live within a household that contains, at its heart, a cohabiting, parental couple. They may be gay men, adoptive or foster parents or the children may be part of a step- or extended family. For these children, the distinctions don’t necessarily matter because, regardless of the fine details, these parents are the bedrock of their family and the nature of their relationship still has a profound influence on that child’s development and life experience. So, while this chapter has focused on the cohabiting mum and dad experiencing the pregnancy of their biological child, the tools that they need to use, and the preparations they need to make, to ensure their relationship is a healthy one apply across the board. As parents-to-be, we rush around making our plans and enhancing our knowledge about everything from eco-friendly nappies to baby signing; very few of us stop to consider that, if we strip away all the consumer products and all the social and healthcare services, what a family is is its members and, as its founding members, parents are the model from which their family will learn and grow.