To Have and to Hold

by Molly Millwood, PhD

  16. V. E. Whiffen, “Looking Outward Together: Adult Attachment and Childbearing Depression,” in Attachment Processes in Couple and Family Therapy, eds. S. M. Johnson and V. E. Whiffen (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 321–41. See also M. W. O’Hara and A. M. Swain, “Rates and Risk of Postpartum Depression: A Meta-Analysis,” International Review of Psychiatry 8, no. 1 (1996): 37–54.

  17. V. E. Whiffen, “Is Postpartum Depression a Distinct Diagnosis?” Clinical Psychology Review 12, no. 5 (1992): 485–508. Also see Cox et al., “Marital Perceptions and Interactions.”

  18. W. S. Rholes et al., “Attachment Orientations and Depression: A Longitudinal Study of New Parents,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100 (2011): 567–86; S. Misri, X. Kostaras, D. Fox, and D. Kostaras, “The Impact of Partner Support in the Treatment of Postpartum Depression,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 45 (2000): 554–58.

  3: The Full Catastrophe

  1. Steinberg, Finding Your Inner Mama, 20.

  2. It was in the work of Marsha Linehan, PhD, that I first encountered the therapeutic potential of helping clients distinguish between pain and suffering. See, for instance, Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Borderline Personality (New York: Guilford Press, 1993).

  3. Steinberg, Finding Your Inner Mama.

  4. A. Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

  5. J. Berman, Superbaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Baby a Head Start in the First 3 Years (New York: Sterling Publishers, 2011). The title of the book seems to imply that parenting is a competition, and that it is not enough to do our best to raise a healthy human child; we must strive for a superhero child instead, and the first three years of that child’s life are make-or-break.

  4: Mom, Interrupted

  1. M. A. Killingsworth and D. T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, no. 6006 (2010): 932.

  2. You can use the same app used in the research study to find out about your own mind-wandering propensities by going to trackyourhappiness.org.

  3. For a very recent and comprehensive review of the use of mindfulness in psychotherapy for the treatment of depression, anxiety, and other psychological disorders, see S. B. Goldberg et al., “Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Psychiatric Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Clinical Psychology Review 59 (2018): 52–60. For a comprehensive review of the effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on physical health and psychosomatic problems, see Grossman et al., “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Health Benefits,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 57, no. 1 (2004): 35–43.

  4. D. de Marneffe, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004).

  5. H. Woolhouse, D. Gartland, F. Mensah, and S. J. Brown, “Maternal Depression from Early Pregnancy to 4 Years Postpartum in a Prospective Pregnancy Cohort Study: Implications for Primary Health Care,” International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology 122, no. 3 (2014): 312–21.

  5: It Takes a Village to Raise a Mother

  1. A useful comparative analysis of the costs and benefits, for both mothers and babies, of vaginal versus cesarean births is K. D. Gregory, S. Jackson, L. Korst, and M. Fridman, “Caesarean Versus Vaginal Delivery: Whose Risks? Whose Benefits?” American Journal of Perinatology 29 (2012): 7–18.

  2. M. Millwood, Cesarean Birth as a Risk Factor for Postpartum Relationship Distress. Poster presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Division 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women), San Diego, CA, 2010. Women were assessed on various measures of well-being at approximately 4 to 6 months postpartum, and scores on the measure of relationship satisfaction were significantly lower in women who had C-sections.

  3. Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 9.

  4. According to the CDC, 32 percent of total births in the US are C-section (2015 data).

  5. “Why Are America’s Postpartum Practices So Rough on New Mothers?” Daily Beast, August 2013. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-are-americas-postpartum-practices-so-rough-on-new-mothers.

  6. Carmen Knudson-Martin and Anne Rankin Mahoney, Couples, Gender, and Power: Creating Change in Intimate Relationships (New York: Springer Publishing, 2009), 24.

  7. L. Nepomnyaschy and J. Waldfogel, “Paternity Leave and Fathers’ Involvement with Their Young Children,” Community, Work & Family 10, no. 4 (2007): 427–53.

  8. One major longitudinal study found that the drop in earnings over the life of their careers was 15.5 percent for men who took time off for family reasons, compared to 11.2 percent when the time off was for personal illness, injury, or other reasons not tethered to their identities as fathers (S. Coltrane, E. C. Miller, T. DeHaan, and L. Stewart, “Fathers and the Flexibility Stigma,” Journal of Social Issues 69, no. [2013]: 279–302). Other studies (e.g., J. A. Vandello, V. E. Hettinger, J. K. Bosson, and J. Siddiqi, “When Equal Isn’t Really Equal: The Masculine Dilemma of Seeking Work Flexibility,” Journal of Social Issues 69, no. 2 [2013]: 303–21) find that lower performance evaluations, smaller raises, and risk of demotions and layoffs are all associated with taking paternity leave.

  9. As noted in C. Cain Miller, “Paternity Leave: The Rewards and the Remaining Stigma,” New York Times, November 2014.

  10. Nepomnyaschy and Waldfogel, “Paternity Leave and Fathers’ Involvement.”

  11. E. Abraham, T. Hendler, I. Shapira-Lichter, Y. Kanat-Maymon, O. Zagoory-Sharon, and R. Feldman, “Father’s Brain Is Sensitive to Childcare Experiences,” PNAS 111, no. 27 (2014): 9792–97.

  12. L. Mundy, “Daddy Track: The Case for Paternity Leave,” The Atlantic, January/February 2014.

  13. S. Pinker, The Village Effect (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2014), 16.

  14. R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 331.

  15. Pinker, The Village Effect, 37–8.

  16. J. K. Monin and M. S. Clark, “Why Do Men Benefit More from Marriage Than Do Women? Thinking More Broadly About Interpersonal Processes That Occur Within and Outside of Marriage,” Sex Roles 65 (2011): 320–26. See also M. S. Clark and J. K. Monin, “Giving and Receiving Communal Responsiveness as Love,” in The New Psychology of Love, eds. R. J. Sternberg and K. Weis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 200–24.

  17. Knudson-Martin and Mahoney, Couples, Gender, and Power.

  18. Women have twice the lifetime rates of major depressive disorder, and most anxiety disorders, as men. Subclinical depressive symptoms (i.e., symptoms of depression that do not meet full diagnostic criteria) are also considerably higher in women. See M. Altemus, N. Sarvaiya, and C. N. Epperson, “Sex Differences in Anxiety and Depression: Clinical Perspectives,” Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 35, no. 3 (2014): 320–30.

  19. D. M. Buss, “The Evolution of Happiness,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 15–23.

  20. B. Fox, “The Formative Years: How Parenthood Creates Gender,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 38, no. 4 (2001): 373–90 (quote from p. 388).

  6: The Great Divide

  1. Cox et al., “Marital Perceptions and Interactions Across the Transition to Parenthood,” 611-25. Also see C. E. Bird, “Gender Differences in the Social and Economic Burdens of Parenting and Psychological Distress,” Journal of Marriage and Family 59 (1997): 809–32; and K. Korabik, “The Intersection of Gender and Work-Family Guilt,” in Gender and the Work-Family Experience, ed. M. J. Mills (Switzerland: Springer International, 2015), 141–57.

  2. C. P. Cowan and P. Cowan, When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

  3. G. Cappuccini and R. Cochrane, “Life with the First Baby: Women’s Satisfaction with the Division of Roles,” Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 18, no. 3 (2000): 189–203.

  4. R. Alexander et al., “Attachment Style and Coping Resources as Predictors of Coping Strategies in the Transition
to Parenthood,” Personal Relationships 8 (2001): 137–52. Also see S. M. Pancer et al., “Thinking Ahead: Complexity of Expectations and the Transition to Parenthood,” Journal of Personality 68 (2000): 253–80.

  5. R. Levy-Shiff, “Individual and Contextual Correlates of Marital Change across the Transition to Parenthood,” Developmental Psychology 30 (1994): 591–601.

  6. S. R. Thorp et al., “Postpartum Partner Support, Demand-Withdraw Communication, and Maternal Stress,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 28 (2004): 362–69. See also Whiffen, “Looking Outward Together.”

  7. Knauth, “Predictors of Parental Sense of Competence,” 496–509.

  8. 2010 American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  9. Borelli et al., “Gender Differences in Work-Family Guilt in Parents of Young Children,” Sex Roles 76, no. 5–6 (2017): 356–68.

  10. M. Perry-Jenkins and A. Claxton, “The Transition to Parenthood and the Reasons ‘Momma Ain’t Happy,’” Journal of Marriage and Family 73, no. 1 (2011): 23–28.

  11. Claxton and Perry-Jenkins, “No Fun Anymore: Leisure and Marital Quality across the Transition to Parenthood,” Journal of Marriage and Family 70, no. 1 (2008): 28–43.

  12. Milkie et al., “Gendered Division of Childrearing: Ideals, Realities, and the Relationship to Parental Well-Being,” Sex Roles 47, no. 1–2 (2002): 21–38.

  13. Cowan and Cowan, When Partners Become Parents, 83.

  14. Fox, “The Formative Years,” 373–90.

  15. S. L. Katz-Wise, H. A. Priess, and J. S. Hyde, “Gender-Role Attitudes and Behavior across the Transition to Parenthood,” Developmental Psychology 46, no. 1 (2010): 18–28.

  16. From Lisa Belkin, “Calling Mr. Mom? Why Women Won’t Have It All Until Men Do, Too,” New York Times, October 24, 2010.

  17. Hook, “Care in Context: Men’s Unpaid Work in 20 Countries, 1965–2003,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 4 (2006): 639–60. Also see the 2010 American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  18. 2010 American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  19. M. A. Milkie, K. M. Nomaguchi, and K. E. Denny, “Does the Amount of Time Mothers Spend with Children or Adolescents Matter?” Journal of Marriage and Family 77, no. 2 (2015): 355–72.

  20. Fox, “The Formative Years,” quote from p. 382.

  21. Knudson-Martin and Mahoney, Couples, Gender, and Power.

  22. M. J. Mattingly and L. C. Sayer, “Under Pressure: Gender Differences in the Relationship between Free Time and Feeling Rushed,” Journal of Marriage and Family 68, no. 1 (2006): 205–21.

  23. S. M. Bianchi and M. J. Mattingly, “Time, Work, and Family in the United States,” Advances in Life Course Research 8 (2003): 95–118.

  24. M. McMahon, Engendering Motherhood: Identity and Self-Transformation in Women’s Lives (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995), 238. McMahon references La Rossa and La Rossa (1981) for the term “glossing” and Hochschild (1989) for the term “family myths.”

  25. McMahon, Engendering Motherhood, 269.

  26. Ibid.

  27. 2010 American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  28. McMahon, Engendering Motherhood, 244.

  7: Couples Adrift

  1. Gottman and Notarius, “Marital Research in the 20th Century,” 159–97.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Cox et al., “Marital Perceptions and Interactions.”

  4. O. Erel and B. Burman, “Interrelatedness of Marital Relations and Parent-Child Relations: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin 118, no. 1 (1995): 108–32. See also P. Cowan and C. P. Cowan, “New Families: Modern Couples as New Pioneers,” in All Our Families: New Policies for a New Century, eds. M. A. Mason, A. Skolnick, and S. Sugarman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 169–92.

  5. P. Cowan et al., “Prebirth to Preschool Family Factors in Children’s Adaptation to Kindergarten,” in Exploring Family Relationships with Other Social Contexts, eds. R. D. Parke and S. G. Kellam (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994), 75–114.

  6. D. Meyer, B. Robinson, A. Cohn, L. Gildenblatt, and S. Barkley, “The Possible Trajectory of Relationship Satisfaction across the Longevity of a Romantic Partnership,” Family Journal 24, no. 4 (2016): 344–50. Also see Twenge et al., “Parenthood and Marital Satisfaction.”

  7. M. Marks, A. Wieck, S. Checkley, and C. Kumar, “How Does Marriage Protect Women with Histories of Affective Disorder from Post-Partum Relapse?” British Journal of Medical Psychology 69, no. 4 (1996): 329–42.

  8. J. Viorst, Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 186.

  9. In the interest of preserving the original spirit of John Bowlby’s pioneering work on attachment, some of the wording of these key principles of attachment theory (e.g., “attachment is an innate motivating force”) has been borrowed from Dr. Susan Johnson’s translation of Bowlby’s theoretical pillars in her book The Practice of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples: Creating Connection (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003).

  10. These are the oft-quoted famous words of John Bowlby, the originator of attachment theory.

  11. This language is also borrowed from Johnson; it is language she uses in various interviews and in The Practice of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples.

  12. A. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Organization of Self (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994). As cited by Johnson in The Practice of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, 26.

  13. Johnson, The Practice of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, 25–26.

  14. Researchers have found that when couples are happy in the relationship, sitting next to each other with their thighs touching causes them to secrete oxytocin—the hormone of trust and bonding—and reduces blood pressure in women. The same is not true for unhappily married couples (K. M. Grewen, S. S. Girdler, J. Amico, and K. C. Light, “Effects of Partner Support on Resting Oxytocin, Cortisol, Norepinephrine, and Blood Pressure Before and After Warm Partner Contact,” Psychosomatic Medicine 67 [2005]: 531–38). Similarly, as Dr. John Gottman discusses in his book The Science of Trust (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), the level of trust couples have determines their physiological responses to looking in each other’s eyes. In Gottman’s laboratory, couples sit facing each other and are first asked to close their eyes and relax for five minutes. They are then instructed to open their eyes and look at their partners. In couples with high levels of trust, blood velocity (a physiological index similar to blood pressure) remains the same or even decreases upon eye contact, but for those with lower levels of trust, blood velocity increases. It’s as if these unhappy couples feel they are looking into the eyes of an enemy, or at least someone who is a predictable source of stress.

  15. Johnson, The Practice of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, 26–27.

  8: In the Weeds

  1. Gottman, The Science of Trust, 193.

  2. De Marneffe, Maternal Desire, 9.

  3. Mirror neurons are considered to be one of the major discoveries of modern neuroscience, originally identified during a research study with monkeys whose brain activity was being monitored as they watched the humans who were studying them. It became apparent that the monkeys’ brain cells were firing the way they would if they were doing what the humans were doing (see G. Rizzolatti and L. Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 [2004]: 169–92). But even without brain electrodes or MRIs, there is plenty of fascinating evidence of mirror neurons visible to the naked eye. For instance, hours-old infants will imitate the facial expressions of adults (A. N. Meltzoff and M. K. Moore, “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures,” Child Development 54, no. 3 [1983]: 702–9), and any close examination of two people engaged in intimate dialogue—like a therapist and client—reveals incredible synchrony in their body language and vocal cadence.

  4. Whiffen, “Looking Outward Together,” 321–41.

  5. In a
fascinating twist to one research study, it was found that what distinguished mothers who engaged in intensive mothering despite their partners’ disapproval was their position of relative financial power within the relationship. These women earned more money than their partners. See Fox, “The Formative Years.”

  9: Live-In Buddhas

  1. H. Lerner, “Vulnerability and Other Lessons,” in Finding Your Inner Mama, 24.

  2. S. Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 107.

  3. J. Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), 93.

  4. A comprehensive review of the research literature on gender differences and gender similarities in not only guilt but also shame, embarrassment, and pride can be found in N. M. Else-Quest, A. Higgins, C. Allison, and L. C. Morton, “Gender Differences in Self-Conscious Emotional Experience: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 138, no. 5 (2012): 947–81. See also British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen’s book The Essential Difference: Men, Women, and the Extreme Male Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).