need to know about this before you bring home your bundle of joy.
When I lecture on the science of young brains, the dads (it’s almost always the dads) demand to know how to get their kids into Harvard. The question invariably angers me. I bellow, “You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? I’ll tell you what the data say! Go home and love your wife!” This chapter is about that retort: why marital hostility happens, how it alters a baby’s developing brain, and how you can counteract the hostility and minimize its effects.
Most marriages suffer
Most couples don’t imagine such marital turbulence when they get pregnant. Babies, after all, are supposed to bring endless, unremitting joy. That’s the idealistic view many of us have, especially if our parents grew up in the late 1950s—an era steeped in a traditional view of marriages and families. TV programs like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie & Harriet depicted working fathers as all-wise; stay-at-home mothers as all-nurturing; children as surprisingly obedient and, when not, creating small but manageable crises easily resolvable in 23 minutes. The protagonists were mostly middle class, mostly white, and, it turns out, mostly wrong.
A bracingly cold glass of water was thrown on this Eisenhoweresque perception by famed sociologist E. E. LeMasters. Rather than babies bringing nirvana to marriages, he showed the opposite. In 1957, he published a paper showing that 83 percent of married couples experienced more turbulence in their relationships with the birth of a baby—some couples severely so. Not surprisingly, these findings were met with a great deal of skepticism.
Time, and further research, proved to be on the side of LeMasters. Armed with better methodologies and longer study periods, studies consistently show that having a baby stresses most couples’ marriages. LeMasters, it turns out, was on to something.
By the late 1980s and ’90s, investigations in 10 industrialized countries, including the United States, demonstrated that marital satisfaction for most men and women dropped after they had their first child—and continued to fall over the next 15 years. Things didn’t improve for most couples until the kids left home.
We now know that this long-term erosion is a regular experience of married life, starting in the transition to parenthood. Marital quality, which peaks in the last trimester of a first pregnancy, decreases anywhere from 40 percent to 67 percent in the infant’s first year. More recent studies, asking different questions, put the figure closer to 90 percent. During those 12 months, scores on hostility indices—measures of marital conflict—skyrocket. The risk for clinical depression, for both fathers and mothers, goes up. Indeed, one-third to one-half of new parents display as much marital distress as troubled couples already in therapy trying to save their relationship. The dissatisfaction usually starts with the mother, then migrates to the father. To quote an excerpt from a recent research paper published in the Journal of Family Psychology: “In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition.”
A British divorce lawyer recalled one illustrative case. Emma’s husband was obsessed with soccer, particularly the Manchester United team, also called the Reds. This condition was made worse with the introduction of a child. Emma actually cited it as grounds for the divorce. Her husband responded, “I have to admit that nine times out of 10, I would rather watch the Reds than have sex, but that’s no disrespect to Emma.”
Given all of these findings, it seems any couple contemplating children should undergo a psychiatric evaluation, then choose voluntary sterilization. What are we going to do?
Seeds of hope
There is hope. We know four of the most important sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression. We will examine each. Couples who make themselves aware of these can become vigilant about their behavior, and they tend to do better. We also know that not every marriage follows this depressing course of events.
Couples going into pregnancy with strong marital bonds withstand the gale forces of baby’s first year better than those who don’t. Those who carefully plan for their children prior to pregnancy do, too. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of marital bliss appears to be the agreement to have kids in the first place. One large study examined couples where both parties wanted kids versus couples where only one did. If both partners wanted the child, very few divorced, and marital happiness either stayed the same or increased in the baby’s first year of life. All conflicted couples where one partner had caved (usually the man) were either separated or divorced by the time the child was 5.
The data behind this come from the Journal of Family Psychology study mentioned previously. The full quote gives much more hope: “In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition—but planning status and pre-pregnancy marital satisfaction generally protect marriages from these declines.”
Marriages do not suffer evenly in the transition to parenthood; some not at all. But as LeMasters and later researchers showed, that is not the majority experience. The social consequences were great enough to warrant investigation. Researchers began to ask: What do couples fight about when a baby comes home? And what does that conflict do to the baby?
Babies seek safety above all
What researchers found is that the emotional ecology into which a baby is born can profoundly influence how his or her nervous system develops. To understand this interaction, we have to address the almost unbelievable sensitivity a baby has to the environment in which he or she is being raised. It is a sensitivity with strong evolutionary roots.
Hints of this vulnerability first came from the lab of Harry Harlow, who was observing monkey baby behavior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. That his findings apply to human infants illustrates how deep these evolutionary roots can go. Harlow looked like virtually every other scientist of the 1950s, complete with nerdy, Frisbee-sized glasses. By his own admission, he was preoccupied with “love,” though he had a strange way of showing it—both professionally and personally. He married his first wife, who had been his student, divorced her after two children, married a psychologist, watched her die of cancer, and then, in his final years, remarried his former student.
Harlow also designed a series of groundbreaking experiments with rhesus monkeys that was so brutal, some scholars credit Harlow for inadvertently creating the animal rights movement. These experiments involved isolation chambers and metallic surrogate mothers. Harlow himself would use colorful language to describe his research, calling his chambers “pits of despair” and his surrogate mothers “iron maidens.” But he almost single-handedly uncovered the idea of infant emotional attachment. This in turn laid the groundwork for understanding how parental stress influences a baby’s behaviors.
Harlow’s classic attachment experiments involved two of these iron maidens—doll-like structures serving as maternal stand-ins. One was made of harsh wire, the other of soft terry cloth. He took newly born rhesus monkeys, removed them from their biological mothers, and placed them into cages containing both dolls. There are many variations on this experiment, but the initial finding was striking. The cold wire doll provided food, delivered from an attached bottle. The soft terry-cloth doll did not. Nonetheless, the animals greatly preferred the cloth mom. The baby would feed from the wire mom, but do so while clinging tightly to the cloth mom. If the babies were placed in an unfamiliar room, they clung tightly to the cloth surrogate until they felt secure enough to explore the cage on their own. If placed in that same room without the cloth mother, the animals froze in terror, then went crying and screaming, running from one object to another, seemingly looking for their lost mother.
The preference was the same no matter how many times the experiment was done or in what variation. These experiments are heartbreaking to watch—I’ve seen old films of this stuff—and the conclusions are unforgettable. It wasn’t the presence of food that telegraphed reassurance to these little ones, a behavioral idea prevalent at the time. It was the presence or absence of a safe harbor.
Human babies, complex as they are, are looking for the same thing.
Monkey