Along with shopping for sippy cups and strollers, expectant parents may want to consider another task for their to-do list: honing their marriage skills.

Numerous studies have shown that a couples' satisfaction with their marriage takes a nose dive after the first child is born. Sleepless nights and fights over whose turn it is to change diapers can leach the fun out of a relationship.

Now, a growing number of mental-health professionals are advising couples to undergo pre-baby counseling to hash out marital minefields such as divvying up baby-related responsibilities, money issues and expectations for sex and social lives. A growing number of hospitals, midwives and doulas (birth coaches who provide physical and emotional support) are teaching relationship skills alongside childbirth education classes.

About two-thirds of couples see the quality of their relationship drop within three years of the birth of a child, according to data from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle, a nonprofit organization focused on strengthening families. Conflict increases and, with little time for adult conversation and sex, emotional distance can develop.

Men and women experience the deterioration differently: Mothers' satisfaction in their marriages plummets immediately; for men, the slide is delayed a few months. Hormonal changes, the physical demands of childbirth and nursing, and an abrupt shift from the working world to being at home with an infant may explain that, says Renay Bradley, the director of research and programming at the Relationship Research Institute.

Labels: babies, children, culture, gender, gender differences, Marriage, marriage counseling, men, parenting, women

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Imagine there was a cure for meanness. Well, maybe there is. ...

Roots of Empathy was founded in 1996 by Mary Gordon, an educator who had built Canada’s largest network of school-based parenting and family-literacy centers after having worked with neglectful and abusive parents. Gordon had found many of them to be lacking in empathy for their children. They hadn’t developed the skill because they hadn’t experienced or witnessed it sufficiently themselves. She envisioned Roots as a seriously proactive parent education program – one that would begin when the mothers- and fathers-to-be were in kindergarten.

Since then, Roots has worked with more than 12,600 classes across Canada, and in recent years, the program has expanded to the Isle of Man, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States, where it currently operates in Seattle. Researchers have found that the program increases kindness and acceptance of others and decreases negative aggression.

Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”

I have visited several public schools in low-income neighborhoods in Toronto to observe Roots of Empathy’s work. What I find most fascinating is how the baby actually changes the children’s behavior. Teachers have confirmed my impressions: tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. In a seventh grade class, I found 12-year-olds unabashedly singing nursery rhymes.

Labels: babies, Canada, children, oxytocin

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The popular belief that women's minds turn to mush during pregnancy and birth is completely wrong and their grey matter actually increases, they say.

Research published by the American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers bulked up as they coped with the steep learning curve of dealing with a newborn.

Mothers who gushed the most about their babies showed the greatest growth in key parts of the brain, it was found.

The researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland scanned the brains of 19 women who gave birth to 10 to boys and nine to girls. ...

The findings were published in the journal Behavioural Neuroscience.

The motivation to take care of a baby, and the hallmark traits of motherhood, might be less of an instinctive response and more of a result of active brain building, the neuroscientists Dr Craig Kinsley and Dr Elizabeth Meyer speculated.

Mothers who most enthusiastically rated their babies as special, beautiful, ideal, perfect and so on were significantly more likely to develop bigger brains than the less awestruck mothers in key areas linked to maternal motivation, rewards and the regulation of emotions.

Labels: babies, motherhood

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As many as three million Chinese babies are hidden by their parents every year in order to get around the country's one-child policy, a researcher has discovered.

Since 1978, China's government has limited each couple to one child, carrying out forced abortions and sterilizations, and monitoring women's intra uterine devices to control the population.

For parents violating the policy, the penalties can be harsh. Large fines are levied, houses are often demolished and offenders are sometimes jailed.

In millions of cases, families are prepared to take the risk, according to research by Liang Zhongtang, a demographer and former member of the expert committee of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Mr. Liang has discovered discrepancies in China's census.

"In 1990, the national census recorded 23 million births. But by the 2000 census, there were 26 million 10-year-olds, an increase of three million," he said. ...

Policy-makers have warned that millions of frustrated men, who would be unable to find wives, could wreak havoc on Chinese society, leading to a steep rise in prostitution and violence. Mr. Liang said the imbalance was "definitely not as severe as the statistics suggest."

Labels: babies, China, demographics, girls, men, population control

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...The gravity of this error became clear to me when I came across research that Time magazine published in 2007, citing data from the Guttmacher Institute that showed the most common reasons women have abortions. It immediately struck me that none of the factors on the list—not feeling capable of parenting, not being able to afford a baby, not being in a relationship stable enough to raise a child—were conditions that we encourage women to consider before engaging in sexual activity.

It was then that I could finally articulate the source of the anger I’d felt all those years. In every society, there are two critical lists: acceptable conditions for having a baby, and acceptable conditions for having sex. From time immemorial, the one thing that almost every society had in common was that their two lists matched up. It was only with the widespread acceptance of contraception in the middle of the 20th century, creating an upheaval in the public psyche in which sex and babies no longer went hand-in-hand, that the two lists began to diverge. And now, in 21st-century America, they look something like this:

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have sex:

* -If you’re in a stable relationship
* -If you feel emotionally ready
* -If you’re free of sexually transmitted diseases
* -If you have access to contraception

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have a baby:

* -If you can afford it
* -If you’ve finished your education
* -If you feel emotionally ready to parent a child
* -If your partner would make a good parent
* -If you’re ready for all the lifestyle changes that would be involved with parenthood

As long as those two lists do not match, we will live in a culture where abortion is common and where women are at war with their own bodies.

Labels: abortion, babies, Catholic Church, children, contraception, culture, heterosexual couples, premarital sex, religion

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What sound is most likely to wake a sleeping woman? An infant’s wail — and that is true whether or not she has children of her own.

What sound is most likely to wake a sleeping man? A car alarm going off, followed by the howling of the wind (not a baby) and the buzzing of a fly. A crying baby is not even on the list of the 10 most sleep-disturbing sounds for men.

Those are the results of research by the British company Mindlab, which combines neuroscience and marketing (and which conducted this particular study at the behest of a “nighttime flu tablet” manufacturer). Volunteers in a sleep lab were attached to an electroencephalography machine, and a variety of recorded noises were played. The EEG recorded disturbances in brain activity in response to each.

Labels: babies, gender differences, men, women

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This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births. By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and 5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. …

Most of the state and private programs responding to nonmarital births over the last 40 years have poured their energies into “taking the baby out” of the sexual encounter via birth control. Abstinence programs, which are less common, try to teach young people how to avoid nonmarital sexual involvement. “Big-picture” efforts have aimed to boost young people’s educational and job attainments, in order to steer them toward a different future. While occasionally, policy experts have referenced the need to help young people think more healthfully about the meaning of their lives, including about the importance of their heterosexual relationships, no extensive efforts have ever been directed to addressing the intertwined issues I have surfaced above. For brevity’s sake, I would say these issues might be identified as: the moral weight of heterosexual relations; the public nature of heterosexual relations; the intrinsically parental orientation of heterosexual relations, and the crisis of fatherhood.

Also for brevity’s sake, as well as to get at the conceptual nub of my proposals, I would suggest that any response to these issues must “put the baby back into sex.” By this I mean that men and women need to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of heterosexual relations’ orientation to the procreation of children – helpless creatures who require decades of intensive labor, a lifetime of interaction, and who apparently come into the world with an inbuilt desire to remain connected to both their father and their mother. No matter the heights and depths of couples’ romantic aspirations and experiences, these can never be divorced from the crucial reality that heterosexual relations are procreative. The law has always known this. Most churches did or still do. And now couples must acknowledge it too, with help from every possible governmental, religious and other social institution. Once the baby is re-introduced into couples’ sexual consciousness, they can better understand that nonmarital sex has its own intrinsically public significance; the door is also opened for women and men to understand the “giftedness” of the other precisely in connection with procreation. They might further be open to the realization that men and women were literally “meant for each other,” meant for “communion,” and that what they can do together is more than the sum of its parts. This is a fundamental approach to helping men and women internalize a view of one another that is more respectful, more elevated, than what obtains today, especially among the most disadvantaged. Motherhood and fatherhood have not lost their fan base in these communities; were each sex to be helped to see the other, beginning in adolescence, as potential mothers and fathers, leaders of their children, of the next generation, and of their community, this might help to transcend current gender mistrustful stereotypes. Tantalizing indications of the possible beneficial effects upon young men and women of learning about their mutual procreative capabilities have come from “fertility awareness” programs like TeenStar.[6]

Who might act on the goal of “putting the baby back into sex”? And how might they proceed? The most likely actors are of course families themselves, churches and governments.

Labels: babies, culture, Helen Alvare, heterosexual couples, out-of-wedlock births, pregnancy, premarital sex

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In recent years, American conservatism has morphed from a smoke-filled room of martini-swilling adults into nothing short of a nursery. The Right, once known for its emphasis on individual accomplishment and personal responsibility, once a haven for those keen on adults making their own decisions, has linked arms with the stroller moms of Park Slope and put babies at the center of its universe.

The most sensational recent case of this may have been Sarah Palin’s “Seventh Heaven”-esque family, which pitted those inspired by such fruitfulness against those repulsed by it. But even before the Palin brood hit the national scene, conservative intellectuals far from Wasilla had been celebrating babies at all costs. City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the fight against teen pregnancy is based on a middle-class bias that misapprehends “adolescent baby lust.” Traditionally, conservatives discussing teen birthrates do not accept any lust as worth reckoning with, so this makes for a change. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s recent book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008), proposes family-friendly policies, a two-step approach intended first to gain the support of parents with many children (a traditionalist-leaning bloc), and, in turn, to see those same policies encourage all Americans to have larger families, and thus to shift, for the sake of the children, towards social conservatism.

What ties these authors together is the belief that social ills come not from unwanted pregnancy, but from the fact that we think a pregnancy could possibly be undesirable. In other words, for Hymowitz, the problem is not that very young women want children, but that our society frowns on early marriage. For Douthat and Salam, the concern is not that those who can’t afford to have babies have them anyway, but that the state fails to make childrearing affordable. These writers, along with columnist David Brooks, do not merely want to correct what they see as a stigma surrounding procreation. The purpose of the movement is to encourage Americans—even arugula-eating sophisticates—to have more babies.

Labels: babies, demographics, fertility, natalism, tax policy

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