Becoming Parents

This book studies the transition to parenthood and its effects on individual well-being and couple relationships.

Moving into parenthood is typically a time of great joy and excitement, but it also brings fatigue, stress, and conflict. From the authors of the best-selling Fighting for Your Marriage and A Lasting Promise, this unique and innovative guide offers indispensable advice on how to protect and preserve your marriage and take care of yourselves as you become parents. Based on scientific research and containing real-life examples, Becoming Parents challenges you to seize this opportunity to really thrive in your relationship and in parenting together as a team. "If you're having a baby, buy this book! It will give your baby the most important gift of all-parents who know how to keep their relationship happy, satisfying, and stable-the kind of relationship your baby can count on and learn from." --Diane Sollee, director, Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education

Parenting without anxiety, guilt, or feeling overwhelmed Happy Parents Happy Kids is the ultimate no-guilt guide to boosting your enjoyment of parenting while at the same time maximizing the health and happiness of your entire family. You can find ways to take care of yourself while you’re busy raising a family—just as you can choose to use parenting strategies that work for you and your kids. This practical and encouraging book will help you · Discover what less-stressed-out parents know about minimizing the fallout from work-life imbalance (to say nothing of all the other things our generation of parents can’t help but feel anxious about) · Tackle the challenges of distracted parenting(in a way that helps kids to develop healthy relationships with technology) · Balance your hopes and dreams for your children with the demands of the rest of your life · Manage screen time for your whole family with simple and effective strategies · Learn mindfulness strategies that can make parenting easier and can be effortlessly worked into your daily life · Live healthier (including a crash course on the science of habit change) · Become a calmer and more confident parent so that you can stop feeling bad and raise astonishingly great kids The takeaway message is clear, powerful, and potentially life-changing. You can lose the guilt, embrace the joy, and thrive alongside your kids.

Based on a landmark, internationally-known ten year study of men and women having a first child, this book describes how couples can make small changes to avoid the toll that this happy transition can take on marriage.

Christopher Clulow examines the connections between partnership and parenthood, focusing on the parents as partners, as well as parents, and on the child. He examines how children change the relationship between their parents, and what relevance the couple's relationship has for healthy child development. Becoming parents is arguable the most challenging of life changes faced by couples. There are no clear guidelines about what is involved: the routes are many and the choices range broadly. Today, diverse lifestyles, new technologies, and changing socioeconomic circumstances have combined with other factors to further complicate the demands of parenting. Against this backdrop, couples play out dramas constructed from their own histories and continuing lives together. The child is born into this context of subtle interplay between each parent's, and the couple's inner and outer experiences. This book provides a fascinating and authoritative look at the emotional process of becoming a family.

There are many books that deal with pregnancy and maternity, and a large number of magazines and articles on paediatric nursing that examine these subjects from different points of view. This volume is not a manual and is not intended to explain to future parents what to do and what to avoid. The objective is rather to look at the most significant and problematic aspects of this delicate phase of a woman's life and that of a couple. It seeks to offer a key to understand the deep significance and complexity of the path to follow to become parents and to face fears linked to the difficulty of procreation, using the tools of observation and psychoanalytic listening. Reviewing several experiences of clinical work, the authors offer reflections on the personal experiences of women and couples and the difficulties which can be met when the desire for a child is disappointed. A maternity and parenting project can be frustrated by miscarriages and encounter the fear of infertility. How are the problems of sterility or spontaneous abortion experienced?

This book recognizes that intense public battles are being waged in the U.S. over the rights of LGB people to form legally and culturally recognized families. Their families are under a kind of sociopolitical scrutiny at this historical moment that compels us all to take stock of our strategies of family-building and, more broadly, the meaning of family in the U.S. today. Through in-depth, open-ended, qualitative interviews with 61 self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual people regarding how they came to have children or remain childless/childfree,this book reveals the challenges posed by homophobia and discrimination and showcases the creative strategies, resilience, and resourcefulness of lesbians, bisexuals, and gays as they build families (with or without children) after coming out. From descriptions of how the early process of coming out affected the desire to parent or remain childfree, to stories about the impact of homophobia and discrimination on the decision-making process, to the dynamics within couples that lead to becoming parents or remaining childfree, to examining how cultural notions of the strength of biology are employed when having children, to accounts of how the closet can be used strategically when bringing children into a family, their voices form the heart of this book. In a sociopolitical context in which gay, lesbian, and bisexual people often have to struggle to access the array of rights and opportunities that are afforded to most heterosexual people without question, addressing the questions raised in this book is an urgent and necessary endeavor.