Patterns of marital relationship change across the transition from one child to two.

Abstract

Patterns of marital change after the birth of a second child were explored in a sample of 229 married couples, starting in pregnancy, and at 1, 4, 8 and 12 months postpartum. Five trajectory patterns that reflected sudden, persistent decline (i.e., crisis), sudden, short-term decline (i.e., adjustment and adaptation), sudden, short-term gain (i.e., honeymoon effect), linear change, and no change were examined with dyadic, longitudinal data for husbands and wives. Six distinct latent classes emerged using growth mixture modeling: (a) wife decreasing positivity-husband honeymoon (44%), (b) wife increasing conflict-husband adjustment and adaptation (34.5%), (c) wife honeymoon-discrepant spouse positivity (7.4%), (d) wife adjustment and adaptation (6.9%), (e) couple honeymoon with discrepant positivity and negativity (5.2%) and (f) husband adjustment and adaptation (1.7%). Classes were distinguished by individual vulnerabilities (i.e., depression, personality), stresses associated with the transition (i.e., unplanned pregnancy), and adaptive processes (i.e., marital communication, social support). Marital communication, parental depression, and social support emerged as important targets for intervention that can assist parents planning to have additional children.

His, hers, or theirs? Coparenting after the birth of a second child.

“…Parental gender role beliefs did not uniquely predict cooperative coparenting, however. It may be that the more immediate marital quality of the relationship between the couple at the time of the transition is far more important to cooperation than expectations about who should do what (Volling et al, 2015). Because including gender role beliefs in a study of coparenting using an actor-partner framework was a novel component of this research, more work is needed to confirm whether these patterns of associations extend to other contexts outside the transition to second-time parenthood.…”

Group‐Based Trajectory Modeling of Marital Quality: A Critical Review

“…Each group-based modeling technique applied in the reports reviewed here yielded between two and six groups. Two of the reports (James 2015a, 2015b) created separate sets of trajectories for more than one marital variable; one report used multiple scales to simultaneously model both positive and negative marital quality (Volling, Oh, Gonzalez, Kuo, & Yu, 2015); and all others modeled only one primary dimension of marriage in the published report. The marital dimensions assessed in the trajectory analyses included marital happiness, communication, conflict, satisfaction or adjustment, and a summated marital positivity and negativity score based on several subscales from one measure.…”

“…Each of these reports combined men and women in the trajectory analyses (i.e., scores from men and women were not modeled separately). The remaining eight reports used data sets containing partnered husbands and wives (i.e., heterosexual couples), but only one of the reports (Volling et al, 2015) retained the couple as the unit of analysis. The other seven reports modeled husbands and wives separately.…”

“…Conflict frequency. Five of the 14 reports examined an aspect of negative marital quality (James, 2015a(James, , 2015bKamp Dush & Taylor, 2012;Madigan et al, 2017;Volling et al, 2015). In four of these (all but Volling et al), the construct was conflict frequency, and each of these reports found three patterns of change/stability in marital conflict frequency (n = 12).…”

“…The final marital outcome assessed in the reports reviewed here was a composite score created from four subscales (i.e., love, ambivalence, conflict, and maintenance) of a larger measure (Braiker & Kelley, 1979). The authors used dyadic data, creating trajectory groups based on the change profiles of husbands and wives in the same couple, all of whom were undergoing the transition from one child to two (Volling et al, 2015). Across the six groups of husband and wife co-occurring change found (see Table 1), all groups demonstrated differing patterns within couples (i.e., there was no group in which wives and husbands followed the identical trajectory of change over time), and all identified groups had either wives or husbands who experienced decreases over time in marital positivity and or increases over time in marital negativity although several groups also saw rebounds in marital quality before the end of the study period (when the second-born child was roughly 12 months old).…”