Bringing Baby Home

When a baby arrives, everything changes. Parents must adapt to the 24/7 care of a new, vulnerable infant – an enormous task. Not surprisingly, 40 to 70% of couples experience stress, profound conflict and drops in marital satisfaction during this time, all of which affect their baby’s care.

Given the increased interpersonal, social and economic pressure families’ experience, especially fragile families with low to poverty level household incomes, it is particularly important to support these caregivers in their transition to parenthood.

The Bringing Baby Home project at the newly founded Relationship Research Institute seeks to address these problems. This Swedish Hospital based study is primarily sponsored by Talaris Research Institute ($2.5 million over four years) with additional funding from the Kirlin Foundation ($600,000 over four years). The goal of the project is to learn more about the changes couples experience as they become parents, and to discover ways to help them make the transition with greater ease and success.         

The short term goal of the project is to develop a program for expectant parents that is hospital-based and administered by hospital personnel. This would involve modifying the standard birth preparation program hospitals offer to include an additional two-day couples workshop and/or a support group.

The long-term goal of the Bringing Baby Home program is to spark a lasting, systemic change within the community by rethinking the way adults care for infants and subsequently how they communicate with, teach, and guide young children. This new vision depends developing a strong emotional foundation in the very early stages of a child’s life and necessitates nurturing it through the toddler and preschool years. Once this is established, research shows children do better in school, adapt more easily socially, and are physically healthier.

The content of the program and workshops has evolved from Dr. Gottman’s 26 years of marriage and family research, and will teach couples how to:

• Avoid marital meltdown and increase marital satisfaction
• Deal with stress and understand that it is normal when a baby arrives
• Keep dads involved in infant care
• Co-parent effectively and improve the quality of parent-infant interaction
• Better understand early childhood development

The hope is that by strengthening their own relationships, parents will be better able to address and model healthy emotional and intellectual development in their children.

The Bringing Baby Home program format involves a two-day workshop with day one focusing on strengthening the marriage and getting to know the baby and day two addressing the regulation of conflict and building strong family interactions.  Detailed background materials are provided so couples can revisit specfiic topics and intervetnion strategies.

We now know that adding our new two-day workshop to standard birth preparation education can prevent many of these negative consequences for young families.  So far we have discovered that:

• We Can Prevent Relationship Meltdown
• We Can Prevent Escalating Hostility
• We Can Largely Prevent Post-partum Depresssion
• We Believe We Can Increase Positive Emotions With the Baby

Bringing Baby Home involves a diverse range of couples, representing a variety of cultural, ethnic and economic backgrounds. The current study includes over 120 couples.

Following this research project, the Bringing Baby Home team hopes to expand the study to reach a broader range of at-risk, lower income caregivers in the Pierce and King County regions.

Interested in helping?
John Gottman is now at a critical juncture in his work on this project.  The next phase of this study involves studying the babies after their first year of life.  To fully evaluate the impact of the workshop, we need to study the families through the babies' third year of life when there are important family transitions and huge developmental changes. Dr. Gottman is seeking financial contributions to help complete the study. 

Questions?
If you would like to speak to someone about this project, please call Becky Thatcher at 206-973-3456 or email her at beckyt@gottmanresearch.com .

For more information on this project's main sponsor, The Talaris Research Institute, visit  www.talaris.org .