Consensus about the marital relationship during transition to parenthood

This research was designed to identify anticipated and actual postpartum concerns about the marriage relationship during the period of transition to parenthood. It also investigated: (1) the accuracy of prediction of postpartum concerns by the prenatal group; (2) states of consensus within the marital dyad regarding the importance of postpartum concerns; and (3) the relationship between communication about the concerns and the relative importance of concerns. Twenty-two couples expecting their first child were randomly assigned to either the prenatal or postpartum interview groups. Husbands and wives individually rank-ordered 35 postpartum concerns from Most Important to Least Important and estimated how their spouses would rank the concerns. Husbands and wives also indicated the three concerns they discussed the most and the three they discussed the least. Couples tended to discuss most often those concerns they ranked most important. However, there were only moderate levels of agreement on the importance of concerns, discrepancies between perceived agreement and actual agreement, and low to moderate levels of accuracy in estimating the importance of concerns for spouses.