Abstract
This paper explores marital adjustment among couples raising a temperamentally difficult infant. Employing a multiple case study methodology we conducted ten interviews with six couples. The parenting distress these couples experienced meant they were at higher risk of marital maladjustment. Four couples experienced marital crisis, resulting in the separation of one couple. Our analysis suggests that reference to “insufficient father involvement” during the interviews signaled problems with the mother’s satisfaction and marital adjustment. We found that mothers consider four specific aspects of paternal behavior as constituting involvement: 1. the father caring for the child in the mother’s presence, 2. the father caring for the child on his own, 3. the father sleeping in the same room as the mother and baby, and 4. the father being psychologically involved and supportive.
Difficult temperament
The term difficult temperament was first used by Thomas, Chess, and Birch (1968) in their analysis of data from New York Longitudinal Study. They used the term to refer to the approximately 10% of infants that “are irregular in bodily functions, are usually intense in their reactions, tend to withdraw in the face of new stimuli, are slow to adapt to changes in the environment and are generally negative in mood” (Thomas, Chess, & Birch, 1970, p. 94). Since then there has been extensive research into difficult temperament (Bates, Freeland, & Lounsbury, 1979; Rothbart, 1982) there is no single understanding of this concept, but there is agreement over its key characteristics. These are the frequent, prolonged and intensive display of distress and negative emotions, dysregulation of physiological functions and the time and effort required to deal with the distress and negative emotion. From the parental point of view, the most problematic symptoms are excessive crying (crying is considered to be excessive when occurring for at least three hours per day three days a week and for a minimum of three weeks) (Wessel, Cobb, Jackson, Harris, & Detwiler, 1954) and considerable sleeplessness. Quantitative studies have shown difficult temperament has an effect on parental care (van den Boom & Hoeksma, 1994), parental self-efficacy (Porter & Hsu, 2003), partner relationships (Mehall, Spinrad, Eisenberg, & Gaertner, 2009) and child development (Bates, Maslin, & Frankel, 1985; Thomas et al., 1968).
Qualitative research on raising a temperamentally difficult infant
Oldbury and Adams (2015) summarized the main themes relating to parental experiences of difficult infants referred to in eleven qualitative studies published between 2003 and 2013. The most prominent was a feeling of guilt and failure, followed by a feeling of anger frequently accompanied by thoughts of harming the baby. Parents also felt unprepared for the reality of raising a temperamentally difficult infant and felt their parental expectations did not reflect the reality. The third theme was the feeling that the parents’ relationship with the infant was negatively affected by the stress of raising the infant. Many other qualitative studies have also shown that difficulties raising the infant were a significant stress factor in the partner relationship (Cox & Roos, 2008; Ellett, Appleton, & Sloan, 2009; Levitzky & Cooper, 2000; Long & Johnson, 2001).
The aim of the present research was to explore the experiences of parents of difficult infants, the impact of childrearing stress on family relations, and the strategies that parents adopted to cope with displays of difficult behavior and their own experiences. Initially we focused on the mothers; however, during the interviews it became apparent that the marital relationship was crucial and so we included the fathers in the interviews. In this paper we concentrate on marital relationships affected by the turmoil associated with raising a difficult infant, and leave aside the other themes that emerged out of the analysis (the full research results can be found in the first author’s thesis; Bajgarová, 2017).
Methods
Research sample
The first author of the paper asked the following question her acquaintances: “Do you know somebody who has a baby that cries a lot and struggles with childrearing?” As the respondents either knew the first author or the person who mediated the contact, the fathers were more willing to be interviewed and gave more information-rich answers compared to the responses provided by mothers selected using a different type of sampling (we also interviewed mothers of difficult infants from a larger sample that had participated in a previous quantitative study; see Bajgarová, 2017). The mothers in this second sample were less willing to participate in interviews, and those that agreed to be interviewed provided answers less rich in information, and their partners did not want to participate in the study.
Our respondents had to meet four criteria. They had to be raising a child under the age of two. The father had to be willing to take part in the study. The child had to have a history of excessive crying and excessive and prolonged sleeplessness. Since we know that parental views of a child’s temperament are to some degree a matter of perception, the fourth criterion was that at least one of the parents had to consider the childrearing to be extraordinarily stressful and show symptoms of parental maladjustment (reduced parental self-efficacy, depression, anxiety, exhaustion, a high level of dissatisfaction).
During the interviews we verified whether the third and fourth criteria were met. The research participants were six heterosexual married couples with a temperamentally difficult child aged under two. All were Caucasians with university degrees (10 masters, 2 doctorates). Table 1 shows the ages of the participants and their children, and length of marriage.
All the participants were fully informed as to the nature of the research and signed a consent form.
Data collection
The semi-structured interviews were held at the participant’s home, in the presence of their child(ren). The interviews were conducted by the first author of the paper. The questions were open-ended, aimed at eliciting “information-rich” responses (Charmaz, 2014). Three couples were interviewed separately, one couple together, and one couple were interviewed together for a while, then the father left and the mother continued on her own. The reason for the differences in interview settings was that the fathers were generally reluctant to be interviewed. This left us with the alternative of either interviewing the father in the presence of the mother or not obtaining the father’s point of view at all. We decided it was better to accommodate the fathers. The limitations of this approach are discussed later. All the interviews were audiotaped and fully transcribed. The questions were designed to obtain a chronological overview of the period, beginning from the decision to conceive through parental expectations, pregnancy, birth and postpartum, including breast feeding, amount of crying and sleep, colic, the introduction of solid foods, infant separation anxiety and toddler tantrums.
There was little focus on the marital relationship. The interviewer asked the mothers how well their spouse tolerated excessive crying, how he helped and supported her, and if they thought childrearing stress had affected their relationship in any way. The fathers were asked the same questions. All the other information concerning the spouse’s childrearing role was spontaneously provided by the respondents. This led us to believe it was an especially important part of the parent’s experience.
The interviews lasted from 35 minutes to 119 minutes; see Table 1 for information on interview length.
Data analysis
The data were initially analyzed by the first author, then carefully reviewed by the second author. The materials produced at each stage of the analysis were then jointly discussed until a consensus was reached. First, the transcripts were coded in Atlas/ti by means of open coding techniques to identify the themes and concepts. The codebook was continually extended and modified. We constructed a case study grid (Table 1), containing the most important themes in all six cases. The themes were grouped into categories and subcategories. The key categories were difficult baby, paternal involvement, father’s attitudes, mother’s attitudes, parental role division, mother’s reaction to paternal noninvolvement, other stressors, support from grandparents, father’s reactions to the mother’s demands, marital quality and parental adjustment. We also used analytical memoing (Miles & Huberman; 1994) in parallel with the analysis. We then used open-coding case-study analytical techniques (Yin, 2003). We analyzed the processes, causes and consequences in each case (within-case analysis). Then we compared the data from all the cases and tried to identify more general themes, principles, patterns and structures (crosscase analysis).
Data credibility
We struggled to adhere to the quality standards of naturalistic qualitative research (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Data credibility was improved by the fact we encouraged the participants to express themselves as freely and openly as possible, and through our systematic analysis of the interviews, including the bracketing (Tufford & Newman, 2012) of our own preconceptions in memos. We also used a large number of direct quotes from the interviews to illustrate our conclusions. The dependability of our findings is supported by the triangulation of data sources; we collected data from both mothers and fathers. Other methods for guaranteeing dependability were the full and accurate transcription of the interviews, coding consistency and systematical recoding. The research methodology is described in detail to improve the transferability and confirmability of the findings.
Results
The child’s difficult temperament was manifest mainly in excessive crying, sleeplessness and irregularity. All the mothers found raising a child with a difficult temperament to be psychologically stressful. The couples differed from each other in one important aspect: in some of the interviews there was a pronounced theme of insufficient paternal involvement that left the mother feeling she had to shoulder the childrearing burden alone.
Mother’s view of paternal involvement
The analysis revealed that mothers interpreted four kinds of paternal behavior as signaling involvement. First of all, what happens once the father arrives home from work is very important. When both the parents are at home, an involved father will voluntarily respond to the child’s need for attention and to any distress signals. The involved father does not leave the management of the infant’s needs entirely up to the mother, but is willing to interrupt what he is doing and intervene.
The interviewer: “And how do you react when you see that your wife has had enough and starts shouting?”
Zack: “It depends, when Henry is misbehaving, I stand behind her. When he’s just being annoying, I try to entertain him somehow.”
The uninvolved father does not spontaneously interact with the child to a sufficient degree. When the mother asks for help, the father reacts with aversion.
He was cradling him a bit, but he was tired when he came home tired from work and wanted to rest. I’m not saying he didn’t play with him, but any help he gave was always quite coerced. He got angry at me because of this quite a lot. It was one reason why our relationship deteriorated a lot. (Eve)
In John’s and Laura’s case, Laura always dealt with the baby’s crying or fussing.
I am totally allergic to her crying, it’s really frustrating. My reaction is to avoid it – give her to her mummy and ‘I don’t know what to do with her, she’s crying’. (John)
The second aspect of paternal involvement concerns the father’s willingness to look after the baby on his own. The involved father enables the mother to take time off, and expresses the belief that the mother deserves breaks. He is determined to put up with the baby’s crying, he is “tuned in” (Tina) and does not call the mother to come home and soothe the baby. The uninvolved father does not want to take care of the baby alone.
For a certain period I couldn’t be alone with our little girl. She didn’t accept me at all; I wasn’t able to soothe her. (John)
This type of father does not acknowledge the mother’s need for rest or self-realization.
I wanted to go to the gym once a week, so he was supposed to put him to sleep, but he couldn’t do that. (Eve)
Another important sign of paternal involvement is if the father sleeps in the same room as the mother and baby. Even if he does not get up when the baby wakes on weekday nights, his presence alone helps.
When there was no other way, I sighed loudly so as to wake Matthew [the father] so we could at least experience this horrible despair together. In the morning I was glad I could describe by the hour how often I was woken up, to trigger sympathy or amazement in him. (Tina)
If the father automatically leaves the room, regardless of the infant’s temperament, it is considered a strong sign of paternal noninvolvement and can lead to the mother becoming dissatisfied and marital conflict.
When Edith [the first child] was small, he always slept elsewhere, possibly for a whole year and he made no attempt and that was much worse. And it seemed to me that it affected our relationship a lot. (Rita)
The father sleeping in another room is clearly a frequent occurrence when the baby suffers from noticeable sleeplessness and excessive crying (Table 1). Yet it still bothers the mothers:
It was horrible, I was sleeping in the next room so I got enough sleep because of work and my wife took it badly. I was aware that it was in fact dividing us. (John)
The final domain of paternal involvement is potential psychological support. This is about whether the father is concerned with the baby:
… and we didn’t know, neither me nor Matthew [the father], the reason she was crying. (Tina)
The father gives the mother the opportunity to talk about her feelings and childrearing concerns. On a planned trip to visit their German friends, Tina told Matthew in the car:
I can’t take it anymore, I can’t cope with sleeping in someone else’s home for three days, and I can’t stand the way people look at me anymore, and why I’m doing such a bad job of looking after her.
The father is supportive, trying to reassure the mother.
Matthew kept convincing me we were doing it right and that Adrienne had everything she needed. (Tina)
He responded to the mother’s concerns with understanding and did not criticize or respond with negativity:
… but he didn’t say things like, ‘That’s what I was telling you before’… (Tina)
The psychological support seems to be more important than the number of hours the father spends with the child. When there is a lack of psychological support, the father does not let his childrearing concerns influence his emotions. The uninvolved father is unaware there are childrearing issues.
In fact, I didn’t know much about Leah the first year, that there were problems with her because it wasn’t passed on to me. (Marc)
In this case he was unaware of his spouse’s distress; Marc saw that Rita “had had enough” but at the same time he stated that she was “amazing, admirable, that she is dealing with it really well.” When the father discusses the baby with the mother, he may become very negative. Marc hurt Rita through his criticism of the baby and by distancing himself from the decision to conceive. “He was always saying that she was bawling her head off …that we shouldn’t have had her.” This type of father seriously undermines the mother. He criticizes the mother and belittles her maternal role. Although he regularly takes care of the children on his own, the lack of psychological support is counterproductive:
When I go to a dance competition with our older daughter, he has Leah at home and phones me to say he’s managed to do everything, prepare the food and he’s been out and that he doesn’t understand what’s so difficult about it and where the problem is. (Rita)
Mother’s responses to paternal noninvolvement
There were three maternal responses to paternal noninvolvement. Where the mother was extremely demanding (Eve) the maternal expectations were communicated before the baby’s birth, prior to the paternal noninvolvement. The demands were more specific and exacting (two weeks of paternal leave after the birth) and did not respect either the progressive or the traditional parental role divisions (extraordinary financial standards combined with a high level of father involvement). The mother enforced her demands in a negative manner, through disapproval (“Eve forbade me from pursuing my hobbies…by being disapproving… I wouldn’t have given it up by myself.”) (Richard), criticism, over-generalizations (“She told me I was doing nothing at home.”) (Richard), insults (“I told him to move out and fuck off.”) (Eve). She had a strong influence on the father’s decisions (he increased his workload to earn more money, temporarily gave up his hobbies so he could be at home in the evening and not leave Eve alone with the baby).
The mildly demanding mothers (self-emancipating) (Laura, Adele) did not communicate any maternal expectancies beforehand but these were greater than the actual paternal involvement. When this kind of mother thinks the situation is unsatisfactory, she starts to demand more but in a benign manner.
John briefly shouted at Marge and she got scared and started crying and he wanted me to calm her down. I refused, he had made her cry, so he had to comfort her. It took him longer, but he finally succeeded. It was the first time he had been in that situation. (Laura)
Perhaps these mothers also lowered their expectations of paternal involvement.
The undemanding mother (Rita) had most likely already lowered her expectations during the transition to parenthood with the first child; nonetheless she still thinks her husband is exceptionally unsupportive. She does not mention attempting to get him more involved and the father appeared to be relieved at that:
With Edith [the first child] she complained more. With Leah [the second and difficult child] you can see that she is an experienced mother and she is doing really well. I am really grateful that she didn’t have any problems. (Marc)
There were several indications that the marriage was not optimal, especially in the interview with the mother (Table 1).
We believe that a lack of help from grandparents (Laura and John, Adele and Simon) can further heighten the maternal need for paternal support.
Marital trajectories (Figure 1)
There was one couple (Zack and Ann) who did not talk about a crisis (“There were difficult days, but we pulled together.”) and who had a generally good marital relationship. In this relationship the father was very involved in a context of egalitarian parental role division.
Marital crises were mentioned in four cases. In three of these the crisis was connected to the mother’s dissatisfaction with the paternal involvement. Rita and Marc did not mention their acute crisis, perhaps because it had occurred during the transition to parenthood with the previous child, but their marital relationship seemed to be of poor quality (according to some indicators of marital quality; Gottman & Silver, 1999). Simon and Adele experienced a marital crisis when their son was 14 months old. Adele described their alienation thus:
We understood each other less and less. I was upset he was working so much and I had no time to relax or for anything else. I reproached him for it… we hardly saw one another, we ate our dinner in silence and then withdrew into ourselves and on several occasions we said something nasty to each other.
With this particular couple, the resolution came after several weeks. They are trying to share more: “We listen to each other more carefully. Before we both stuck to our guns…” They are trying to share more things which are not connected to family life: “We share what we read about.”, and they emphasize the importance of shared time “I want dinner to be a time for just the two of us.” The father has become more involved: “Simon wants me to finish my Ph.D., so he takes Fred out and helps me.” He acknowledges the mother’s need to have a break: “he says then, ‘Adele, you’ve changed completely, I can see that you’re relaxed.’…” In the end they arranged for a baby-sitter to relieve Adele from continuous child care. Richard and Eve did not manage to resolve their crisis; Richard has moved out and it seems that the marriage is heading for divorce. Tina and Matthew’s crisis did not concern paternal noninvolvement (Matthew was a supportive father within the traditional role divisions) but housing choices; it was triggered by stress caused by Adrienne’s increasing sleep problems. While Tina expressed satisfaction at Matthew’s role and her belief that she could not manage without him, Matthew seemed to be in need of psychological support, talking of exhaustion and deteriorating psychological health (he started taking antidepressants). John’s lesser involvement in childrearing is perhaps buffered by the psychological support he gives Laura—she can discuss problems in raising Margaret with him, they even talk about his unsatisfactory involvement in looking after the child. John is aware of this, before Margaret’s birth he was determined to be one of the “new generation of fathers”, “equally adequate as your partner”, “at least as good as the mother.” While he is aware of the need to increase his involvement, he cannot find the energy and motivation to do so. “I understood Laura very well but I wasn’t able to get into it.” The situation is about to change: “I think that we are going to confront it. Laura expects me to be with them more and in the end it’s up to me to put more effort into it.”
Discussion
Paternal involvement and marital satisfaction
Our findings are similar to other qualitative studies in that we have shown that the stress of raising a difficult infant led the fathers to withdraw from childrearing (Ellett & Swenson, 2005; Ellet et al., 2009; Nash, Morris, & Goodman, 2008), and this stress negatively affected the partner relationship (Cox & Roos, 2008; Ellet et al., 2009; Levitzky & Cooper, 2000; Long & Johnson, 2001). Four couples experienced a marital crisis, resulting in the separation of one couple.
It was further shown in our study that paternal noninvolvement led to the mother becoming dissatisfied and consequently to marital instability. According to Gottman and Silver (1999), marital satisfaction declines in 67% of first-time mothers during the transition to parenthood. Extensive research with the remaining 33% of satisfied mothers found that the most important factor was being able to involve their spouses in the adventure of parenting and the fathers not being left behind. In their research on paternal involvement during adolescence, Harris and Morgan (1991) found a strong positive correlation between the wives’ reports of marital satisfaction and paternal involvement in child care. They believe this is due to the wives being happier if their husbands are more involved with the children. Kalmijn (1999) tested various hypotheses regarding paternal investments and marriage stability. She concludes that the more a husband participates in childrearing, the more satisfied the wife is with the marriage. The wife’s satisfaction is the most important intermediating factor in paternal investment and marriage stability. She concludes that fathers who are deeply involved in childrearing tend to have a stabler marriage because the wife experiences greater marital satisfaction as a result. In other research, maternal satisfaction with the father helping in families with young children with a disability related more strongly to indicators of family well-being than the actual extent to which the fathers helped (Simmerman & Blacher, 2001).
Another important factor was how the mother reacted to paternal noninvolvement. Eve’s abruptness is reminiscent of Gottman’s term “harsh startup”, which is a reference to women in particular fronting their demands with criticism, blame or disdain. A harsh startup is a reliable predictor of divorce within the first seven years of marriage (Gottman & Silver, 1999). Women’s requests that the men become more involved were not complied with. This is in line with the results of qualitative and quantitative studies that show that women in marriages can have problems exerting their demands (Ball, Cowan, & Cowan, 1995; Gottman & Silver, 1999). They have to carefully choose the right time and right way to raise the issues in order not to upset their husbands (Ball et al., 1995), and their husbands may resist by escalating negativity (Gottman & Silver, 1999). This might be one reason why women cannot get their husbands to become more involved with the children. Thus, even though the mothers believe the fathers should be more involved, they do not have enough power to influence the father’s behavior. In research on parental expectations and actual father involvement by Cook, Jones, Dick, and Singh (2005), egalitarian fathers demonstrated greater involvement than traditional fathers, but the mother’s gender ideology failed to predict the degree of paternal involvement. Egalitarian mothers do not appear to successfully negotiate greater paternal involvement. In Amato, Loomis, and Booth’s longitudinal study (1995), wives who adopted less traditional gender role attitudes saw a decline in perceived marital quality. When husbands adopted less traditional attitudes, their perceived marital quality increased. Hence the combination of an egalitarian wife and traditional husband can create a basis for further marital conflict as seen in the research and in Eve and Richard’s quick separation.
Research limitations
One of the limitations of our research might be that exploring couple dynamics was not our original aim. However, this may have helped because the parents might have been more cautious if the main focus had been their relationship. Another limitation might be the difficulty of generalizing from a small and highly educated sample of parents with difficult infants to all couples raising a young child. At best, only tentative hypotheses on couple dynamics can be generalized. Also our access to fathers was somewhat limited: we spoke with only four fathers separately, while the other two were interviewed in the presence of their wives, and thus the amount of data from the father’s point of view is limited compared to that from the mother’s. Also the most positive image we obtained—from the couple with a progressive role division—may be related to the fact that we did not speak with either of the partners individually, and thus they may not have expressed any dissatisfaction with their partner. We think that the interpretation of our findings should be limited to families with young children only. Mothers’ perceptions of paternal behavior as involvement change over the different periods of child development. Another question is whether the four aspects of paternal involvement apply to all couples or just those with a difficult infant. We suspect that special behaviors connected to either involvement or noninvolvement would also be perceived this way by mothers with less difficult infants. All four features of paternal noninvolvement could be seen as communicating the father’s traditional attitudes—our baby is not my business—and thus may more generally be a cause of maternal dissatisfaction. In our opinion, paternal noninvolvement could be a stronger cause of maternal disappointment in families with a difficult child, because not only is the father not involved with the baby, but he is not involved with his wife either, ignoring signs of distress and exhaustion and then refusing to help.
Implications
This study has several theoretical implications. First, like many previous studies (Gottman, & Silver, 1999; Harris & Morgan, 1991; Kalmijn, 1999) it shows how important paternal involvement is during marital adjustment after the birth. Second, it demonstrates the extra distress couples go through when raising a difficult infant. And third, it brings a new understanding of the paternal behaviors mothers consider to be involvement. This study fills a gap in our knowledge because paternal involvement is traditionally seen from the child’s perspective, but should be considered from both the paternal and maternal points of view (Hawkins et al., 2002). Mothers’ views of paternal involvement are especially important because several studies have indicated that maternal satisfaction is a mediating factor between paternal involvement and marital satisfaction (Gottman & Silver, 1999; Harris & Morgan, 1991; Kalmijn, 1999). How mothers understand paternal involvement should therefore be of interest to researchers. Given the high early divorce rate and the fact that for many couples the trajectory towards divorce begins with the wife experiencing a decrease in marital satisfaction following the first birth, we can clearly see the importance of paying more attention to these issues. At the practical level our findings on the kinds of paternal behavior mothers regard as involvement could be of use to people devising prenatal courses for expectant couples and for marital counselors providing advice to parents with small children whose relationships are already in trouble.
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© 2018 Zdeňka Bajgarová, Iva Stuchlíková, published by De Gruyter
