GIVE ME A BREAK:YOU'RE IN your mid-30s and your first baby feels like your reward for having done everything right. When you were single, you carefully prevented pregnancy in order to complete third-level education and work your way up in your career. And no way would you have a baby with just anyone. You wanted to marry your perfect partner first, writes KATE HOLMQUIST
Due to your age, trying for a baby wasn’t as easy as you thought it would be, but now that you’ve succeeded, everyone keeps telling you how lucky you are.
So why are you feeling so sad and stressed? Why are you and your partner fighting all the time? Why didn’t anybody tell you it would be like this?
If it’s any consolation, a new study, published yesterday, says you’re not alone if having a baby has crashed your marriage. The best-educated women are marrying later and having babies later, and it’s their marriages, especially if they live in Dublin and work in high-earning careers, that are most likely to suffer.
Family Figures: Family Dynamics and Family Types in Ireland 1986-2006, by the Family Support Agency, UCD and the ESRI, using CSO statistics, came to what the authors – Dr Peter Lunn, Prof Tony Fahey and Dr Carmel Hannan – call a "striking" conclusion. The risk of marital breakdown increases by 25-30 per cent for couples with one child compared with married couples with no children. Having two children brings with it less chance of divorce. "Our favoured explanation is that a first child can put strain on the relationship, while having more children is a sign that any strains were overcome," the authors state.
Because this is a statistical report, the authors do not elaborate on the strains, but anyone who has been in this situation knows them well. When a relatively ambitious, two-career couple add a baby to their existing strains, they may have no reference for coping, because their own parents lived within the model of dad working and mum at home full-time, at least until the children were school-going.
These days, new mothers in full-time employment get nearly a year of maternity leave when they add their holidays in, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easier when they have to go back to work. The real pressure starts when mum is working again and has to renegotiate her relationship with her husband or partner. (And for contract workers and self-employed women with their own businesses, this day of reckoning may arrive even earlier, possibly within weeks of the baby’s birth.)
Father and mother try to juggle their priorities. Who is most important at any given time? Your child or your mate? The mother may feel that now that she’s this new person – a mother – her husband doesn’t understand her. And the child has found a place in her heart so large that her husband may feel there is no space for him any more.
New parents are full of self-doubt. New fathers feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to protect this vulnerable new child, but they may not realise that their high-achieving wife – who seems to cope so well with the breastfeeding and attending all those mother and baby groups and walks in the park – is just as vulnerable. Everything she has believed about herself during the first 30-plus years of her life has been undermined by a needy baby who swamps her own needs.
Some commentators have called this the “King Baby” syndrome, where the baby eclipses everyone else. But I would call it lack of support for parents.
The Family Figures report agrees. It recommends that fathers be given statutory paternity leave, “at least for first children”. This makes sense, because the father is often a new mother’s only support, since her own family are likely to be working too hard to give practical support, if, indeed, they live nearby.
The real crisis comes after the maternity leave, when a baby grows into a toddler, and then a demanding child. The cracks in a couple’s relationship turn into earthquake-sized fissures. Who wakes up in the night? Who does the creche and school drop-offs and pick-ups? Who helps with the homework? Who does the laundry? Who cooks the dinner? How can we afford dinner when childcare costs so much? What do we give up in an effort to balance the budget – the second car, the social life, the holiday? How can we possibly have sex any more, when we’re so resentful of one another?
Finances are a big part of the problem. The report calls for “greater generosity in public supports for families in relation to first children”, and even predicts a day not far off when having babies becomes such a strain that people stop having them. It advises that fertility could soon become a political issue here, as it is in France and Germany.
Rarely do statistical reports inspire, but this one should, especially when it argues that now is the time to start looking at how public policy can make having babies a part of thriving marriages, rather than the make-or-break experience that too often destroys them.