Taking Care of Your Partner with the Arrival of Baby

Life in Relationship

How do partners take care of each other when they have a baby?

1 – Learn together, about baby and each other

What are your unique challenges?

Gender role complications

Awareness of shifts and changes with each baby

Embrace flexible curiosity

Make space and room for letting the baggage come out

2 – hold the good and bad together for and with another

Acknowledge the impossibility of the unpredictable nature of parenting

Some common anxieties:

• Exhaustion
• Anxiety about infant or just life
• Changes in other relationships (boundaries with others)
• What support is available
• Physical touch and sensory overload
• Uncertainty of needs – other and within self
• Communicating about something so new
• Losing who I am outside of parenting

3 – Notice where your partner needs and respond to each other with grace

• Hormone changes and adjustment for both partners
• sleep deprivation messes with you
• validate and offer small touches to ground partner
• notice mess and mindfully notice joy
• Caring for each other outside of motherhood and fatherhood
• Caring for each other by splitting duties

household chores episode – https://ilovemyshepherd.libsyn.com/household-chores

4– help one another remember yourselves outside of parenting

• remember it’s a season
• go out and make nice moments happen when you stay in
• get to know baby and let baby get to know you - acclimate to baby, but also let baby acclimate to you

Resources:

Gottman Bringing Up Baby course - https://www.gottman.com/blog/bringing-baby-home-the-research/

And Baby Makes Three - https://amzn.to/3B79iBj (affiliate link)

Short answer: Plan for the unplannable and watch yourself grow.