Parenthood can Take a Toll on Relationships, But it Doesn't have to

I became a parent a year and a half ago, and my life changed forever. When I was pregnant lots of parents gave me advice (Enjoy going to the grocery store by yourself while you still can! Go out on dates! Clean your house!). One even warned me that becoming a parent would “rock my world.” I thought I understood. I thought I was prepared for the huge change coming. And while I wasn’t unprepared, I really had no idea exactly how life-changing becoming a parent would be. Now I try to explain to my friends who don’t have children what exactly getting swept into parenthood felt like, and the best I have come up with is this—I had my daughter and she was more wonderful than I could have imagined, and the rest of my life fell into chaos. One of those pieces of my life was my relationship with my husband. We look at each other and marvel that we used to sit around on the weekend and lament that we did not know what to do with ourselves. Now we would give anything to learn the secret to freezing time. Now we try to hold on as life rushes by. Now I tell my husband we need more time and he agrees but asks, “what time?”

Parenthood: Trial or Tribulation?

This is the first post in a four-part series on parenthood and happiness.

On New Years Day I celebrated not only the start of a new year, but a new phase in my life. A few (long) hours after midnight I became a parent, and my life was irrevocably changed. In the journey to parenthood I knew one thing to be true—that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Would becoming a parent bring me joy, love, and gratitude greater than I had previously known? Would I find myself anxious, worried, depressed, and dreaming of my former life? Or, as I suspected, would I find myself experiencing intense moments of both?

In my short time as a parent I have experienced great joy, love and gratitude as well as intense worry, and sometimes even sadness. Happily, as I sit here typing up this post with my two and a half month old swaddled next to me on the couch, eyeing me trustingly as she falls in and out of sleep, I can say that the balance tends to weigh strongly on the side of joy. But in those moments where I don’t have the luxury to type up this post because I’m tending to a crying child, or changing a dirty diaper, I dream of the freedom of my former life and the balance is just a bit more evenly weighted.

And the one thing I know with certainty is that I still have no clue what exactly I’ve gotten myself into. While my days often stretch out in front of me with the sameness that comes from having an infant with simple needs, I also know that she is growing and changing at a rapid pace. Each week we are in uncharted territory as she learns to smile, sit, and eventually walk, talk and push back as she becomes her own independent person.

The Importance of Being Agreeable

Consider, for a moment, two very different people:

Draco

Neville 

Neville is a friendly, warm person who tends to cooperate with and trust others. He generally expects the best of people, and tends to be generous and helpful towards others. He tries to be modest about himself.

Draco, on the other hand, is an aloof, rude person who tends to be competitive and suspicious of others. He’s cynical about people – he doesn’t expect them to return favors, so he’s not that likely to be helpful. He thinks modesty is overrated.

How would personality psychology say these two differ? Well, they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum of “agreeableness” – if you feel more similar to Neville, you’re probably high in agreeableness, and if Draco hits closer to home, you’re probably relatively disagreeable. Agreeableness captures how interpersonally warm, trusting, modest, altruistic, cooperative, straightforward, sympathetic, and easygoing you are, and is one of the building blocks of personality.

So what does being agreeable mean for your work life and parenting styles? How about your health outcomes and environmental behavior? Let’s see what the literature has to say.