The Transition to Parenthood: The Study of First-time Parents’ Coparenting Experience

• Main Authors: CHENG, LI-EN, 鄭立恩
• Other Authors: TEY, SIANG-HUA
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/8r8627

碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 諮商心理與人力資源發展學系輔導與諮商研究所 === 107 === The purpose of this research is to explore first-time parents’ coparenting experience and the development of the coparenting relationship, and to understand how coparenting relationship and marital relationship affect each other. For those purposes, the in-depth interview of the qualitative research method was used. The semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants from four couples. Hennie Boeije’s “spiral of analysis” was adopted as the data analysis method, which formed the results. The main findings of this research were as follows: I. The first-time parents’ coparenting experience was affected by the awareness of the parental roles, which were shaped by embodiment, social expects and self-ideal parental role. New mother is a direct participant and new father is an indirect participant. There was an obvious gender difference in the division of coparenting role, involving biological differences and gender stereotypes. According to biological functions of gender, new mothers took more responsible to child-care labors. On the other hand, new fathers and new mothers had equal responsibilities in childhood education. II. In the coparenting processes, there were two aspects of parental pressure: the impact of parenting life and the conflict between generations. First, the greatest impact of parenting life was “limited personal freedom.” First-time parents turned their parental pressure into parental responsibility, as well as established a child-oriented lifestyle. Second, first-time parents relied on parenting resource of elders. On the one hand, the intergeneration relationship became closer; on the other hand, the intergeneration relationship became more nervous by the different concepts between generations. First-time parents mainly insisted their idea of parenting and communicated with the elders. III. The coparenting communication model of first-time parents was: challenges- copying strategies- coordination- consensus. The expectation gap between couple caused conflict during coparenting processes. Based on “patience”, there were four main copying strategies: taking care, oral conflict, rational communication and self-adjustment. Through the coordination processes developed by rational communication and self-adjustment, first-time parents got a parenting consensus. IV. In the processes of coparenting, first-time parents experienced changes of quarrel pattern and relationship maintenance; in the final, the marital relationship became dependent and close. At first, although the quarrel contents of first-time parents were mostly on children issue, the frequency and degree of quarrel were reduced and few negative effect on marital relationship. Secondly, first-time parents transfer their emotional focus to child during their infancy. In the meanwhile, the intimate interaction between husband and wife were reduced, which made wife feel lost easily but husband feel normally. In the follow-up development of coparenting, husband and wife both felt each other’s supportive coparenting, and identified the spouse’s parenting behaviors. The husband and wife were dependence on each other and developed a closely marital relationship. According to the results of this study, further discussion and recommendations were provided.