In the days and months after the first baby's arrival, parenting partners gradually begin to come to terms with the dramatic changes in their lifestyle introduced by the baby's needs. Parents can and often do experience a variety of emotions, from joy and exhilaration to irritability, frustration and mild to moderate depression. Parents also begin forging a family "script" that describes how their family goes about being a family. These scripts typically differ somewhat for mothers and fathers, as is often readily apparent when parents report their own perspectives on "who does what" around the house. We are interested in learning more about parents' early perceptions of family life - both those perceptions that are more or less shared by the two parenting partners, and those that are unique to the experiences of each parent as an individual. We are also interested in learning how well couples have been able to stave off the compelling pull to invest all their time and energy in the infant, rather than in one another. And we are interested in what the baby has to say, both as a uniquely developing individual who possesses particular styles, habits, and response tendencies, and as a member of the triadic family system.
To this end, we visit families at their homes at the three month post-partum mark, and during this visit ask parents to share with us a number of interesting and important bits of information about their lives. As at all other time periods, in the study, parents complete very short questionnaires that help us take the pulse of how they have been feeling recently, how they think the couple relationship is faring, and what arrangements they are presently making concerning the "who does what" of childcare and household work. Parents also provide descriptions of their infants' temperament, along dimensions such as interest in novelty, irritability, and soothability, and we complete in-home observations of the baby's response style in responding to a series of routine and not-so-routine interventions, such as having a cap placed on her head, having her nose wiped, and experiencing a variety of new toys and other objects varying in levels of interest, colorfulness, noisiness, and so forth. From our observations and the reports of parents, we develop a beginning profile of the baby's early temperamental features - a profile that we then rely upon to make predictions about the types of child and family adaptations we might be likely to see down the road apiece.
Parents are not left out of these visits, either. We spend some time interviewing them about life since the baby's arrival, and also ask them to engage together with the baby in both playful and mildly frustrating interaction situations. There are also opportunities for one-on-one, face-to-face interactions between parents and infants, and an engaging problem-solving task for just the two parents to complete together. By gathering information concerning each of the family members as individuals, about the different two-way pairings within the family (mother and baby, father and baby, mother and father) and - most important to our study - about how partners engage together as coparents interacting with the baby in the family unit, we begin to paint a very rough portrait of early family life for each of the many households we visit - portraits that we will later return to when we ask whether there were any features of our study participants' early adaptation to their lives together as a new family that forecast particular aspects of child or family adjustment later on down the line.