How to Refind Each Other After Having Children - The Dad Perspective

AD. Do you remember a time when life in a relationship felt so easy, straight forward, and so seamless?… You would talk, laugh, talk more, and truly connect. And then reality hit - kids came into the picture, and life got that bit ‘realer!’ 

Being a parent presents so many challenges, especially when it comes to maintaining a strong, healthy relationship. Having children means there’s less time to focus on ourselves, let alone our partner and our relationship. In the early stages, we’re deprived of sleep, often stressed about money, balancing work and being a new parent. In fact, studies show that new mums start to experience a downturn in relationship satisfaction around six months after the birth of their first child. Dads also start to see some relationship problems, but a little later around nine months.

_{[Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash]}

What Causes the Downturn in Relationship Satisfaction?

What happens to a lot of us is that the thing we used to be really great at, communication, suddenly becomes one of the least effective things we do, and if not attended to can affect our relationship to a point where a form of trust is broken.

Daddilife has recently launched their free guide on How to rebuild trust in a relationship because of exactly that. In the guide Daddilife cover 33 different ways to rebuild a relationship after you have kids to provide a comprehensive resource on the area for dads (and for mums!).

Having read my original article on the 5 love languages, Daddilife wanted to add a dad’s perspective that looks specifically at communication. Because, a bit like how we go through a process to discover our love language, we almost need to refind each other in a different way when we parent as a couple.

How to Refind Each Other After Having Children

How many times since having children together did you ask your partner, “how has having kids affected us? How has it impacted our ‘roles’ and our ‘goals’? I see so many couples who simply don’t have that conversation, ever, and then wonder why they feel increasingly at odds with their partners. In truth, it’s because having children didn’t just change you as individuals... It changed you as a couple.

That’s a challenge in itself, but in today’s world there are more false standards displayed across social media to contend with too that want to tell us how relationships ‘should be.’ The increasingly polarising message being that a man isn’t a man unless he’s doing x, y , z, and a woman isn’t a woman unless she’s doing a, b and c. A lot of the time it feels like the external world is doing its best to split couples than make them stronger. 

With our thinking cap on we know there’s simply no one size fits all answer here, but from a dad perspective we’re also not the best at prompting the conversations that matter. This is often in direct contrast with what we hear from mums who have framed their own thoughts fully, helped often by a wonderful sense of sorority and community around them. It’s one area I’ve always been envious of as dads simply don’t have that same sense of sorority as mums on the whole.

Ways to Initiate Communication

So with that in mind, here’s what I’d love to see from more dads and mums as a start to their new communication: 

• Take responsibility: If you need a conversation with your partner about this, it’s likely that there’s some areas of tension already present in your relationship. So the first step is to take some accountability for what has got you here in the first place. You can’t possibly hope to rebuild a relationship without taking the responsibility for what has lead you to this current place. 
• Be helpful to each other: Re-kindling trust and a special bond means being helpful. Listen, actively to what each other needs and wants - and how that helps you as a unit (not as individuals). 
• Mark out the conversations that matter: Life gets busy, so diarise the time for the chats. I know of one dad who even has a yearly ‘workshop weekend’ where him and his wife will quite literally workshop the year ahead for them both. It sounded crazy at first, but the more I found out about it, the more it made total sense! Now I’m not saying you need to workshop whole weekends, but make it a conscious time to have the conversations that matter.

Relationships are challenging to manage at the best of times, but to really grow, together, it’s time we lean into the difficult conversations, and importantly commit to doing them right.