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This chapter describes Unit 6 of the Couple CARE for Parents program, which guides couples through the sensitive areas of caring and sexuality. It describes common difficulties couples may experience in having time for each other, and for re-establishing a healthy sex life after childbirth. Specific suggestions are provided on exercises to assist couples to explore and discuss these issues together, and identify self-change that might be helpful to enhance their relationship. In the area of caring, the goals are to encourage regular demonstrations of caring behaviors, and to prompt creativity in how each partner expresses caring. The discussions on sexuality aim to foster realistic beliefs about sex after childbirth, to encourage positive and helpful sexual self-talk behavior, enhance the couple’s capacity to communicate effectively about sexual issues, and assist them to further enhance enjoyment of their sexual relationship.

This chapter is focused on Unit 5 of the Couple CARE for Parents (CPP) program, which aims to help couples negotiate a mutually acceptable sharing of infant care responsibilities, and to balance individual, couple and family time. Unit 5 is the first unit delivered in flexible delivery mode (in the usual way of delivering CPP). Flexible delivery involves the couple completing activities at home and reviewing these activities with the educator at a later time via telephone or Internet. This chapter reviews some practical issues in making the flexible delivery format effective. The content also describes how to help couples analyze their current patterns of time use, and promote a healthy balance of individual, couple and family activities. The focus is then on helping couples review their parenting roles, and how those roles vary from their pre-birth expectations, with the aim of helping couples negotiate a shared approach to parenthood. This chapter also describes common challenges to completion of the flexible delivery units (e.g., when couples have not completed their self-directed learning activities), and how to manage those challenges.

The transition to parenthood brings a range of life changes for all couples. Many couples struggle to adapt to parenthood and experience declines in their couple relationship satisfaction. This chapter reviews the literature on the most common challenges for new parent couples, and the factors that put particular couples at risk of struggling to adapt to parenthood. This chapter also includes a review of brief couple education programs that aim to help adaptation to parenthood, and the research evaluating such programs. Finally, we provide an overview of the Couple CARE for Parents (CPP) program, an evidence-based approach to assisting couples that forms the focus of the current book. There are six units in CPP, and they are described in detail in each of the remaining six chapters of the current book.

This chapter describes how to deliver the first unit of the Couple CARE for Parents (CPP) program, which aims to help expectant couples prepare for the major changes that will occur after the birth. This chapter explains how educators can structure CPP to enhance its effectiveness and provides some example icebreakers to facilitate a successful start to the program. The content of CPP then moves to introducing the importance of shared and realistic expectations of parenting, and provides a number of activities that educators can use to facilitate couple discussion of infant care expectations, expectations of gender roles, and preferred parenting practices. The expectations and activities then lead into a review of individual support needs, which the participants discuss as couples in order to develop a shared plan for what support they will use in the early phases of parenthood.

This chapter describes Unit 4 of the Couple CARE for Parents (CPP) program, which focuses on adjustment of couples to the early stages of parenthood. The unit begins with a debriefing about the birth, then a review of the pre-birth CPP content and self-change plans as a way to focus couples back on working at their relationship and supporting each other in parenting. A major part of the unit is a discussion about baby care and tips for managing stress. The baby care information begins with information about sensitive and responsive parenting, and then moves to sleep, feeding and crying. Couples discuss what is good about parenthood and what they are finding difficult, how they are supporting one another through these big changes, and the self-talk they have been using in the last few weeks as they care for their baby. Activities aim to assist couples in identifying negative parenting self-talk and developing positive parenting self-talk as a replacement.