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Why childbirth stories are valuable in shaping family transitions.

Why you can trust us

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By Darby Saxbe

5 MIN READ

Jul 17, 2023

Gather a group of new parents and the conversation will likely turn to their childbirth stories鈥攔anging from the joyful to the gnarly to the positively traumatic.  feature a curated range of birth experiences, and you can buy embossed leather 鈥渂irth story鈥� journals as a baby shower gift. People are fascinated by this pivotal, emotionally complex, and literally life-and-death experience.

Birth narratives might also contain clues about how the adjustment to parenthood will go.

 to understand difficult experiences. Stories may be particularly valuable as a source of 鈥渕eaning-making,鈥� the process of finding order in chaos by making sense of unexpected events, identifying silver linings, and discovering the patterns and connections that thread seemingly random events together into a coherent narrative.

In a new study led by , a former graduate student in , we found that the levels of meaning-making in the stories new parents told about their baby鈥檚 birth  in the child鈥檚 first months.

Constructing Meaning in Your Own Life

Finding meaningful themes and patterns in life鈥檚 seeming randomness is a fundamentally human activity. As writer Joan Didion put it, 鈥�.鈥�

Meaning-making can buffer despair in the wake of tragedy. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl鈥檚 memoir, , argues that meaning and purpose can prevent the bitterness and disillusionment that can otherwise fester after great loss. Research on what psychologists call 鈥溾�� has found that the level of meaning-making in people鈥檚 narratives about a difficult event predicts their mental health over time.

For example, studies have found  in cancer patients, bereaved parents, and caregivers. Cancer survivors might discover that their chemo ordeal brought them closer to friends and family, or helped them step back from the hustle of everyday life and embrace a slower pace.

Although childbirth is typically experienced as a joyful rather than a tragic event, it can still be unpredictable, frightening, and even life-threatening. Indeed, psychologists have begun to recognize that particularly difficult labors , not just in mothers but in their partners as well. Even normal, nontraumatic births require parents to cope with hours, sometimes days, of pain and discomfort. Therefore, we hypothesized that meaning-making might be an important part of couples鈥� birth narratives, potentially promoting resilience in new parents.

To test these hypotheses, we collected birth stories from 77 couples who were participating in our lab鈥檚 . We visited couples at the hospital within a day or two of their infant鈥檚 birth, and audio-recorded them sharing their stories together. We told couples, 鈥淲e鈥檇 like to hear you tell the story of your birth experience. Start from the beginning and tell us as much as you remember.鈥�

Listening for Meaning-Making in Birth Stories

A team of coders listened to each story and recorded examples of meaning-making, using three categories established in the research literature:

• Sense-making: Identifying reasons that an event might have unfolded the way it did or making connections that show why an event was meaningful. For example, one mother in our sample found meaning in her long labor, describing her baby as 鈥渧ery brave and tough鈥� because she survived hours of pushing.
• Benefit-finding: Pointing out silver linings or unexpected positive effects of a difficult experience. For example, after a difficult birth, one parent in our sample stated, 鈥淚t was scary, but the nurses and the doctors were so nice to us.鈥�
• Change in identity: Describing how an event has transformed one鈥檚 sense of self. As a parent in our sample said, 鈥淚 feel like my life has changed completely with the baby now here.鈥�

Although couples told their story together, we tracked meaning-making separately for each partner. We also rated how much each partner participated in telling their story so we could adjust for their levels of engagement in sharing their birth narrative.

The : Almost all the participants made at least some meaning-making statements in their birth stories. Of the three categories of meaning-making, change-in-identity language surfaced least often, appearing in about 37% of the birth stories. Mothers tended to use more sense-making and benefit-finding language than fathers. And both members of a couple tended to use similar amounts of meaning-making language.

Becoming Mom or Dad

After we had coded all of the narratives, we next looked to see whether meaning-making predicted relationship satisfaction and parenting stress in our couples. The transition to parenthood can be a  and is often linked with .

But when mothers used more sense-making and benefit-finding language, they showed a smaller drop in their relationship satisfaction than moms who used less. Fathers who used more sense-making and benefit-finding language reported lower parenting stress at six months postpartum than dads who used less.

And partners of fathers who used more change-in-identity language also reported lower parenting stress later on, suggesting that dads who experience the transition to parenthood as transformative may be able to help mothers cope better with new parenthood. On the flip side, though, when mothers showed more meaning-making, their partners actually reported more parenting stress at six months postpartum. It may be that when mothers find the birth experience to be more personally meaningful, partners feel left out or pressured to step up their own parenting.

Overall, these results supported our initial hunch that meaning-making might be detectable in birth narratives and forecast parents鈥� psychological adjustment after birth. Greater meaning-making language seemed to benefit the couple relationship and largely buffer parenting stress.

This study was limited by a fairly small sample of cohabiting heterosexual parents. Nevertheless, it highlights the value of stories in shaping family transitions. For therapists working with new parents in the wake of a difficult birth, encouraging couples to seek meaning in their birth story may help ease their transition to parenthood. Journaling and storytelling exercises may help couples process their feelings about their childbirth experiences. After all, the birth of a baby is also the birth of a story鈥攁nd that story is well worth telling.

This story was originally published by . It has been published here under a Creative Commons license.

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