ABSTRACT
The transition from being a couple to becoming a family has been a focus of study and controversy since LeMasters’ (1957) apparently startling assertion that the birth of a first child constituted a “crisis” for 83% of the couples in his study. Drawing conclusions from his intensive retrospective interview data, LeMasters argued that this normative transition, typically seen as a time of joy and optimism, could also be a time of significant strain for new parents. For the next 2 decades, other investigators published skeptical rejoinders to LeMasters’ conclusions. The researchers were mostly sociologists who used cross-sectional or postbirth samples of new mothers and fathers completing brief checklists or answering a few simple survey questions (e.g., Hobbs, 1965, 1968; Hobbs & Wimbish, 1977). Their results were interpreted as minimizing the incidence, prevalence, and seriousness of distress in new parents and their marriages, and led the investigators to suggest, as Hobbs and Cole (1976) put it, that “initiating parenthood may be slightly difficult, but not sufficiently difficult to warrant calling it a crisis experience for parents whose first child is still an infant” (p. 729).
