ABSTRACT
The birth of a child is the family’s most significant critical event and gives rise to its key transition (McGoldrick et al., 1993). As we saw in chapter 1, the most salient feature of the event today is the unprecedented importance of the child itself, and its much-exalted power to confer on the couple the sense of stability that was once conferred, as both a gift: and an obligation, by their generational mandate and inheritance. Of its very nature, the birth event establishes generational connectedness and is therefore a form of action, although this is rarely acknowledged. New roles and relationships magically appear: Spouses become parents, parents become grandparents, parents’ brothers become uncles, other new babies become cousins, and so on.
