Things Just Haven't Been the Same: Making the Transition from Marriage to Parenthood

Drawing on both personal and professional experience, a family psychotherapist offers new parents a guide to adjusting to their new roles while preserving their romance. 35,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

When happily married couples become parents, Sachs contends, their marriages all too often flounder or fall apart. A clinical psychologist based in Columbia, Md., he points out that a new child not only adds enormous responsibilities and stress to a marriage, but also stimulates the parents' childhood "tapes" and thus reactivates their old feelings of helplessness in relation to their own parents. But chaos, Sachs declares, need not ensue. To change, new parents must first achieve "Selfhood" by differentiating themselves from their "first families." Then he advocates a "dia-logic" technique designed to "depolarize our hyperparenting-hypoparenting or pursuing-distancing dance" by dealing with our "parents from the past" and, finally, with our parents, grandparents and in-laws. Using a combination of case histories, clinical insights and mind-addling jargon, Sachs counters his gloomy diagnosis with a vision of hope. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.