Marital relationship in young families: A cross-sectional study

The purposes of the present cross-sectional study were to compare husbands' and wives' perceptions and to assess changes in marital quality when couple members are engaged in caring young children. In particular, this research was focused on a few variables usually considered as the fundamental dimensions of marital functioning: marital satisfaction and communication, satisfaction with division of labour, and child rearing stress. The sample was representative of the young families living in the North of Italy and it was composed of 592 marital couples; all together subjects were 1184. The instruments we used were included in a self-report questionnaire, which each spouse filled out separately. Results showed that wives are more dissatisfied with both the marital relationship and the division of household labour than husbands. Moreover, it emerged that above all fathers experience a decline in marital satisfaction and in communication quality, as the first child grows up; on the contrary, as far as wives' perceptions are concerned, the considered variables don't modify in a significant way. On the whole, results of the present research added weight to the supposition that this is a critical stage of family life span, not only for wives, as numerous research have already pointed out, but also for husbands.