Kara Hoppe - Baby Bomb: A Relationship Survival Guide for New Parents

Vivid and emotionally spot-on. Baby Bomb doesnt miss a beat in giving you helpful tools, examples, and dialogue right from the first chapter. This book tackles the pervasive problem of traditional gender roles in parenting, elevates the conversation, and challenges us to think deeper about nurturing our partner relationships after baby comes along.

Heather Turgeon , psychotherapist, and author of The Happy Sleeper

The couple comes first. Strange how radical these words seem, but also how right. Baby Bomb insistsand gives parents concrete ways to rememberthat their health and partnership is never any less important than their baby. This book is a breath of fresh air that helps lighten even the hardest days of early parenting.

Angela Garbes , author of Like a Mother

After the birth of a baby, the relationship of the parents is often left untended, like a fallow field. Baby Bomb is the guide you need to help return nutrients to the soil of your relationship, plant seeds of new growth, and celebrate the bounty of your relationship for years to come.

Britta Bushnell, PhD , childbirth and new-parent specialist, and author of Transformed by Birth

Buy this book now. Give Baby Bomb to every expectant couple you know. It is an indispensable guide for all new parents and pregnant couples. There is none other like it. It will nourish the couple; teach them how to care for one another, make collaborative decisions, and flourish as a strong team.

Ellyn Bader, PhD , cofounder The Couples Institute, creator of the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy, and coauthor of Tell Me No Lies

Baby Bomb is a gift for young couples. The principles of attachment theory and nervous system regulation are the basic elements of Parenting 101. And Karas fresh voice of experience explaining how to apply those principles is the bow on top.

Diane Poole Heller, PhD , creator of the Dynamic Attachment Re-Patterning experience (DARe), president of Trauma Solutions, and author of Healing Your Attachment Wounds and The Power of Attachment

The inevitable clash of competing loyalties that come with being a partner, a parent, and yourself can be painful when theyre out of balance. With exceptionally incisive insight, Kara and Stan help you map confusing emotional experiences. For thirty-five years, I worked as a psychologist supporting and helping couples through their toughest times. I wish I had this book all along. Im glad I have it now.

Peter Pearson, PhD , cofounder The Couples Institute, and coauthor of Tell Me No Lies

I was moved by the powerful insights in this book, which teaches couples how to integrate partnership and parenting. Kara and Stan shift the old paradigmwhereby mothers are the ones primarily responsible for raising a securely attached childto a new paradigm in which secure-functioning couples do that together, and do so more effectively. Partnering according to these principles gives birth to a vast transformation through which both partners and their child grow. I encourage therapists and doctors to get more than one copy of this book to share with every couple who is expecting.

Nilufer Devecigil , therapist, and author of In Yolu

There is a saying that the best thing you can do for your children is to have a great relationship with each other. Baby Bomb is a manual for making that happen. Every parent-to-be should read it, and everyone who is already a parent should read it. Your children will thrive, if you do.

Harville Hendrix, PhD , and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD , coauthors of Giving the Love That Heals

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2021 by Kara Hoppe and Stan Tatkin

New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Shoup

Acquired by Jennye Garibaldi

Edited by Jennifer Eastman

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hoppe, Kara, author. | Tatkin, Stan, author.

Title: Baby bomb : a relationship survival guide for new parents / Kara Hoppe and Stan Tatkin.

Description: Oakland, CA : New Harbinger Publications, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020055602 | ISBN 9781684037315 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Parenthood. | Couples. | Interpersonal relations. | Parenting.

Classification: LCC HQ755.8 .H659 2021 | DDC 306.874--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055602

To Charlie and Judeyou two are my everything. I cant imagine loving you more.

K. H.

To my mother and father, who showed me what it meant to be in love, be devoted, be dependable, and do the right thing. To my wife, Tracey, and my stepdaughter, Joanna, who continue to show me how to be secure functioning and live a blessed life.

S. T.

Contents

Foreword

For couple therapists, its an open secret: children can eviscerate a relationship. Sex researcher Barry McCarthy is fond of torturing audiences by telling parents, The research is clear. Sexual satisfaction plummets with the birth of the first child and springs back as soon as the youngest leaves for college.

Until youve personally crossed that threshold and had your heart melted by that scrunched little faceonly to wake at two in the morning to the sound of screaming and the prospect of falling out of bed and stumbling through the dark yet againyou just dont know. As blind urgency pushes you through the haze of sleep deprivationsuddenly mixed with a particularly robust hatred toward your resting partneryou poke them in the ribs and cry, Its your turn. Get up! I mean it; its your damn turn!

There really is no way to fully prepare for a baby, no matter how many books you read. One parent in my clinical practice put it this way: Its like political torture in some dictatorship. You have this ear-splitting thing that explodes in your face at all hours, without warning. And none of the inane, rather humiliating things you did last timejostle, coo, stand on one legturns off the shrieking. In fact, nothing seems to work.

Welcome to the baby bomb! Whatever you previously thought, throw most of it out the window.

Before the first of our two boys was born, I asked friends for novels I might enjoy during my month of paternity leave. Id have a few minutes here and there to escape, right? My best friend gave me a book of one-minute short stories, with a note that read simply Good luck!

What you most likely wont hear admitted to in playgroups or at the swings in the park is the one word I associate with this moment in the life cycle of any family: overwhelm. Im talking about the sense that its all too muchthat the noise, the endless need for patience, the tensions with your partner are more than you can bear.

The truth is that, like any intense love relationship, the parent-child relationship can serve as an emotional vacuum cleaner, pulling out of you the fissures and unhealed issues from your own childhood. Were your parents neglectful? Odds are youll be a super-attentive parent. Was your childhood tightly controlled? Odds are youll be a permissive parent. Which is not to say your partner will be the same. Often quite the opposite occurs. Your sensitivity reads to your partner as coddling. Their discipline feels to you like cruelty. Your sacred agenda for your little onethat they wont experience the parental mistakes you didis at odds with your partners agenda. It can lead to what I call parental hell, when you witness your partner actively doing to your child some version of the terrible things you experienced at that agethe very things you swore your child would never be subjected to. And you want to murder your partner.