Navigating Stress and Relationship Conflict as Parents: How to Work as a Team After Having Kids

It’s no secret that parenting is stressful. The mental load. New responsibilities. The pressure to break cycles and support your children’s development and emotional wellbeing. Becoming a parent comes with a lot of labor and plenty of challenges. What we often don’t realize is how that stress can breed relationship conflict. 

67% of couples report a decline in relationship satisfaction in the first three years after having a baby—and it’s easy to understand why. 

All of those stressors have a way of impacting how we show up, not just for our children, but also with our partner. 

Arguments over the invisible load, ongoing resentment, and a lack of quality time together can all lead to relationship conflict.

The good news is that when we understand the way that we respond to stress and build awareness of our own emotional regulation skills, we can work to foster greater connection and teamwork so we can navigate challenges together. 

This week on The Momwell Podcast, I’m joined by family therapist Liz Earnshaw, author of ‘Til Stress Do Us Part and founder of Liz Listens, to discuss stress and relationship conflict after having a baby, and how we can learn to connect, communicate, and work as a team. 

How Stress Can Affect Relationships

We’re often blindsided by struggles in our relationship after having a baby. It’s common for resentment to build and conflict to increase. And when this happens, we tend to think that our partner is the cause of our stress. What we don’t realize is that in many cases, it’s the other way around—our stress is causing the conflict. 

Liz pointed out that couples without children function with a different degree of stress than they do after they become parents. They might have bumps in the road, but they feel that they can navigate stress as a team, manage differences, and work things out when struggles arise.

Parenting is inherently stressful, and those stressors can knock a relationship off course. 

Once a baby enters the picture, however, that can change. Parenting is inherently stressful. Crying, anxiety, dirty diapers, a messy house, sleep deprivation, body image issues, differences in desire—all of those stressors can knock a relationship off course and into choppy waters. 

The same two people who had navigated stress together and had historically functioned as a team are oftentimes at each other’s throats, no longer on the same page, and can quite swiftly forget that they love each other. 

But if we can understand our stress, the way we each respond to it, and how to support each other, we can learn to get back on the same page and function as a team again. 

Stress, Self-Regulation, and Relationship Conflict

Liz defined stressors as anything difficult you face. But it’s important to remember that stress isn’t inherently a bad thing. Liz pointed out that stress is motivating—without it, we wouldn’t have much to do or a reason to do it. Stress can be good for our bodies and our brains. 

Going to college, starting a new job, moving, or even physical exercise are all examples of positive stress in our lives, giving us a natural challenge to achieve or accomplish something. 

But stress that is unmanageable is not positive. When stress feels unmanageable, it triggers changes in our bodies and minds that causes us to perceive the source as a personal threat. Liz said that part of that stress reaction is mind-based, but a lot of it is body-based. 

Stress can impact our physical health, mental health, and our relationships

Stress hormones get released into our bodies, actually changing the way we think. We aren’t able to see things clearly, we feel dysregulated, and we don’t act like our baseline selves. This kind of stress can impact our physical health, mental health, and our relationships. 

Our ability to tolerate stress can change from day to day, depending on our capacity. What might feel manageable on a full night’s sleep and a day when we have nothing going on could shift into the distressing form when we’re exhausted, overworked, or up against a deadline. 

For new parents, that capacity often feels lower. They’re sleep deprived, overstimulated, coping with new mental labor and the ongoing demands of their child. They are self-regulating from sun-up to sun-down and even throughout the night. This can lead to self-regulation depletion—when we simply run out of our capacity to continually regulate. 

If we continue to deplete ourselves, we might find that we react negatively to each other’s stress, escalating each other and causing more relationship conflict. 

How to Communicate Through Relationship Conflict and Stress

It’s important for us to not only build awareness of our own capacity and stress level, but also to understand the differences in the way that our partner experiences stress and what their triggers are. 

Liz pointed out that it can be difficult to understand when other people’s experiences are different from our own. You may be able to handle the sounds of noisy children better than your partner, or vice versa. Or your partner may have a higher tolerance for a cluttered house than you. 

But if we are dismissive of each other’s stress or experiences, it only escalates stress and makes us feel more frustrated and less alone. 

If we want to work as a team to navigate the stress of parenting, open communication is vital. This means honestly expressing your concerns to your partner, while at the same time actively and empathetically listening to theirs.  

Liz identified a three-part goal when working with your partner to navigate stress in your lives:

Self-Regulation

Self-regulation involves building awareness of your personal stressors and taking steps to reduce them when possible. It also means being proactive to take care of your own needs and building in-the-moment skills to regulate and bring yourself back to a state of calm.

It’s also important to be honest with ourselves when we’re at capacity. That might mean asking for help or calling in support from our partner if possible. 

Co-Regulation

Co-regulation involves building awareness about our partner’s reactions and stress and validating rather than dismissing it. We can use our own regulation to keep a situation from escalating, giving our partner the chance to regroup and regulate themselves. 

Building Awareness of the Environment

The more aware of your environment and potential stress triggers, the more you can control it and reduce those stressors. This can also apply to your partner’s stressors. 

You can’t control your partner, but both members in a relationship are responsible for understanding the environment and conditions that may stress each other out. Liz said that when you’re in a relationship, you’re responsible for yourself and for the other person.

Validating each other and knowing when to step in and offer support, even when we don’t understand why the particular stressor feels so big, can help us work as a team. 

For example, if one of you feels very stressed out by clutter, then the other might facilitate a family clean-up before a transition. Or if one of you is particularly stressed by a tantrum, the other might step in and proactively manage one when it happens. 

The goal is not to take away the stressors from the other person or assume too much responsibility. 

The goal is not to take away the stressors from the other person or to assume too much responsibility for our partner’s stress—it’s simply to validate your partner’s experience and give them the space and capacity to regulate. 

The Invisible Load, Gender Norms, and Relationship Conflict

Another factor that can increase stress and contribute to relationship conflict for parents is the invisible load and the distribution of household labor. 

Moms often bear the brunt of not just the physical household tasks, but the invisible labor as well. This can be particularly draining and stressful—and it can cause a situation where one partner is carrying a great deal more stress than the other. 

It’s not just about redistributing labor—it’s also about feeling seen, acknowledged, and valued. 

Addressing this problem isn’t just about redistributing labor—it’s also about feeling seen, acknowledged, and valued. 

If our partners don’t understand the weight of the mental load or the stress we are carrying, and they don’t take an active role in that labor or even validate that we’re carrying it, we can feel abandoned and invisible. 

This dismissiveness continues to escalate the problem because it leaves us carrying this stress with no way to resolve it. Stress that doesn’t get resolved doesn’t go away—it builds under the surface until it erupts. 

Confronting Gender Norms and the Invisible Load

If you’re experiencing stress around the mental load, having open conversations about this weight is important. Sometimes our partners simply don’t understand the mental load or why we’re struggling with it. 

The invisible load is often linked so strongly to gender norms that we don’t realize we’re carrying—and it can get interwoven with our identity. We might find ourselves repeating patterns from our parents without even realizing this. 

For example, we might feel that we need to make every meal from scratch because our mom did—but perhaps she wasn’t working full-time or carrying the same level of responsibility that we are. Maybe she wasn’t even as emotionally involved as we want to be. 

Or perhaps our partner is coping with pressure to be more involved and break cycles, but also finds themselves playing out social patterns they witnessed in their childhood.  

Both partners might have to confront these gender norms and decide what is really important. 

We have to realize that there is often a tradeoff—we can’t be ALL the things. Both partners might have to confront these gender norms and decide what is really important to them, and what can be let go. From there, it becomes easier to share the mental load in a fair and sustainable way. 

How to Address Stress and Relationship Conflict as a Team

When we experience stress, it’s easy and common to want to blame our partner—especially when we’re harboring resentment about the invisible load. 

But it’s important to separate our partner from the problem and work to see them not as the cause but as a teammate that can address the problem with us. This can feel particularly hard, especially after years of resentment and conflict. We might find ourselves critical and defensive, leading to ongoing patterns and repeated arguments. 

Liz pointed out that when we blame our partner, dismiss their experience, or become accusatory, it only increases our stressors. 

Our partner isn’t the problem. The problem might be that one of the children is sick and somebody needs to stay home and juggle work. Or the problem might be the mental labor and the way it’s distributed. Maybe the problem is the household projects that need to be done. 

Whatever the real problem is, working together with your partner against the issue is far more rewarding and effective than working against them. 

Working with your partner against the issue is far more rewarding and effective than blaming them. 

When a team encounters a problem or a challenge or they lose a game, they don’t turn to the other player and tell them everything they did wrong. They practice, they work hard, and they come together to do better next time. That’s the mindset we want to build with our partner. 

This isn’t always easy. It requires taking ownership and accountability for our own responsibilities. It requires communicating and advocating for our needs. And most of all, it requires empathy. But when we can work to get on the same team, we can navigate stress together, validating, supporting, and lifting each other up along the way. 

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