SYNOPSIS Objective The goal of this study was to identify determinants of maternal gatekeeping at the transition to parenthood. Design Participants included 182 different-gender dual-earner couples. During pregnancy, expectant parents completed questionnaires regarding their psychological functioning, attitudes, and expectations, and at 3 months postpartum questionnaires regarding maternal gatekeeping behavior and gate closing attitudes. Results SEM analyses revealed that mothers were more likely to close the gate to fathers when mothers held greater perfectionistic expectations for fathers’ parenting, had poorer psychological functioning, perceived their romantic relationship as less stable, and had higher levels of parenting self-efficacy. In contrast, fathers with lower parenting self-efficacy appeared to elicit greater maternal gate closing behavior. Mothers who engaged in greater gate opening behavior were more religious. Conclusions Maternal gatekeeping may be more strongly associated with maternal expectations and psychological functioning than with maternal traditional gender attitudes. Fathers’ characteristics are less predictive of maternal gatekeeping than mothers’ characteristics.

Coparenting, or the ways partners relate to each other in their roles as parents, is important to child and family functioning. However, it remains unclear whether coparenting begins at or prior to a child’s birth. This study tested whether expectant parents’ behavior in the Prenatal Lausanne Trilogue Play procedure (PLTP), an assessment designed in Switzerland for examining prebirth coparenting behavior, forecasted postnatal observations of coparenting behavior in a sample of first-time parents in the United States. 182 dual-earner couples expecting their first child participated in the PLTP during the third trimester of pregnancy, and at 9 months postpartum, observations of coparenting behavior were obtained from mother-father-infant play interactions. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated significant continuity between expectant parents’ prenatal coparenting behavior and their observed postpartum coparenting behavior one year later. In particular, couples who engaged in higher quality prenatal coparenting behavior demonstrated more supportive and less undermining coparenting behavior at 9 months postpartum, even after controlling for observed prenatal couple behavior and self-reported couple relationship functioning. Thus, this study demonstrated the validity and utility of the PLTP as a window into the development of coparenting, and supported the notion that the coparenting relationship develops prior to the child’s birth and is already distinct from the couple relationship.

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Our analysis identified patterns in Fifty Shades that reflect pervasive intimate partner violence-one of the biggest problems of our time. Further, our analysis adds to a growing body of literature noting dangerous violence standards being perpetuated in popular culture.