The Gottman Institute’s research-based Bringing Baby Home (BBH) workshops prepare couples for life with a baby and help them be the best parenting team possible. In a relaxed and supportive environment, parents learn to strengthen their relationship and foster their baby’s development.
When babies grow up in a home with a positive, playful parenting team, they feel safe and nurtured and available to learn. They cry less, they smile more, and their parents’ cooperation helps them to pay better attention during play time so that they get more out of it.
Many couples experience a drop in intimacy and sense of compatibility during the first 3 years of their new baby’s life. The Bringing Baby Home Workshop is specially designed to help prospective, adoptive, pregnant, and new parents keep their relationship refreshed and thriving. Couples will discover tools for balancing baby-needs with relationship-needs, enhancing their communication, better support each other through common experiences, and happily redefine their goals and identities.
Bringing Baby Home (BBH) Outline
This six-session workshop (2 hours per session) includes online and offline content supporting a couple’s relationship, their communication, their conflict management skills, and information about what to expect with the baby’s development.
Topics include how to increase relationship satisfaction between parents, decrease the risk of postpartum depression and improve co-parenting skills while meeting the emotional and psychological needs of your child.
Each session will include:
- Informative Lecture
- Group Discussion
- Research-based Gottman partner exercises
- Guidance on how to create regular rituals to strengthen friendship and manage conflict
Offline content will include:
- Exercises to do on your own time.
- Opportunity to incorporate relationship strengthening rituals into your life
All of these materials are designed to help couples successfully transition to parenthood.
Materials Included
Along with information and material included in the lecture, you will receive:
- Bringing Baby Home Workbook, featuring 15 chapters and over 250 pages of materials
- Second Sheet of Exercises for the second person
- Six Card Decks featuring different exercises we will be doing
You will be provided with the electronic versions of these materials. Physical copies may be purchased at a small additional cost.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
This workshop is designed to offer couples specific skills to maintain a higher level of relationship satisfaction after becoming parents. People who should attend include:
- Couples thinking about having or adopting children
- Couples planning on having or adopting children
- Pregnant and expecting couples
- Parents with children under the age of four, babies in arms are welcomed!
- Established parents with more children coming
WHY ENROLL?
The Bringing Baby Home Workshop is a research based curriculum with strong evidence of its effectiveness. Couples who participate in the program showed:
- more stability in their relationship
- greater responsiveness to their infant’s signals
- better co-parenting abilities and working together more positively
- greater father involvement and more secure father-infant attachment
- better infant development, including more smiles and laugher, with less language delays
- better mental health, including fewer mothers showing symptoms of postpartum depression
As a couple you will both experience 12 hours of learning and engage in exercises and activities to:
- Strengthen your couple and parenting relationship
- Improve couple communication
- Gain research-based skills and practice them to navigate conflict
- Learn about connecting as a couple and a family
- Recognize emotions in baby and what baby is communicating
- Plan on how to keep intimacy and passion in your relationship
- Understand information on and resources for postpartum mood issues
- Reflect and discuss parenting roles, philosophies, and parenting as a team
You will also learn the answers to fundamental questions around parenthood, including:
- How do “we” become “three” as a family in the transition to parenthood?
- What happens to us?
- How do we manage conflict and stay connected?
- Do we agree on parenting? What are our parenting roles?
- How do we connect with our infant/child?
- What about intimacy and sex?
- What are our goals and shared values?
Learn more about the course from its founders, John Gottman and Carolyn Pirak:
Lara Elfstrand
I help couples to fall in love with parenting… together. I do that by helping babies to cry less, smile more, and develop well; helping parents to support growth from a calm, confident, unconditional place; and helping couples to reduce resentment and isolation and manage conflict while increasing friendship and intimacy. I help couples to focus on their relationship as something that needs to be protected and nurtured during the transition to parenthood, as their identities change and they develop their different parenting styles.
I am a postpartum doula. I have a master’s in early childhood special education and am endorsed as an advanced transdisciplinary infant parent mental health practitioner. I am certified in Happiest Baby on the Block, the Gottman Bringing Baby Home program, and infant massage.
I have taught Bringing Baby Home classes to young couples and families in a variety of life stages—considering parenthood, expecting a baby, or with an infant or toddler at home. Learn more about me at little-elf.org and check out my Learn to Love Podcast interview here.
TIME, PLACE AND PRICE
Next training is To Be Determined.
Course will be LIVE and ONLINE on the Zoom.
$350 – $450 Sliding Scale
We know our current times are challenging for everyone, and we know love is needed now more than ever. So we are happy to be offering this training at a sliding scale from $350 – $450. If you are financially able, we encourage you to select the $450 option to help support those in need right now. If our current pandemic has put a strain on your finances, then feel free to choose the $350 option.
The cost of registration includes:
- A couple’s (two people) registration
- Participation in all six two-hour sessions
- Parenting Resources
We have one scholarship for those with financial need. Send an email to info@the-heart-center.com with your interest in the course and a couple sentences on your financial situation.
Class size will be limited to six couples only, to give each participant time to ask questions, get feedback, and feel supported.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
“Most classes focus on baby baby baby but this course equally addresses the two people that made the baby!”
– Father of a newborn
“I enjoy the honesty of the class. It is very easy to share what is going on and it feels very much like a safe space.”
– An expectant father from San Jose, CA
“The Bringing Baby Home class was a great experience and we recommend it to new parents… It was great to share our stories and thoughts with the group in hopes that if it happens to them, they know they aren’t alone.”
-Mother of an 18-month old
“We learned a lot of tools that we can put into our routine or reference anytime that help us focus on our relationship as something that needs to be protected and nurtured. The class helped put in perspective how much stress an infant can place on the relationship, and the need for guides and goalposts in keeping the parents on the same team.”
– Ben
“I learned that there are ways to strengthen a marriage through intentional rituals that involve listening to each other, getting to know each other, appreciating each other, being open to compromise, and starting to see how the other person may perceive the relationship. I consider one of the biggest wins to be becoming less afraid of the transition to parenting. Now I feel like I have a better understanding of what to expect or be flexible with when the baby enters the family. And that there are specific strategies to combat conflict and overwhelm, and rituals to make everyone in the family stay connected and feeling loved. I think the habit of thanking each other for the small things and for specific things is very helpful because it makes both of us feel appreciated on an ongoing basis. I think setting aside time weekly to focus on our marriage, learn more about healthy relationships, and to envision what we want for our family helped build a stronger foundation for our marriage before the baby comes. I feel like the program de-mystified what makes couples successful and happy in the long term.”
– Kat
Register Now
Registration will open once dates are confirmed.
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