difficulties, Cowan and Cowan (1995) argued the need for "interventions to ease the

transition to parenthood" for this seemingly low risk population and have called for

prevention programs to be provided systematically to new parents. In this section, the

present study's findings and implications for providing counseling to couples

transitioning to parenthood are discussed, along with implications for prevention

programs intended for groups of new parents.

 Like others before it (e.g., Cowan & Cowan, 2000; Feldman, 2000; Gottman, 1994;

Ruble et al., 1988), this study reiterated the importance of fathers' involvement in the

practical and emotional care of their children. Fathers who did not contribute as much to

housework and childcare as they had expected they would had lower levels of individual

well-being. Fathers' level of involvement also seemed to affect wives, for whom more

child-related task differentiation predicted violated expectations. Couples who reported

more task differentiation of child care reported higher levels of disaffection in their

marriages and role dissatisfaction. These results reinforce Shapiro and Gottman's (2005)

contention that "it should be an important objective of any transition to parenthood

intervention to keep fathers involved with their babies" (p. 4). Interventions have

succeeded in helping couples to increase their marital and role satisfaction, but often

without resulting in significant changes in fathers' involvement with housework and child

care (e.g., Cowan & Cowan, 2000; Hawkins et al., 1994) As some of the research has

indicated the quality of the marital relationship may predict fathers' level of participation,

therapists and family educators may need to work on improving marital satisfaction to

encourage fathers to be more involved. However, as Hawkins and his colleagues (1994)

argued, professionals need to guard against increasing satisfaction while undercutting