Want a better marriage, sex life? Get your husband to look after the kids

Better maternal diet linked to lower risk of heart abnormalities in babies at birth

THE secret to a better sex life could be as simple as getting your husband to look after the kids, researchers have found.

They discovered that if men take up more of the child-care duties, splitting them equally with their female partners, heterosexual couples have more satisfaction with their relationships and their sex lives.

The Georgia State University research was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association and reported in DailyMail UK.

Researchers said that when men do the majority of the child care, their female partners exhibited the highest overall satisfaction with their sex lives.

However, men demonstrated the lowest overall satisfaction with their sex lives.

Meanwhile, a relatively healthy diet before pregnancy is linked to a lower rate of certain heart abnormalities in babies at birth, finds research published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood (Fetal & Neonatal Edition).

Congenital heart defects are common, costly, and affect around one per cent of newborns. Around one in four affected children will die infancy as a result. So far, doctors have few preventive options at their fingertips.

Some studies suggest that multivitamin supplements might lower the risk while others suggest that better diet quality might make a difference to the rate of heart abnormalities at birth.

“The important point to be made is that when we’re looking at child care, the difference that we find is really between arrangements where the mother is largely responsible for child care and everything else,” said Daniel L. Carlson.

Along with graduate students Sarah Hanson and Andrea Fitzroy analysed data from more than 900 heterosexual couples’ responses in the 2006 Marital Relationship Study (MARS).

The researchers found that when women were responsible for most or all of the child care, both parties reported both the lowest quality relationships and sex lives.

They concluded that beyond splitting child care responsibilities equally, dads in a heterosexual relationship could take on the majority of child-care responsibility without negative effects on the quality of the couples’ relationships.

These couples had just as much sex as couples with egalitarian arrangements, and were just as satisfied with the amount of sex they were having.

“What we find is that there’s generally little to no downside to men being largely responsible for child care,” Carlson said. “We conclude that being an engaged father is very important to men. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t see such a high level of satisfaction. It suggests that father engagement and sharing child care with one’s partner is important to both sexes.”