Organizing With Couples: New Parents

As we continue through our three part series about working with couples, please see part one about Organizing With Couples. In part two I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts with you about working with new parents and how organizing yourself and your new roles as a new family is so important as you welcome a brand new member to the family.

New Parents:
I love working with new parents, they are fun because they’re full of possibility and are engaging in a really positive process and are usually very open to new ideas and systems. If you were slightly disorganized prior to becoming a parent, it is really important to acknowledge that and see the need to have systems for your new needs in order to make it work. Otherwise, that new little bundle can swiftly amplify the problem.

New parents are really looking for an answer and it’s a really good time to find these new systems because they haven’t really established the rules yet. It’s nice to help them make those rule together so that one person doesn’t end up doing it all only because they are the one who put the system in place.

Responsibilities:
When talking about roles for couples, there are a lot of different things that happen within a family that need attention like daily money managing, long-term financial estate planning and insurance. When a couple decides on who is responsible for these items it is important to consider which person might be better suited for the day-to-day finances verses who might be better working with the long-term planning and insurance. You might be surprised to find one person may not fit both roles. The same process should be used for deciding who would be better at keeping the family social calendars or making travel plans. Think about who is in charge of what duty and clearly establish the roles.

Historical Roles – Do They Still Work?
We typically fall into similar roles that our parents were responsible for. But it’s important to take a step back and question those roles.
Ask yourself these questions:
Does this work for me in my current position in life?
Can I do what my dad did?
Does that makes sense?
Does the role my mom played work for the life I’m are leading now with the job I have outside of the home?

I think for the most part this is the first generation where previous roles really do not work like they used to. I tell new mothers that you have no role model for this. This is new territory so you need to organize it and think about how you want it to happen because it’s not going to come from the seat of your pants.