This workshop is offered in two formats (choose one):
The content supports a couple’s relationship, their communication, their conflict management skills, and information about what to expect with your 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.
The workshop will include:
- Informative Lecture
- Group Discussion
- Research-based exercises
- Guidance on how to create regular rituals to strengthen friendship and manage conflict
- Opportunity to incorporate relationship strengthening rituals into your life.
All of these materials are designed to help couples successfully transition to parenthood.
Who Should Attend?
Our 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 Sign-Up?
Our workshop is developed from 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 partner involvement and more secure partner-infant attachment
- better infant development, including more smiles and laughter, with less language delays
- better mental health, including fewer mothers showing symptoms of postpartum depression
As a couple, you will both experience a supportive and comfortable space 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?
Time, Place, and Price
Our workshop is offered in two formats (choose one):
- Online – October 10 & 11, 2023
- Price: $250 total for both days until September 30, 2023
- $350 total for both days beginning October 1, 2023
- Two days: October 10, 2023 and October 11, 2023
- Time: 7:00pm-8:30pm
- Place: Zoom link will be provided upon registration
- Price: $250 total for both days until September 30, 2023
- In-Person: October 21, 2023
- Price: $350 total until September 30, 2023
- $450 total beginning October 1, 2023
- One day: October 21, 2023
- Time: 9:00am-3:00pm (ET)
- Place: 2200 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22201
- Price: $350 total until September 30, 2023
Erin Metheny, LMFT
I am a mother of two children and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a passion to help families to thrive. I have over 10 years of experience providing couples counseling and relationship workshops for couples. I have advanced training in Emotionally Focused Therapy for working with couples or EFT. I have a strong understanding of attachment and connection and a desire to help individuals find their way to closeness and reconnection, especially while they are raising children.
When I became a mom and recovered from postpartum depression and sleep deprivation, I knew I wanted to help more families become rested, healthy, and happy. I became certified as a pediatric sleep consultant in order to change the lives of more families by providing them with the right tools and compassion needed to become well rested. Working together means that you will have a guide and a friend to walk alongside you during the challenging times and to celebrate with you during your successes.