Assistant Professors Melissa Curran and Emily Butler are initiating a study of families going through the transition to parenthood using a unique synthesis of perspectives from family systems, attachment, and a biopyschosocial model of health. The transition to parenthood is known to be potentially both stressful as well as beneficial for partners; new parents are exposed to situations in which they must take on new responsibilities and negotiate old roles with one another as partners, and together as new parents. This transition offers a unique opportunity to study each partner’s perspective both before and after the birth of the couple’s first child in terms of their stability and commitment to one another as partners, and also their own, dyadic, and family health habits. An important emphasis of this research will be on the understudied role of fathers, as well as on the coparenting relationship between the father and mother with their child, and the impact of these processes on stability, commitment, and physical health habits.