AOL

No one wants to say it, but everyone knows it's true: having babies and parenting small children can be pretty tough on a marriage.

Are you and your partner coming against the inevitable challenges of early parenthood? Do you see things differently now that you have kids? Do you think you're the only ones going through it?

A new book, Babyproofing Your Marriage, addresses all these common stories and more. Three wives, mothers and friends - Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O'Neill and Julia Stone - have written a funny, thought-provoking, no-holds barred account of the impact parenthood has on marriage.

Fuelled by their own first-hand experiences and conversations with hundreds of men and women, the authors reveal that the struggle to balance marriage and family is nearly universal. Everyone is going through the same thing.

Babyproofing Your Marriage explores both sides of the post-baby relationship divide, and offers simple but effective ways in which husbands and wives can bridge the gap and reconnect with one another - so that having children doesn't mean sacrificing being a couple.

Babyproofing Your Marriage takes on the most contentious issues: the tit-for-tat arguments over the division of labour (scorekeeping), managing the demands of the in-laws and outlaws, the oxymoron of the family holiday, and perhaps that most combustible of all post-baby squabbles - the dwindling sex life (otherwise known as the Sex Obsessive/Ice Queen Vortex).