De deux à trois... transition à la parentalité et alliances familiales dans les familles lesboparentales

The present paper focuses on a particular period in the family life cycle called « transition to parenthood ». Previous researches have studied this complex period and emphasized the necessity to adopt a multifactor and procedural perspective in order to understand the developing family system. Two main aspects were chosen to be studied : a) the development of family interactive competences, the couple's capacity to organize triadic interactive models during pregnancy and to reorganize these models following the child's birth ; and b) the child's own characteristics, such as temperament, as factors contributing to the development of precocious interactive competences and to the parenting style. These aspects have been widely explored in the context of heterosexual parents families but very few has been written concerning homosexual parents families. Most of previous studies aimed to compare the child development in these two types of families, focusing on different dimensions such as the quality of parent-child relationship, the psychosocial development, or the gender identity. This paper presents the situation of a family from our current longitudinal study in the Systemic and Relational Psychopathology Clinic, University of Liège. It describes two stages of the Lausanne Triadic Play : a prenatal situation taking place at the 7th month of pregnancy, and a postnatal situation when the child is 3 months old. We observe the particular interests of the LTP prenatal procedure as a predictive instrument of the parental abilities to enact their interactive competences after the child's birth, as verified with the postnatal procedure. © 2013, Médecine and Hygiène.