Lead
Parenting books go quiet on postpartum sexuality for understandable reasons — it is hard to write about, readers approach it guardedly, and the margin for causing harm with imprecise language is real. The result is that most parents accumulate experience in silence, without a frame of reference for what they're going through.
This article draws on peer-reviewed longitudinal data to describe postpartum sexual health with clinical precision. Its purpose is description, not prescription: what the research shows, what it does not show, and what parents can do with that information. There is no single "normal" recovery arc, no advice about what a couple's sex life should look like at any given point, and no suggestion that difficulty is a signal of relationship failure.