Effects of length of marriage and number of children on marital satisfaction among baptist couples in lagos state, Nigeria

The present study investigated the effectiveness of assertiveness training and marital communication skills. The moderating effect of length of marriage and the number of children were also examined. The study adopted pre-test-post test control quasi-experimental design with 3 x 2 x 2 factorial multistage sampling technique was used to select 84 participants; representing married couples who were selected from the three local Baptist churches of the Baptist conferences in Lagos. The comprehensive marital satisfaction scale r = 0.98 was the research instruments used. Two (2) hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance using Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA0 and Duncan post hoc test. The study revealed that there was significant main effect of length of marriage on marital satisfaction (F1 31 = 4.90; p< 0.05) it was also revealed that there was significant main effect of the number of children on marital satisfaction (F1 31 = 6.24; p > 0.05). Based on these findings, married and would-be-couples are encouraged to give birth to a small size of children they can manage as that would reduce stress associated with parenting.