A method and approach for evaluating coparenting events during couples group interventions.

Introduction: When interventionists stimulate productive father-mother dialogues around coparenting, there are numerous potential benefits for families. Families stand to benefit from more positive involvement of fathers with both coparents and children, key contributors to healthy child developmental outcomes. In this report, we introduce a new strategy and rating system for helping practitioners and supervisors assess the nature and quality of coparenting-related dialogues and conversations in the context of couples group interventions.

Mary Main's contributions to our family systems approach to interventions with parents of young children.

In this paper we describe our Berkeley colleague Mary Main's intellectual contributions to our program of creating and evaluating couples group interventions for parents of young children. The first section presents the theoretical model and the projects at the heart of our research program. The second section illustrates how the Adult Attachment Interview, a Couple Attachment Interview, or a questionnaire describing attachment styles helped us to understand how internal working models of both parent-child and couple relationships added to our observational measures of couple and parenting behavior to provide unique information.

Searching for who benefits most and least: An analysis of moderators of the TRUE Dads fatherhood intervention.

Evaluations of interventions to promote fathers' involvement in family life typically focus on whether or not the intervention has a positive impact. Some evaluations also attempt to describe mediators that explain how the intervention is linked to specific outcomes. An evaluation of TRUE Dads, a Randomized Clinical Trial of a couples-based fatherhood intervention for low-income families, reported results that addressed these two issues.

TRUE Dads: The impact of a couples-based fatherhood intervention on family relationships, child outcomes, and economic self-sufficiency.

TRUE Dads, a federally funded Responsible Fatherhood intervention, aims to strengthen three of men's key roles in the family: (1) as fathers, building and maintaining positive engagement with their child; (2) as partners, maintaining a positive relationship with their co-parent; and (3) as providers, through fostering employment and economic self-sufficiency. A feature of the program is that low-income fathers and their co-parenting partners participate together in 6 3-hour group workshops, followed by optional participation in an additional 6 3-hour workshops. Fathers in the intervention condition were offered a chance to participate in a 2-week employment program.

Attachment goes to court: child protection and custody issues.

Attachment theory and research are drawn upon in many applied settings, including family courts, but misunderstandings are widespread and sometimes result in misapplications. The aim of this consensus statement is, therefore, to enhance understanding, counter misinformation, and steer family-court utilisation of attachment theory in a supportive, evidence-based direction, especially with regard to child protection and child custody decision-making. The article is divided into two parts.

Fathers' and mothers' attachment styles, couple conflict, parenting quality, and children's behavior problems: an intervention test of mediation.

A diverse sample of 239 primarily low-income couples participated in a random controlled trial of the Supporting Father Involvement couples group intervention. In this report, we examined the value of adding measures of fathers' attachment style and parenting to mothers' measures in order to explain variations in children's behavior problems. We also tested the hypothesis that the link between intervention-induced reductions in couple conflict and reductions in anxious/harsh parenting can be explained by intervention effects on parents' attachment insecurity or on anxiety and depression.

Enhancing Father Involvement in Low-Income Families: A Couples Group Approach to Preventive Intervention.

To address the problem of fathers' absence from children's lives and the difficulty of paternal engagement, especially among lower income families, government agencies have given increasing attention to funding father involvement interventions. Few of these interventions have yielded promising results. Father involvement research that focuses on the couple/coparenting relationship offers a pathway to support fathers' involvement while strengthening family relationships.

A more optimistic perspective on government-supported marriage and relationship education programs for lower income couples.

Comments on the original article by Matthew D. Johnson (see record 2012-08242-001). It is important to challenge some of Johnson's points about the effectiveness and reach of interventions to lower income couples and couples of color and his suggested prioritization of basic over applied research.

Couples' groups for parents of preschoolers: ten-year outcomes of a randomized trial.

This paper reports the results of a 10-year follow-up of two variations of a couples' group preventive intervention offered to couples in the year before their oldest child made the transition to kindergarten. One hundred couples were randomly assigned to (1) a low-dose control condition, (2) a couples' group meeting for 16 weeks that focused more on couple relationship issues among other family topics, or (3) a couples' group meeting for 16 weeks that focused more on parenting issues among other family issues, with an identical curriculum to condition (2). Earlier papers reported that both variations of the intervention produced positive results on parent-child relationships and on the children's adaptation to kindergarten and first grade, and that the groups emphasizing couple relationships also had additional positive effects on couple interaction quality.

Marriage and fatherhood programs.

To improve the quality and stability of couple and father-child relationships in fragile families, researchers are beginning to consider how to tailor existing couple-relationship and father-involvement interventions, which are now targeted on married couples, to the specific needs of unwed couples in fragile families. The goal, explain Philip Cowan, Carolyn Pape Cowan, and Virginia Knox, is to provide a more supportive developmental context for mothers, fathers, and, especially, the children in fragile families. The authors present a conceptual model to explain why couple-relationship and father-involvement interventions developed for middle- and low-income married couples might be expected to provide benefits for children of unmarried parents.

Attachment, Marital Satisfaction, and Divorce During the First Fifteen Years of Parenthood.

This study examines two overlapping longitudinal samples of U.S. couples with children, covering a period of 15 years after the first child's birth.

Adult attachment, couple attachment, and children's adaptation to school: an integrated attachment template and family risk model.

Most attachment theorists assume that parenting style is the central mechanism linking the quality of parents' attachment with their parents and adaptation in their children. Outside the attachment tradition, family risk models assume that many family factors affect children's adaptation, chief among them being couple relationship quality. The present study tests an integrated model that considers both theoretical and empirical links between attachment theory and family risk research.

An approach to preventing coparenting conflict and divorce in low-income families: strengthening couple relationships and fostering fathers' involvement.

In the context of current concern about levels of marital distress, family violence, and divorce, the SFI study is evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention to facilitate the positive involvement of low-income Mexican American and European American fathers with their children, in part by strengthening the men's relationships with their children's mothers. The study design involves a randomized clinical trial that includes assignment to a 16-week couples group, a 16-week fathers group, or a single-session control group. Couples in both group interventions and the control condition include partners who are married, cohabiting, and living separately but raising a young child together.

Promoting healthy beginnings: a randomized controlled trial of a preventive intervention to preserve marital quality during the transition to parenthood.

Couples expecting their first child were randomly assigned to intervention (n=28) and comparison groups (n=38) to assess the efficacy of a couples intervention and examine marital satisfaction trajectories across the transition to parenthood. The primarily European American sample (M age=30 years) completed assessments of marital satisfaction at 5 points from the final trimester of pregnancy to 66 months postpartum. Growth curve analyses indicated a normative linear decline in marital satisfaction.

Couple attachment and the quality of marital relationships: method and concept in the validation of the new couple attachment interview and coding system.

This study investigates links between adult attachment and marital quality in 73 married couples, using a new Couple Attachment Interview that was modeled after the Adult Attachment Interview but focuses on the relationship between the partners. A coding system (CAICS) comparing the interview protocol to prototypes for secure, dismissing, and preoccupied attachment styles yielded continuous ratings of all three styles, and categorical classifications of secure/insecure for each partner. The study found direct links between couple attachment and both self-reported and observed marital quality, with all three continuous scores contributing uniquely to the equations.

Coming home upset: Gender, marital satisfaction, and the daily spillover of workday experience into couple interactions.

This study explored how daily changes in workday pace and end-of-the-workday mood were related to nightly variations in withdrawn and angry marital behavior. For 3 days, 82 husbands and wives from 42 couples completed questionnaires at the end of the workday and at bedtime. More negatively arousing workdays were linked with angrier marital behavior for women and less angry and more withdrawn behavior for men.

Interventions as tests of family systems theories: marital and family relationships in children's development and psychopathology.

This paper addresses the role of family-based studies of preventive and therapeutic interventions in our understanding of normal development and psychopathology. The emphasis is on interventions designed to improve parent-child and/or marital relationships as a way of facilitating development and reducing psychopathology in children and adolescents. Intervention designs provide the gold standard for testing causal hypotheses.

Attachment security in couple relationships: a systemic model and its implications for family dynamics.

Theory and research on adult attachment style emphasize the crucial role that the sense of attachment security plays in the formation and maintenance of couple relationships. In the present article, we review studies that have examined the contribution of adult attachment style to relational cognitions, emotions, and behaviors as well as to the formation, quality, and stability of dating and marital relationships. We discuss some of the measurement and design issues raised by this research.

Satisfaction with child care arrangements: effects on adaptation to parenthood.

The relationships between parents' satisfaction with their child care arrangements and factors from four domains of a family systems model were examined for effects on adaptation to parenthood. Results suggest the desirability of including both mothers and fathers in child care interventions, public policy debates, and future research.