Question

Can relationship skills education improve the relationships of low-income couples – and the lives of their children?

Why are we asking?
Regardless of whether parents are married or unmarried, children benefit from living in stable, low-conflict families. When parents experience less conflict in their relationships with each other, parent-child relationships are more supportive and nurturing, and children fare better on a range of social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. MDRC helped develop and is evaluating relationship skills education programs for low-income married and unmarried couples with children.

Working Toward a Solution

Report

Early Implementation Lessons from the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation

An important first hurdle for voluntary programs is recruiting and retaining eligible participants. This report describes how ten Supporting Healthy Marriage programs focused on developing effective marketing strategies, keeping couples engaged in the program, and building management systems. These efforts resulted in encouraging early levels of participation by low-income couples.

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Working Paper

Policies That Strengthen Fatherhood and Family Relationships

This working paper, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reviews evidence about the effectiveness of two strategies to strengthen family relationships and fathers’ involvement with their children: fatherhood programs aimed at disadvantaged noncustodial fathers and relationship skills programs for parents who are together.

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Report

Early Impacts from the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation

This report, which presents 12-month impact results from a demonstration designed to strengthen marriages among low-income married couples with children, shows that the program produced a consistent pattern of small, positive effects on multiple aspects of couples’ relationships, including measures of relationship quality, psychological and physical abuse, and adult individual psychological distress.

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