A study funded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation was conducted to identify strategies to support high-quality facilitation in healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs for youth. The basis of the study is a formative evaluation of a facilitation skills training curriculum for HMRE program staff at two community-based organizations: Catholic Charities of Wayne County in New York and Youth and Family Services in South Dakota. This report explores the content-related curriculum on the following topics: Managing Energy, Debriefing and Drawing Out Teachable Moments, and Building Trust and Challenging the Comfort Zone. The curriculum and supporting resources are available for download as well as three tip sheets with key lessons from each module of the curriculum.

More than 3,000 Family Resource Centers (FRCs) in 36 states and the District of Columbia work with more than 2 million people annually, and because they have emerged organically without dedicated federal funding, they are often described as "America’s best kept secret." FRCs work with families in a strengths-based, multi-generational, family-centered approach to enhance parenting skills, foster the healthy development and well-being of children, youth, and families, prevent child abuse, increase school readiness, connect families to resources, develop parent and community leadership, engage males and fathers, support healthy marital and couples relationships, and promote family economic success.

The National Family Support Network will hold a webinar on December 14, 2022 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ET and will address the following three questions:

• What are FRCs and how are they networked across the country?
• What does research show about the positive outcomes FRCs have achieved for children and families?
• Why are so many public and private funders at the state, county, city, and community levels choosing to invest in FRCs?

Video recordings of the plenary and concurrent breakout sessions are now available for the Virtual Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) 2022, convened by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, held June 1 - 3, 2022. The conference recordings include sessions on the following topics:

• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Programs, Policies, and Populations
• Employment and Mobility in the Labor Market
• Youth Well-Being and the Transition to Adulthood
• Strengthening Families, Fatherhood, Marriages, and Relationships
• Evaluating Social Programs, Building Evidence, and Using Data
• Approaches to Alleviate Poverty and Expand Opportunity

Many healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs serve individual adults rather than couples. Such programs aim to help participants form and maintain healthy romantic relationships and avoid unhealthy relationships, regardless of their relationship status. However, there is little rigorous evidence on the ability of HMRE programs for individual adults to improve participants’ outcomes and none on the ability of these programs to improve outcomes over the longer term. To help build the evidence base on the diverse set of HMRE programs serving individual adults, this study examines MotherWise, a relationship skills program for women with low incomes who are pregnant or have just had a baby, and its impacts on women’s outcomes 30 months after study enrollment.

Nearly 20 million children (almost 1 in 4) live in a home without a resident father. These children are more likely to have social-emotional adjustment problems and failing grades at school, and to become involved in the juvenile justice system. To address the problems that arise from fathers’ physical or psychological absence from children’s lives, the U.S. Congress authorized in 2006 the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) initiative, allocating $150 million per year to two separate programs: Healthy Marriage (HM) programs to strengthen married and unmarried couple relationships; and Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs to increase the active engagement of non-residential and residential fathers as parents, partners, and economic providers. While almost all RF programs offer group programs attended and led by men, with a focus on parenting and men’s mental health, this brief presents evidence which shows that fatherhood programs that include both parenting partners and expand the curriculum to cover multiple domains of family functioning not only increase father involvement and collaboration between parents, but also reduce harsh parenting and support children’s development. The brief also illustrates evidence to support a greater integration of RF and HM programs, the use of expanded curricula that cover multiple aspects of family life, and where more attention is to be paid when assessing the impact of these programs on parents and children.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families by teaching them skills to improve communication and conflict management, how to recognize the characteristics of healthy romantic relationships, and how to strengthen existing relationships. HMRE programs may pair a relationship skills curriculum with other services, such as individualized job development or instruction on financial planning, that aim to promote economic stability or content on parenting skills. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of a novel program that sought to integrate Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) into an employment training program for young adults. To develop and implement the program, Family and Workforce Centers of America, a long-standing provider of employment training in St. Louis, Missouri, enhanced one of its traditional employment training programs to include lessons from a widely implemented relationship education curriculum, along with additional content on workplace relationship skills and personal finances. The integrated program called Career STREAMS (Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services) offered daily workshops for two weeks covering employment-related topics and information on HMRE, weekly booster sessions following the workshops, and individualized case management and job development services. This report documents the study methods, describes program costs and implementation, and presents program impacts after one year.

Fathers, children, and families benefit when fathers have healthy coparenting and romantic relationships. Given the importance of healthy relationships, many fatherhood programs address coparenting and romantic relationships in programming and aim to improve skills that are applicable across different types of relationships, including communication, conflict management, and emotional self-regulation. For American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) fathers, it is important to consider the diverse cultural traditions, histories, and unique political status of Tribes as sovereign nations. The purpose of this Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief is to provide practice-based, contextually relevant strategies that fatherhood programs serving AIAN fathers can use to support their healthy coparenting and romantic relationships.

Many fatherhood programs aim to or are required to include programming that supports healthy coparenting and romantic relationships through skill building and other services. However, despite the importance of supporting these healthy relationships, it can be difficult to do so in practice. This brief identifies three barriers fatherhood programs often face when addressing healthy relationships with fathers: engaging fathers in romantic relationship content, determining and implementing approaches for coparent engagement in relationship education, and providing support for fathers navigating legal systems and agencies that can affect their coparenting relationships. It also provides three resources that offer strategies fatherhood programs can use to address these barriers and better support fathers’ healthy relationships.

Fathers’ role within families has gradually evolved from traditional family breadwinner to that of more full and equal coparent involved in all aspects of caregiving. Research has shown that positive father-child involvement leads to better outcomes for children and families, and a critical component of improving fathers’ involvement with their children is supporting their coparenting and romantic or intimate relationships. In addition to providing parenting and economic stability services, fatherhood programs that receive federal funding are required to provide relationship education, which positions them ideally to help fathers establish and maintain healthy relationships. The Coparenting and Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education for Dads (CHaRMED) project has aimed to better understand how fatherhood programs support fathers’ coparenting and intimate relationships. This brief highlights some important lessons learned from CHaRMED that can inform how fatherhood program practitioners support fathers’ relationships and improve their—and their families’—well-being.