love is respect hosts Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month (TDVAM) annually as an effort to focus on advocacy and education to stop dating abuse before it starts. The theme, “Love Like That,” illuminates what ‘that’ means regarding healthy and unhealthy relationships. This webpage offers the 2024 TDVAM materials, including an action guide, a calendar of events, and a social media guide.

The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center is hosting a re-watch of a webinar hosted originally in 2023, on February 21, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. ET. In this live re-watch, participants will hear a discussion on how youth advocates can address teen dating violence in Tribal communities. The webinar will include available tools and resources for Native youth; defining violent versus healthy relationships, and empowering the next generation through Indigenous values.

This blogpost summarizes findings from two new nationally representative studies under the Couple Relationships and Transitions Experiences (CREATE) study that examines the importance of marital interventions in early marriage. The interventions are offered before and after marriage and are designed to improve relationship satisfaction, communication, and relationship skills. The first study identified participation rates in early marriage interventions and whether these interventions were perceived as beneficial and change producing by the couples. The second study examined whether intervention program participants have better marital outcomes.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report provides data that assesses the third cohort of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) grantees following their grant award in 2015. Data snapshots cover client recruitment and characteristics through the end of the grant in 2020. The data highlights staffing and implementation, services offered to support healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood, and other program components.

The Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), a key program of the Family and Youth Services Bureau of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, was created to address teen pregnancy. PREP grantees are required to include the Positive Youth Development (PYD) approach in their program design. PYD provides a framework to create and implement effective programs to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among youth using six adulthood preparation subjects (APSs) that support youth in the transition to adulthood. These APSs include healthy relationships, adolescent development, financial literacy, parent-child communication, education and career success, and healthy life skills. This brief offers PREP grantees an overview of the PYD key concepts and evidence base. The brief also includes a set of PYD practices and a table of examples where PYD can support APS programming, drawn from PREP grantees.

Co-regulation is a process where practitioners create safe spaces and nurturing relationships and coach youth in the use of self-regulation. The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation has developed this guide to show how integrating co-regulation may improve program implementation and outcomes. The guide highlights the ACF-sponsored Self-Regulation Training Approaches and Resources to Improve Staff Capacity for Implementing Healthy Marriage Programs for Youth (SARHM) project, which builds on a set of resources for educators in the Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) programs for youth ages 14 to 24. Research questions raised in the guide include what key elements of co-regulation strategies can program facilitators use to support youth self-regulation, what capacity building supports are needed by program facilitators, and how feasible are co-regulation strategies in the implementation of youth HMRE programs.

This November 2018 webinar by California Partnership to End Domestic Violence provided information on its Youth in the Lead 2019 campaign that addressed teen dating violence. It provided insights on how the Partnership focuses on youth expertise by collecting actual peer organizing strategies youth have used to address teen dating violence and promote healthy relationships. The speakers also provided best practices that organizations have used to develop connections with the broader community.

(See also Resources on "intimate partner violence" in the Resource Library)

This web conference was hosted on November 6, 2019 by Prevent Connect, a national project of California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The web conference introduced participants to CDC’s comprehensive teen dating violence prevention model, Dating Matters: Strategies to Promote Healthy Teen Relationships, and highlighted the latest research evidence displaying the model’s effectiveness in preventing teen dating violence. The web conference also showcased the Dating Matters Toolkit, which provides communities with the materials, tools, and guidance needed to implement all seven components of the Dating Matters model. Links to the web conference PowerPoint slides and the text chat transcript are provided.

(See also Resources on "intimate partner violence" in the Resource Library)

Take A Stand for Healthy Relationships, a National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Discovery Education program, teaches high school students in grades 6-12 how to understand and build healthy relationships. The curriculum contains self-paced modules and lesson plans to help students gain crucial skills in communication, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence, and help them recognize healthy and safe qualities and behaviors in relationships. Accompanying educator guides offer school staff ways to support students through the essential content.

(See also Resources on "intimate partner violence" in the Resource Library)

The Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood initiative provides funding for the Fathers Advancing Community Together (FACT) program in Contra Costa County, California. FACT offers responsible parenting, healthy relationships, and economic stability services, including workshops for low-income parents. This Urban Institute brief covers a survey of FACT participants that examined whether they believed they were equipped with the skills to be good parents and how participating in the workshops affected their capacity to save money and develop budgets or obtain employment.