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CHAPTER IV
PROGRAM INTERVENTIONS TO IMPROVE MARRIAGEABILITY
The marriage and relationship programs described in the previous chapter are primarily designed for and offered to middle- and upper-income educated couples who are engaged or married. Yet many low-income couples are both unmarried and low income, and often face serious personal and family challenges that disrupt the formation of healthy couple relationships and marriages. Hence, in addition to strengthening relationships directly, it may be important to remove structural barriers to family formation and enhance the personal characteristics and capabilities that will make individuals attractive to potential spouses.
This chapter describes program services that could enhance “marriageability.” Marriageability is conventionally defined as a person’s attractiveness as a marriage partner based on the human capital—education and employment history—that contribute to one’s labor market participation and earnings. This conceptual framework defines marriageability more broadly to also include those personal resources and skills that, if strengthened, might make one more likely to succeed in employment and also be a more attractive partner. Such strengths and skills include health and mental health, and the ability to parent effectively and manage day-to-day family and household responsibilities.
Although none of the programs reviewed in this chapter has the explicit goal of improving marriageability, many provide services or link participants to services that could remove barriers to family formation and improve the attractiveness of participants as potential spouses. These programs and services often aim to serve the full range of low-income families—not just parents who are unmarried when their children are born. Some services are intended to repair or restore existing relationships, while others aim to increase the involvement of nonresidential fathers with their children when the parents are no longer romantically involved. The marriageability approach could be used with the full range of family structures in at least three different ways:
- To enhance the marriageability of couples who are romantically involved
and interested in marrying but who may have personal and family challenges
that reduce the likelihood that they will form and sustain healthy marriages
- To improve the marriageability of unmarried parents who are not romantically
involved, not yet ready to consider marriage, or do not have plans to
marry but may wish to in the future
- To encourage the positive involvement of nonresident parents with their children when marriage is not a viable option
A. SERVICES TO IMPROVE MARRIAGEABILITY
By definition, low-income families have limited resources and often struggle to meet such basic needs as food and housing. The struggle can stem from difficulty finding stable jobs with adequate pay and benefits, as well as from a variety of other personal and family challenges that make working and caring for a family more difficult. A study of welfare recipients in one county in Michigan examined the prevalence of issues, such as lack of employment, criminality, gang involvement, health issues, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, alcohol and substance abuse, and mental illness. The study found that 64 percent of those surveyed had two or more of these personal and family issues, and 15 percent had five or more (Danziger et al. 2000).
In the face of multiple personal challenges, families may not be willing or able to discuss relationship issues until more basic needs are met and immediate crises resolved. In programs providing a range of services, families are more likely to participate and open up to staff if they feel their primary and immediate needs are taken seriously. These needs often relate to employment. Staff at two of the programs visited for the development of the conceptual framework, Bienvenidos Family Services and CFWD, reported that participants—especially fathers, who eventually take advantage of other services—often are first attracted by the prospect of help finding a job.
Family violence can precipitate program entry or may come to the attention of program staff during participation. Confirming the research evidence, staff and participants of the programs studied in this project reported that family violence and abusive relationships are common. Bienvenidos staff estimated that a large proportion of its participants have had some experience with domestic violence, and many male participants at CFWD reported having been violent in the past. Because these problems concern the physical safety and emotional well-being of parents and children, it is of paramount concern that program participants not be encouraged to remain with abusers or put themselves or their children at risk. Yet some programs for at-risk families do not screen out people who remain in abusive relationships because that would amount to ignoring the needs of many families who could benefit from support, education, and other services. To avoid this problem, programs have developed different ways of directly addressing the issue of domestic abuse.
Many programs addressing the needs of low-income families are comprehensive in nature and provide participants with a full range of services in house or refer them to services elsewhere in the community. Other programs may be more targeted in nature, providing services that focus on specific issues. These services can offer support or help strengthen the personal resources and capabilities that might indirectly encourage marriage or strengthen existing relationships. Some of the services include:
- Employment training, education, job search
- Separate classes or groups for victims and perpetrators of domestic
violence
- Health care and mental health treatment
- Parenting and child development education
- Life skills education
- Support groups to encourage father involvement
- Coparenting classes
Employment and Education Services. Stable employment and income have been linked to positive marriage outcomes. This connection is particularly strong for black men because their ability to contribute financially is often seen as an important attribute by black women who are struggling to make ends meet (Edin 2000).
Employment services can include assistance with job search, on-the-job training, job development and networking, and classes in resume writing, interviewing, and “soft skills,” such as the ability to show respect for authority and minimize conflict in the workplace. Programs may link participants to such training and education services as General Education Degree (GED) preparation, adult education, English-as-a-Second Language classes, and vocational training, all of which can lead to more and better job opportunities. STRIVE, a part of CFWD, for example, is an intensive job readiness workshop that provides services through case management, classes, peer support, and counseling. It assists participants with job retention and advancement, in part by emphasizing the interpersonal skills needed to sustain employment.
If a program focusing on marriage intends to offer employment and education services, program leaders must confront choices about how to provide them. Providing employment and education services “in house” as part of the healthy marriage initiative itself is likely to be costly, and may duplicate services already available in the community. Program planners would, of course, have to weigh this cost against any presumed special advantage associated with in-house service delivery. Such advantages might include the ability to tailor the services or schedule them in ways especially suitable to the participating couples. However, the costs may outweigh such possible advantages, and suggest that referral and follow-up is preferable. Programs must also choose between employment services that emphasize labor force attachment approaches such as direct job placement and those that emphasize human capital development such as job training. In general, research suggests that labor force attachment approaches are more likely to yield positive effects on employment and earnings (Hamilton 2002).
Domestic Violence Treatment. Physical and emotional abuse is an important barrier to stable and healthy relationships. Some types of domestic violence can be treated by helping perpetrators learn nonviolent forms of communication and practice anger management. Some services help victims recover from psychological trauma so they can enter into healthy relationships in the future. These services not only may treat the problem but also may help make victims and abusers more aware of what constitutes a healthy relationship or marriage.
Bienvenidos offers a 26-week program for abusive men called All My Relations. A trained mediator facilitates the program, which teaches nonviolent communication skills, conflict resolution, and mediation skills, following a curriculum designed by Jerry Tello at the National Latino Fatherhood and Family Institute. It emphasizes the root causes of violent behavior, including the pressures caused by racism, poverty, and violence in the home or neighborhood. Fathers are asked to reflect on how they have internalized these pressures and directed them at others through violence, drug use, and other unhealthy activities.
Bienvenidos also offers Latinas en Progreso, a domestic violence treatment program for female victims of abuse. The program includes weekly group meetings, individual counseling, educational workshops and classes, and an after-care support group. This comprehensive approach is aimed at educating women about the cycle of violence, supporting them as they heal emotionally from the trauma of abuse, and helping them to avoid physical and social isolation.
Physical and Mental Health Services. Services to improve physical and mental health may also improve parents’ marriageability by making it easier for them to sustain employment, be good parents to their children, and contribute to daily household tasks. These services typically address medical problems, mental health problems (including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety), and substance abuse.
Many programs offer some form of physical or mental health services. A free health clinic for men and women at Bienvenidos provides health screenings and basic health services as well as more intensive treatment and care for people suffering from HIV, AIDS, and substance abuse. Some programs, such as Children First, focus on physical health by providing health education and services for mothers and children during home visits with registered nurses.
Some programs provide substance abuse treatment through in-house comprehensive programs. For example, Bienvenidos serves female substance abusers through a year-long program that engages participants for about 10 to 20 hours each week. Services include drug education, support groups, relapse prevention, therapy, life skills training, and workshops.
Programs may screen for and refer participants to treatment for mental health issues. In Children First, mothers are regularly assessed for postpartum depression during the six months following the birth of a child. Healthy Start assesses mothers for depression, develops a care plan, and refers them to services as needed. Bienvenidos conducts psychological assessments through the Institute for Women’s Health and provides individual and group therapy to those identified with mental health needs.
Parenting and Child Development Education. Some programs for low-income families offer parenting education to help participants understand the stages of child development, develop relationship and communication skills, set appropriate household rules, and use effective disciplinary strategies. Such services could improve marriageability because parents may be more likely to stay with a partner who is a loving, fair, and effective parent. Moreover, couples who participate in parenting education together are more likely to learn to work cooperatively for the benefit of their children, which can reduce one potential source of parental conflict and create a more harmonious and stable family environment.
Parenting education can be provided in a number of ways, including formal classes, home visits, or in small groups. Bienvenidos, Children First, and Responsible Choices provide parenting education through visits to participants’ homes. Bienvenidos also offers a series of weekly parenting classes at the organization’s family support center for 16 to 20 weeks. These classes primarily serve parents who have been involved with the child protective system, and they are designed to teach parents how to create and maintain a safe and stable environment for their children. Early Head Start and Healthy Start focus on child development and parenting education, which are offered in the home, classroom, or in combination. Early Head Start also provides family development services in which objectives are developed for parents and children, and families work with a staff member to achieve and set new goals.
Life Skills Education. Services that teach parents such life skills as how to efficiently perform household tasks and remain financially stable may improve marriageability because potential marriage partners are likely to be interested in mates who can contribute to meeting the household’s needs. Most programs described in this chapter teach life skills—most commonly through home visits or classes. As part of its relationship curriculum for singles, Constructing a Godly Home teaches basic life skills, including cooking, laundry, and managing finances; a facilitator encourages participants in premarital classes to discuss what household tasks each partner will perform.
Bienvenidos teaches life skills through its home-based programs, which serve families in the service population who have the most immediate needs or crises. Home visitors help empower parents to meet their own needs (such as food, housing, and health care) and to avoid crises. For example, home visitors may suggest what parents could say to receive emergency medical care or how to address a landlord’s complaint about late rent payments.
Responsible Fatherhood. These services and programs are designed to encourage the financial and emotional involvement of fathers in their children’s lives. They often work to instill values, such as honesty, honor, and commitment, while helping men to be responsible fathers and role models in their communities. Father involvement services are delivered through such modes as classes, support groups, and group or family activities. These services are especially useful for fathers who are no longer romantically involved or living with the mothers of their children.
Family Star Early Head Start recently added a component in which fathers can receive employment assistance and participate in monthly men’s group meetings. Fathers engage in child-related activities by repairing toys and furniture in Early Head Start classrooms and through participation in Father’s Day picnics. Bienvenidos involves fathers through the National Latino Fatherhood and Family Institute, which offers weekly fatherhood classes, school-based pregnancy prevention, weekly anger management classes, and monthly support groups. At CFWD, the Men’s Services program provides fathers with case management services and two types of education sessions, each of which occurs weekly. One session is curriculum-based and covers parenting and coparenting, life skills development, and anger management; the other session involves a peer support group.
Coparenting, or “Team-Parenting” Services. Coparenting, or team parenting as it sometimes is called, refers to the ability of mothers and fathers to work as a team to raise their children—regardless of whether the parents live together or are romantically involved. Such services can involve efforts to improve the parents’ communication with each other and to help them coordinate parenting duties.
Sometimes mothers act as gatekeepers in denying noncustodial fathers access to their children, and it can be difficult for these men to be effective fathers without having a cooperative relationship with the mothers. As a result, some responsible fatherhood programs are implementing a coparenting component that focuses on improving the quality of communication between parents and the coordination of parenting duties. Through the 50/50 Parenting pilot program under development at CFWD, parents develop a plan for sharing decision-making and outlining agreements about such issues as visitation, conflict resolution, and child support. Similarly, the Family Star Early Head Start fatherhood demonstration recently began a coparenting support group for mothers and fathers, which focuses on improving participants’ ability to parent effectively together.
B. POTENTIAL EFFECTIVENESS OF A MARRIAGEABILITY APPROACH
Although strong intuitive and practical arguments can be made for providing the range of services described above, there is no strong body of research demonstrating that services designed to improve marriageability also encourage marriage. Although several programs for low-income families include comprehensive interventions that target new parents, they typically do not have a strong focus on couple relationships or marriage. Consequently, evaluations of such programs usually do not examine their potential impacts on family structure. For example, the evaluation of the Healthy Start program—a community-based program serving low-income women and infants—did not analyze effects on family formation or marriage because the program is not explicitly designed to affect these outcomes (Devaney et al. 2000).
However, some empirical evidence suggests that programs offering some of these services can affect family formation and marriage. An evaluation of the Nurse-Family Partnership Program (NFPP) shows the program indirectly promoted marriage formation and stability among low-income families. NFPP targets new, low-income mothers, many of whom are unmarried. Designed by David Olds, currently at Children’s Hospital in Denver, the program aims to prevent negative health and behavior outcomes among mothers and their children. Participants enter the program during pregnancy and are served for up to two and one-half years after their children are born. Services are provided through intensive home visits by registered nurses, who follow a curriculum focusing on several core areas: personal health, infant/toddler caregiving, maternal life course development, and social support. Nurses help families identify their needs and gain access to community resources that can meet those needs. Longitudinal random assignment evaluations of the program show that it reduced child abuse, subsequent pregnancy, welfare use, and the incidence of alcohol and drug abuse among the intervention group mothers. At age 15, children of the intervention group mothers had fewer arrests and convictions, fewer sexual partners, and used cigarettes and alcohol less frequently (Olds et al. 1999).
Of particular relevance to this study are the results from a recent follow-up at one of the sites. Three years after the program ended at that site (when the children were 5), biological fathers of children in the treatment group were significantly more likely than fathers in the control group to be living in the same household as their children (19 versus 13 percent). Treatment group mothers were more likely to be married relative to control group mothers (15 versus 10 percent) (Pettit and Olds 2001). These results are somewhat surprising because the intervention did not explicitly seek to promote marriage or directly address mother-father relationship issues by providing counseling, relationship skills education, or couples mentoring. However, one of the program’s goals is to help the fathers become more involved in being supportive of the mothers during pregnancy and childbirth. The nurses are also trained to include the children’s fathers in the home visits if requested by the mothers, and are encouraged to help fathers find resources they may need such as employment or responsible fatherhood services.
The timing of entry into NFPP may explain its observed positive outcomes. Other programs that aim to intervene later in the children’s lives, when fathers are more likely to have disengaged from their children and to have built up child support arrearages and negative feelings about the mothers, tend to find it more challenging to bring about such positive outcomes. For example, the evaluation of the Parent’s Fair Share demonstration, a program to increase responsibility among low-income noncustodial fathers by providing support groups and incentives for paying child support, showed disappointing results in improving the fathers’ emotional involvement with their children (Knox and Redcross 2000).
An evaluation of the Minnesota Family Independence Program (MFIP) (a welfare-to-work program) also suggests some indirect effects of programs on marriage. In addition to workforce participation mandates, MFIP provided parents with enhanced financial incentives to work and more generous benefit rules. After three years, MFIP recipients were more likely to be married than AFDC recipients, with the increase in marriage largely attributed to the employment financial incentives and more generous benefit rules (Knox et al. 2000).
Despite some promising empirical evidence on the potential effectiveness of programs providing services to low-income adults and families, careful thought must be directed to the extent to which a program designed to encourage healthy marriage should incorporate services to enhance marriageability and what these services should be. A great number of programs serving low-income unwed parents already exist, and marriage rates remain low. Most evaluations of these programs have not focused on the impacts on marriage. As a result, there is no conclusive evidence on whether marriageability services would have positive impacts on marriage.
Nevertheless, given the many, varied needs of low-income families and their lower prevalence of marriage, an intervention to encourage healthy marriage that does not attend to the issues discussed in this chapter is unlikely to be successful. In designing healthy marriage programs for low-income populations, developers should be mindful of the greater prevalence of these problems and the need to address them. Therefore, a marriageability focus may be envisioned as an important component, but not the primary emphasis, of interventions to strengthen unmarried parent families.
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