Enhancing Parenting Effectiveness, Fathers' Involvement, Couple Relationship Quality, and Children's Development: Breaking Down Silos in Family Policy Making and Service Delivery

Abstract

In this article, we examine family‐based interventions designed to increase parenting effectiveness, fathers' positive involvement, and couple relationship quality, all with the goal of enhancing children's development. We focus on the fact that government funding policies, service delivery systems, and research evaluations of interventions to benefit children and families typically operate in separate silos. We provide a theoretical model, along with empirical evidence, to argue that a more integrated, collaborative perspective is likely to produce more optimal outcomes for parents and children than current siloed attempts to improve child and family well‐being. We discuss some of the obstacles to using evidence to guide policy decisions. We offer suggestions for policy makers and service providers in an attempt to describe a more integrated approach to supporting family well‐being, and to encourage the increased use of systematic data in making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources for family support.

Best Practices in Family Life Education Program Evaluation

“…In the classical no‐treatment control‐group design, some interested individuals simply will not receive the intervention and only be asked to be a research subject in a study. This can be hard for program administrators to accept (Cowan & Cowan, ). Nonetheless, the strong evidence produced by this classical design helps to justify withholding treatment to volunteers.…”

“…Our first recommendation is targeted more to program developers and evaluation researchers than administrators. FLE programs have been critiqued because they are too siloed; that is, they usually focus on just one part of the family system when a broader systemic focus is needed (Cowan & Cowan, ). For instance, parenting education, coparenting education, fathering education, and couple relationship education are intertwined conceptually and pragmatically, yet they are usually addressed in separate programs (Cowan & Cowan, ).…”

“…FLE programs have been critiqued because they are too siloed; that is, they usually focus on just one part of the family system when a broader systemic focus is needed (Cowan & Cowan, ). For instance, parenting education, coparenting education, fathering education, and couple relationship education are intertwined conceptually and pragmatically, yet they are usually addressed in separate programs (Cowan & Cowan, ). A systemic approach, however, presents greater complexities for evaluation, including more outcome measures and more systemic measures or analyses of outcomes, as well as more sophisticated analyses of causal pathways in the intervention.…”

“…Our second recommendation focuses on cost–benefit analysis. Cost–benefit analyses of programs are an important but neglected part of a comprehensive evaluation process (Cowan & Cowan, ). Investment in evidence‐based early interventions can produce substantial returns on investment compared with later remediation services (Heckman, ).…”

“…One set of scholars conducted cost–benefit analyses of an early childhood education program and found that every dollar invested in the program produced a fiscal benefit of nearly $11, which they calculated to be the equivalent of an 18% annual return on the investment (Reynolds, Temple, White, Ou, & Robertson, ). Similarly, a cost–benefit analysis of the Parents as Partners program in England conservatively estimated that every £1 of cost returned between £3.5 and £7.0 (Cowan & Cowan, ). As a field, however, FLE has largely failed to document those returns perhaps because doing so is challenging.…”