Integrating Marriage Education into Perinatal Education

Abstract

Couples making the transition to parenthood experience challenges that can threaten the quality and stability of their relationships and the health of family members. Currently, the educational infrastructure to support the delivery of couple-relationship education during the transition to parenthood is limited. Because new-parent couples interact with the health care system at many points during this transition time, an opportunity exists for strengthening couple relationships within the system to improve the well-being of adults and children. In this article, we propose a productive collaboration between marriage/couple educators and health care systems to integrate couple-relationship education into the standard of perinatal care.

Investigating the Influence of Relationship Education on Parental Attitudes

“…Mental health and marriage and family therapy professionals are encouraged to provide RE services in collaboration with other health care services offered to new parents to increase the scope and breadth of couples of served. Furthermore, Hawkins, Gilliland, Christiaens, & Carroll (2002) state that limited infrastructure exists to support parents during their transition to parenthood compared with growing infrastructures to help couples prepare for marriage, providing an area ripe for external funding and seeking federal support to assist couples during the transition to parenthood. 258 S. M. Barden et al…”

Psycho-education to enhance couples' transition to parenthood

“…There is a growing recognition among health professionals, researchers and governments that supporting the couple relationship is important in preventing relationship distress, family breakdown and poor child outcomes (Markman & Halford, 2005). Traditionally, relationship education has been provided to couples at the time of marriage (Halford, 1999;Halford et al, 2003;Markman, Stanley, Blumberg, Jenkins, & Whiteley, 2004;Simons & Parker, 2002), and although such studies show that skill-training in key relationship processes enhances adaptive couple relationship processes and relationship satisfaction and stability, there are calls for more flexibility in mode of delivery and for more points of access to relationship education (e.g., Halford, 1999;Halford & Simons, 2005;Hawkins et al, 2002). These two intervention fields, the one for the transition to parenthood, and the one for the transition into marriage have been studied relatively separately (Hawkins et al, 2002), but the merging of these two fields optimally informs research on supporting couples across the transition to parenthood.…”

A Prime Time for Marital/Relational Intervention: A Review of the Transition to Parenthood Literature with Treatment Recommendations

“…Among the ongoing intervention programs, Hawkins, Gilliand, Christiaens, and Carroll (2002) and Kermeen (1995) suggested integrating short couple enrichment segments within existing childbirth education courses. Kermeen (1995) found little success with this approach, with the results indicating that couples who received the relational segments did not score significantly different from comparison couples in terms of marital satisfaction.…”