This brief draws on the personal experience of the Project Director for Family Services of Greater Houston in Texas, to offer tips for lobbying a State's legislature for the implementation of marriage preparation and relationship strengthening services. Recommendations include: know your legislators, know the lobbyists, do your homework before you pick up the phone, be specific about the funding you will go after, make an appointment, help write the bill, and review similar bills created in different States and incorporate language from those bills.
Although both men and women are involved in marriage, relationship matters are often considered the woman's domain. For practitioners offering marriage and relationship education (MRE), this general belief can often make engaging men in your program a challenge. Information is relatively sparse with regard to how men can be engaged in marriage education. There is research on men and commitment, and there are relatively frequent pop culture references to men and marriage regarding infidelity or gender roles, but very few resources are available for married men to support their relationship.…
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Journal Article A study explored how Black, employed fathers (n=15) participate in and contribute to the academic life and success of their school-aged children, and their relationships with their children's teachers and schools. Findings indicate the fathers concurred that Black fathers and teachers must improve their relationships to ensure children's academic success. Teachers (n=11) acknowledged their schools do not actively engage fathers' involvement. 24 references.
Research in the last three decades has established a clear link between parental involvement and children's educational attainment. While most of what we know is based on mother-child interactions, increased attention has been paid to the specific influences fathers and other male caregivers have on their children's development. This paper briefly summarises the findings from the field of father involvement that also address the issue of children's literacy practices. Since the literature on father involvement and children's literacy outcomes is limited with significant knowledge gaps, the…
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Journal Article Objective. Although studies have begun to explore the impact of the current wars on child well-being, none have examined how children are doing across social, emotional, and academic domains. In this study, we describe the health and well-being of children from military families from the perspectives of the child and nondeployed parent. We also assessed the experience of deployment for children and how it varies according to deployment length and military service component.Participants and Methods. Data from a computer-assisted telephone interview with military children, aged 11 to 17 years,…
This guide provides practical strategies to help you recruit teens into your MRE services. Consider the following four tips:* Know and be able to explain why teen marriage/relationship education matters* Choose a setting and/or partnership* Market your message* Consider all your recruitment options(Author abstract)
This small scale survey report evaluates aspects of family learning and its benefits for adult participants and their children, their families and the wider community. Between September 2008 and March 2009, inspectors visited 23 local authority adult and community learning services that were receiving Learning and Skills Council funding for wider family learning, family literacy, language and numeracy, and family learning impact funding. The survey explores a range of delivery models, gives examples of good practice and makes recommendations for improvement.
The National Center for Fathering (NCF) and the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) partnered together to assess the degree of involvement and support that fathers provide to their school-age children. The findings of this survey expand upon a similar survey originally conducted in 1999, providing an assessment of the changes in father engagement over the last ten years. Both sets of data were collected through a single-stage, random dial, national phone survey of 1,000 individuals ages 18 and over. Key findings:* Over the last ten years, a number of key gains were made that show…
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Journal Article Although much research has focused on how imprisonment transforms the life course of disadvantaged black men, researchers have paid little attention to how parental imprisonment alters the social experience of childhood. This article estimates the risk of parental imprisonment by age 14 for black and white children born in 1978 and 1990. This article also estimates the risk of parental imprisonment for children whose parents did not fi nish high school, fi nished high school only, or attended college. Results show the following: (1) 1 in 40 white children born in 1978 and 1 in 25 white…
