How couples' sessions lift stress from families

Project
Parental Couples Relationship ?Programme

Purpose
To help couples improve their relationships and avoid issues that can have a negative impact on their children

Funding
£2.9m from the Department for Education, from December 2012 to March 2015

Background
Parents’ relationships with each other have a huge impact on their ability to parent and care for their children and on their wellbeing. Psychologists and husband-and-wife team Professors Philip and Carolyn Cowan from the University of California, Berkeley, have been researching the area for 35 years. Their research started by looking at how to support couples coping with their first child and moved on to work with increasingly “high risk” families where there were child welfare concerns. This led to the development of the Parental Couples Relationship Programme, which was tested in the US. The approach is now being launched in the UK with government funding by the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships and the charity Family Action.

Action
The programme consists of 16 weekly sessions for groups of five to seven couples, facilitated by trained mental health professionals. It will focus on so-called “hard-to-reach” families including some in which there are child protection concerns. The sessions explore the dynamics between couples, parenting styles and communication, and how mothers and fathers can support children’s development. A key factor is the importance of fathers being actively involved in parenting and children’s lives.

“The idea is not to tell people how to do things but to provide a supportive environment in which parents can explore what they are trying to do. It gives them a structure to work it out,” says Professor Philip Cowan. “The group makes people see that we’re all in the same boat, that being a parent with young children is tough and everyone has issues they struggle with.”

The programme has been tested fully with low-income, “high-risk” families in the US and Canada but will be adapted to ensure it works for UK families. “The English character may be slightly different,” says Professor Cowan. “But what we have found working with parents in different countries is that the stresses and issues they talk about are the same.”

The programme will launch in six London boroughs – Camden, Greenwich, Islington, Southwark, Wandsworth and Westminster – before being extended to other parts of the country.

Outcome
The programme’s approach has been extensively evaluated. Three clinical trials between 2003 and 2012 involved more than 800 mainly low-income families. The programme helped improve the strength and quality of family relationships and prevented the rise of behaviour problems in young children.

One study involving 289 couples compared the impact of fathers’ groups, couples’ groups and a one-off information meeting. It found that “participants in couples’ groups showed more consistent longer-term positive effects than those in fathers-only groups”. Satisfaction with the couples’ relationships remained stable over 18 months from 36.35 to 35.25 (on a scale of 6 to 44), with half of them reporting the same scores or increased satisfaction. “Fifty or more studies show that without intervention, marital satisfaction declines, so a finding of no average change over 18 months is very positive,” explains Professor Cowan. In the control group, only 27 per cent had stable or increased scores but for 73 per cent satisfaction had gone down.

The latest trial worked with families where there were concerns about child welfare. Here, couples that embarked on the programme showed reduced conflict and an improvement in parent-child relationships compared to a control group. There were also significant benefits for children. Among children in the control group, aggression, hyperactivity, social withdrawal and anxiety all increased over the course of the study, whereas families who did the programme reported that behaviour problems remained stable or improved.