Supporting Father Involvement: An Intervention With Community and Child Welfare–Referred Couples
| Author | Kyle D. Pruett,Philip A. Cowan,Marsha Kline Pruett,Peter Gillette,Carolyn Pape Cowan |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12352 |
M K P Smith College
P A. C, C P C, P G University of California,
Berkeley
K D. P Yale University
Supporting Father Involvement: An Intervention
With Community and Child
Welfare–Referred Couples
Objective: To expand the evidence base of the
Supporting Father Involvement (SFI) interven-
tion to include child welfare families.
Background: Taking a preventive
father-inclusive approach, SFI aims
to strengthen coparenting, parent–child rela-
tionships, and child outcomes. This study
replicates 4 prior iterations of the program
using the same 32-hour curriculum facilitated
by clinically trained staff, case managers,
and onsite child care and family meals.
Method: Participants (N=239) included
low-income (median =$24,000) coparenting
pairs, typically mothers and fathers/father
gures, half of whom were Mexican American,
with toddlers (median age <3 years). Question-
naires assessing multiple family domains were
administered verbally over an 18-month period.
Intervention effectiveness was tested through
a randomized control trial with immediate
treatment or waitlist–control groups using a
moderated mediator structural equation model.
Smith College School for Social Work, Lilly Hall,
Northampton, MA 01063 (E-mail: mpruett@smith.edu).
Key Words: child abuse, child welfare, couples intervention,
father involvement, preventive intervention.
Results: The model explained 49% to 56%
of the variance in children’s problem behaviors
(intervention and autoregressive effects). The
intervention reduced couple conict, which
reduced anxious and harsh parenting, lead-
ing to better child outcomes. The intervention
was equally effective for community and child
welfare–referred families and family dynamics
pathways were similar across conditions.
Conclusion: With its intentional outreach
and inclusion of fathers, SFI offers an
effective intervention for lower risk child
welfare–involved families.
Implications: Results argue for the utility
of treating community and child welfare par-
ents in mixed-gender prevention groups that
focus on strengthening multiple levels of family
relationships.
After years of focusing predominantly on
mother–child relationships and children’s devel-
opment, many researchers and service providers
now acknowledge that father involvement and
coparenting relationships play central roles
in children’s well-being (Allen & Daly, 2007;
Lamb & Lewis, 2013). Systematic evaluationsof
interventions based on these ideas, however, are
still rare compared with published research on
traditional mother-centered parenting programs.
Supporting Father Involvement (SFI), a group
Family Relations 68 (February 2019): 51–67 51
DOI:10.1111/fare.12352
52 Family Relations
intervention for fathers or for coparenting cou-
ples in primarily low-income families, is an
exception. Designed to (a) increase the quan-
tity and quality of fathers’ involvement with
their children and (b) strengthen the relation-
ship between fathers and their coparenting
partners, SFI has demonstrated efcacy (P. A.
Cowan, Cowan, Kline Pruett, Pruett, & Wong,
2009) and effectiveness (P. A. Cowan, Cowan,
Kline Pruett, Pruett, & Gillette, 2014; Kline
Pruett, Cowan, Cowan, & Pruett, 2017; Kline
Pruett, Gillette, & Pruett, 2016) in terms of its
impact on parents and on their children—an
outcome rarely examined in studies of couple
interventions.
The conceptual model underlying SFI (C. P.
Cowan & Cowan, 2000) delineates child out-
comes associated with risk and protective factors
in ve specied aspects of family life: individ-
ual, couple, parenting, three-generational, and
external stress and support domains (also see
Doherty, Kouneski, & Erickson, 1998). These
risk and buffering factors have proven to be
amenable to intervention and lie at the heart of
the SFI’s structure and content.
Previously, parents identied by the child
welfare system (CWS) because of child abuse,
neglect, or domestic violence had been referred
to other community services by design. In this
article, we describe a randomized control trial
(RCT) in which a low-income community sam-
ple similar to one included in past SFI studies is
compared with low-income participants referred
by CWS staff—in essence testing whether SFI
is an appropriate intervention for higher-risk
participants.
SFI I E B
The SFI approach combines a facilitative, thera-
peutically oriented focus on family relationship
building, emphasizing the role of fathers as pos-
itive contributors in the family. Taking a pre-
ventive approach, father involvement and part-
ner relationships are supported as the means
to strengthen coparenting and father–child rela-
tionships. The program aims to promote positive
father involvement early in child and family life
trajectories before negative emotions and inter-
actional patterns become intractable, resulting
in family aggression, or paternal withdrawal or
absence. The curriculum developed interweaves
parenting education with reection, communica-
tion, and parenting attitudes and skills, with a
clear emphasis on each family dening their
own cultural and personal styles rather than
“expert-driven” proscriptions.
SFI begins with interviews of individual
couples, who are then randomly assigned to
either a 32-hour fathers group or couples group,
typically presented in 2-hour sessions over
16 weeks. The fathers groups tend to have 8
to 10 participants, and the couples groups tend
to have 4 to 8 couples. The curricula differ
only in who attends (fathers or both coparents)
and how change is targeted (through one par-
ent or through both parents). Twice in each
intervention curriculum, fathers and mothers
meet separately with one of the coleaders,
with the father’s meeting focused on time with
the youngest child and the mother’s meeting
focusing on sharing child care with fathers.
Themes from the ve risk/protective domains
are woven together in the curriculum over the
course of the groups. Each session includes
a combination of didactic material, exercises,
videos, and discussion in various formats (i.e.,
large group, small group, couples or coparents,
individuals) to elicit maximum engagement and
foster participants’ growth. The groups are led
by clinically trained male–female pairs. An SFI
case manager refers families to other commu-
nity services as needed and supports the family’s
retention in the program through ongoing con-
tact. Onsite child care and family meals help sup-
port parents’ consistent attendance. For a more
complete discussion of SFI content and program
components, see P. A. Cowan et al. (2009) and
Kline Pruett, Cowan, et al. (2017).
Four studies have documented the positive
impact of SFI with different populations. An
RCT with 289 Mexican American and Euro-
pean American low-income families in four
California counties compared a 16-session
fathers group with a 16-session couples group
while using a 1-session, 3-hour couples group
as a low-dose information control condition
(P. A. Cowan et al., 2009). The control group
fathers and mothers showed no positive changes
and some negative changes at the 18-month
follow-up assessment, whereas positive changes
were found for participants in both ongoing
intervention conditions: increases in fathers’
involvement in care of the children, reductions
in parenting stress, no increase in children’s
behavior problems (while control condition
children showed an increase), and no decline in
the couple relationship—a positive nding in
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