Coparenting and Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education for Dads (CHaRMED)

2018 - 2022

Coparenting and Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education for Dads (CHaRMED) is a federal evaluation effort designed to:

  • better understand how Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs currently support healthy marriages/relationships and coparenting;
  • examine how their approaches align with the needs of the fathers in their target populations; and
  • inform the RF field about potential future directions in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education and coparenting programming.

Information collected under CHaRMED will focus on the nature of fathers’ relationships, review the services that RF programs currently provide to support healthy marriages/relationships and coparenting, solicit fathers’ opinions about those services and how they align with their needs, identify gaps in services, and outline recommendations for addressing these gaps. To address the objectives of the study, data collection will include:

  • secondary analysis of existing data;
  • semi-structured interviews with program staff, program partners, and curriculum developers; and  
  • in-depth individual interviews with fathers enrolled in RF programs, fathers who have dropped out of RF programs, and fathers’ coparents.

The work is being conducted by Child Trends.

Point(s) of contact: Nicole Constance and Kathleen McCoy

This study is registered on the Open Science Framework under the title Coparenting and Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education for Dads (CHaRMED) .  

Information collections related to this project have been reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under OMB #0970-0540. Related materials are available at the CHaRMED Information collection page on RegInfo.gov.

The most currently approved documents are accessible by clicking on the ICR Ref. No. with the most recent conclusion date. To access the information collections (E.g. interviews, surveys, protocols), click on View Information Collection (IC) List. Click on View Supporting Statement and Other Documents to access other supplementary documents.

Related Resources

The purpose of this brief, as part of the Coparenting and Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education for Dad (CHaRMED) study, is to provide practice-based, contextually relevant strategies that fatherhood programs serving AIAN fathers can use to support their healthy coparenting and romantic relationships.

These considerations from the CHaRMED study can inform the way fatherhood programs support fathers’ healthy coparenting and romantic relationships.

This product, developed as part of the Coparenting and Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education for Dads (CHaRMED) study, is a curated collection of resources that offer strategies for programs to use to better support fathers’ co-parenting and romantic relationship needs.

 

The purpose of this brief is to summarize stigma and discrimination experienced by fathers in fatherhood programs related to their culture and racial identities, their role as fathers in society, and their history of incarceration and also provides practice-based resources to help programs support fathers in navigating challenges related to these forms of stigma and discrimination.

The purpose of this brief is to describe how COVID-19 affected fathers’ relationships and healthy relationship programming and explore lessons learned for fatherhood programs to ultimately improve healthy relationship programming in fatherhood programs moving forward.

The purpose of this report is to inform both ACF and the broader fatherhood practice and research fields about the ways in which fatherhood programs support, or could better support, fathers’ healthy coparenting and romantic relationships.