Resources

• Marriage and Fatherhood, and Their Impact on Poverty
  (from "Focus," a newsletter from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Research on Poverty)
  The purpose of "Focus" is to provide coverage of poverty-related research, events, and issues, and to acquaint a large audience with the work of the Institute for Research on Poverty by means of short essays on selected pieces of research. The Summer 2002 issue contains six articles on marriage and fatherhood.

• Investigation of Programs to Strengthen and Support Healthy Marriages
  This report from the Urban Institute highlights key components of current marriage education programs, identifies opportunities and challenges for expanding services into other service delivery systems, and provides recommendations for evaluations of healthy marriage programs.

NRCFCPPP Information Packets

• Marriage Initiatives by Kristine Schuerger (June 2002)
  

• Marriage Initiatives - Update by Maria Kratsios (December 2004)

  
  

• Healthy Marriage Initiative
  The Administration for Children and Families' Healthy Marriage Initiative has the mission of helping "couples, who have chosen marriage for themselves, gain greater access to marriage education services, on a voluntary basis, where they can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage."

• Child Trends: Marriage/Family Research Area
  Child Trends is engaged in a number of projects that focus on conceptualizing and defining “healthy marriage” and evaluating the implications of marriage-strengthening efforts for families and for children.

• Building Strong Families
  Strengthening marriages and relationships in low-income families has emerged as a national policy strategy to enhance child well-being. Building Strong Families (BSF) is an initiative to develop and evaluate programs designed to help interested unwed parents achieve their aspirations for healthy marriage and a stable family life. This website from Mathematica is designed to help programs that participate in the evaluation, and other interested parties, learn about the progress of the evaluation and the kinds of services that are being tested.

• CLASP: Couples and Marriage Policy
  This section of the website of the Center for Law and Social Policy focuses on a "Marriage-Plus" perspective, which has two main goals centered on the well-being of children: (1) to help more children grow up with their two biological, married parents whose relationship is healthy; (2) when this isn't possible, to help parents--whether unmarried, cohabiting, separated, divorced, or remarried--cooperate better in raising their children.

• The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
  This study, a nationwide joint effort by Princeton University's Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (CRCW) and Columbia University's Social Indicators Survey Center (SIS Center), follows a birth cohort of (mostly) unwed parents and their children over a five-year period.