Though teenage fathers are often not involved in raising their children, a university professor’s counseling program aims to teach young parents to communicate and cooperate.
Last month, Amy Lewin, a family science professor, published a study about her plan to improve co-parenting skills among teenage parents in the Journal of Primary Intervention.
“Moms are involved regardless. Usually, fathers are not involved in the picture,” said Kevin Roy, a professor and the family science department director of graduate studies, who was not involved in the research. “So the concern is, how do we get fathers involved?”
The pilot program focused on expecting urban minority teen parents living in Washington, who were primarily African-American, Latino or multi-racial.
The research for the program, Strong Foundation, began in 2010 with a grant from the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, and the pilot ran from 2011 into 2013. The pilot involved counseling 32 couples beginning when the mother was between 15 and 32 weeks pregnant and continuing until a year after the birth.
The intervention plan was an adaption from a similar program called Family Foundations, which focused on largely white middle-class adult parents.
“We took some of the same skills and some of the same overarching themes or core components of that intervention and tried to make them relevant to our teen parents,” Lewin said.
Before coming to this state, Lewin worked for 17 years at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, where there was a primary care clinic for teen parent families. At the clinic, Lewin noticed that both the mothers and fathers wanted positive involvement in their children’s development, but there were barriers that made it difficult for teen fathers to achieve that.
Lewin said very few of these teen parents had role models in their families or communities of successful co-parenting.
The adolescent nature of these relationships is also a complication, she said.
“[It was] much more difficult to be successful co-parents once they broke up, and because they are adolescents, they tend to break up,” Lewin said. “Also because they are adolescents, when they break up, there tend to be a lot of hard feelings, and that is a big barrier.”
Damian Waters, co-author of the paper and family science doctoral student, explained one of the tools of the intervention called “red light, green light,” in which parents slow down when they are getting annoyed or frustrated. He said some participants whom he still sees today use this method often and that it helps them communicate with their partners.
Only one other published intervention has addressed co-parenting specifically for teen parents and was conducted only before the babies were born, Lewin said. Lewin’s intervention is unique because of its focus on strengthening relationships, not only prenatally, but also during the first year of the child’s life, she said.
Transitioning to parenthood can be stressful for teens, Waters said. There are limited programs set up to help during that transition while teenagers face the pressure of school and have little access to resources for their child.
“If both parents aren’t there, you’re looking at families being more at risk for poverty, you have issues around monitoring, you have fewer resources in the household,” Roy said. “Fathers have a pretty strong impact on [children’s] literacy scores and reading and language development, so those are things that are hampered.”
In the future, Lewin said she plans to implement the program again in Washington and in other places, such as New York City, to teach young parents to be successful there.
“If we are able to give them the tools to be able to communicate, problem-solve and make decisions together and also [learn to] manage emotions,” Waters said, “before they have those children and throughout the transition to parenthood, it would help them.”
