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December/January 2023Vol. 23, No. 10Lessons Learned From the CHaRMED Fatherhood Project

The Coparenting and Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education for Dads (CHaRMED) project is a federal evaluation conducted by Child Trends that began in 2018. Its goals were to better understand how responsible fatherhood programs support healthy relationships and coparenting, to examine how these approaches align with the needs of fathers, and to recommend future directions for related programming.

 

A blog post on the Child Trends website, "Fatherhood Programs Can Support Fathers’ Healthy Relationships With Children and Coparents," highlights important lessons learned from the CHaRMED study over the last 3 years, including the following:

 

  • Tailoring curricula to participants can make relationship education more relevant for fathers.
  • Fathers feel more connected to healthy relationship programming when they build personal connections with program staff and other participating fathers.
  • Many fathers are eager to build their coparenting skills.
  • Legal and social system involvement can prevent fathers from seeing their children and can strain coparenting relationships.
  • Virtual programming may increase fathers’ access to relationship programming.

 

This work is significant since positive father-child relationships can lead to improved outcomes for children, and a crucial component of improved father involvement is a strong coparenting and/or romantic relationship with their partner.

 

Child Trends plans to release more information about CHaRMED later in the year. Visit the project page for more information and updates.