Appendix F Study Description

February 2019

Coparenting and Healthy Relationship
and Marriage Education for Dads
(CHaRMED)
Fathers, children, and their families benefit from healthy relationships. Relationships refer to any
relationship between two or more people, including relationships between a parent and child,
romantic partners, and parents or other caretakers of a child. The Office of Family Assistance
(OFA)—within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and
Families (ACF)—promotes healthy relationships through the Responsible Fatherhood (RF) grant
program. RF grantees are required to include programming on healthy marriage and relationships and
responsible parenting. These healthy relationship and parenting programs focus both on romantic
and coparenting relationships and aim to improve a wide array of fathers’ relationship skills, such as
communication, conflict management, emotional self-regulation, and problem-solving.
Despite the importance of healthy romantic and coparenting relationships, little is known about how
RF programs incorporate Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) and coparenting
services into their programming, and what strategies hold promise for promoting active engagement
in these services. To learn more about the approaches used by Responsible Fatherhood programs,
OFA is funding, and ACF’s Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is overseeing, the
Coparenting and Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education for Dads (CHaRMED) study. OPRE has
contracted with Child Trends to design and conduct the study.

Study objectives
The CHaRMED project aims to build knowledge about approaches that RF providers currently use,
or could use in the future, to foster healthy coparenting and romantic relationships. To meet this
objective, the study will:

• Describe the characteristics and qualities of marriages or romantic relationships, and coparenting
relationships, of fathers who are likely to participate in RF programs.

• Develop a conceptual model for addressing coparenting with fathers, including those most likely
to be served by RF programs.

• Document current services offered by RF grantees in the areas of Healthy Marriage and
Relationship Education (HMRE) and coparenting.

• Understand participant and program staff perspectives on HMRE and coparenting services, and
how these services might be improved.

• Identify gaps in existing approaches to HMRE and coparenting services, and identify other
approaches and/or resources relevant to address those gaps.

For more information, please contact:
Mindy Scott, Principal Investigator, Child Trends
Email: mscott@childtrends.org  
Phone: (240) 223-9324

Nicole Constance, Senior Social Science Research Analyst, ACF/OPRE
Email: nicole.constance@acf.hhs.gov  
Phone: (202) 401-7260

childtrends.org