Program Spotlight: NERMEN

The “F” in CYFAR includes parents. Parents and their relationships with each other, whether married or not, have a strong influence on their children’s outcomes, and that is the starting point for a CYFAR-related group called NERMEN.

The National Extension Relationship and Marriage Education Network is a working group of 18 or so family life educators and specialists with strong ties to CYFAR. It has evolved out of an initiative by Anna Mae Kobbe, who chaired the CSREES’s National Workgroup on Marriage and Couples Education before her retirement in 2006.

According to NERMEN co-director Ted Futris of the University of Georgia, the group’s goals are to “help our extension colleagues understand and identify available resources, to provide training and resources to develop and implement appropriate and effective relationship and marriage programs. We also want to help people connect with other national initiatives.”

To that end, NERMEN has a Web site that offers resources and networking opportunities, and has recently put out a book, "Cultivating Healthy Couple & Marital Relationships: A Guide to Effective Programming." The list of NERMEN contributors is long and will be familiar to CYFAR folk. It includes Francesca Adler-Baeder of Auburn, Karen Shirer of the University of Minnesota, Wally Goddard of the University of Arkansas, Brian Higginbotham of Utah State University and original members Charlotte Shoup Olsen of Kansas State University, Linda Skogrand of Utah State University and others.

Healthy marriage, happy children

Statistically, children do better when their parents are in healthy relationships. Although they can thrive in single-parent homes, on average, children whose parents are happily married have better outcomes, including staying in school, performing better in school and having fewer emotional and behavioral problems. When parents are not married there is a higher risk for the non-resident parent, usually the father, to be less involved with the child.

About two-thirds of American children live with their married, biological parents. But families are more complicated than just “married or not”. The national divorce rate has stabilized and even gone down slightly since 1990, but the number of children born to unmarried parents has risen. In addition, half of all US marriages are remarriages, and 65% of those involve stepchildren. For half of all cohabiting couples with children, there are children from previous relationships in the household.

In some cases, parents have practical or personal obstacles to marriage. For example, single parents lose most government financial assistance if they marry. Some single parents who live with their own parents can find it difficult to make the leap to independence or bring a spouse into the household if they marry.

Relationship skills training can have lasting benefits for parents. One study showed that married parents who took relationship classes when they had a newborn were more likely to be happily married, and the child showing better outcomes, five years later.

The NERMEN guide authors stress that they do not see marriage as the only goal, or endorse coercing individuals to stay in abusive or harmful relationships. The goal is for parents to have healthy relationships and cooperate in raising their children.

NERMEN also has a youth-focused relationship and marriage education component, and its goals are very different from the curriculum for parents – to give youth the skills to form and maintain healthy romantic relationships. That includes knowing what an unhealthy relationship looks like, that conflict is inevitable and how to deal with it, and the reduction of risky sexual behaviors.

Specialties

NERMEN is a network of professionals, each with different specialties. Higginbotham and NERMEN co-chair Adler-Baeder have researched and written articles for numerous journals about challenges and outcomes for stepfamilies. Skogrand has written articles on ways to better serve diverse populations through family education, including recent work on Latino audiences, together with Shoup Olsen. Much of Shirer’s recent work has been with “fragile families” – unmarried couples who have children together. Goddard writes about finding joy in the journey of life.

Together, NERMEN offers resources to program leaders wanting to do relationship and marriage education. Their guidebook offers a number of practical suggestions for using research in marriage and relationship education programming, and a step-by-step guide to introducing relationship and marriage education into a community. “Marriage education is a difficult topic for many states and agencies,” Futris said. “These are personal matters.”

In planning and designing a program, leaders must first have an ethical vision for the program that includes fleshing out its goals. Be aware of community sensitivities, such as what constitutes marriage. The guide suggests that programs will be more effective if couples participate with others like them, whether married parents or youth or single parents.

A Growing Interest

Although high school and college courses in family and consumer sciences and human development often contain healthy relationship curriculum, and despite the legacy of Kobbe’s national work group, for the most part this has not been a major focus for Extension in recent years as much as it has been for CYFAR. NERMEN hopes to encourage more such programs to develop across Extension.

Futris said NERMEN members were encouraged by strong attendance at their workshops at CYFAR 2008. Futris said the group is working on an adolescent-focused project for the future and in the autumn will offer NERMEM, a model for teaching relationship skills. An online training session on the subject of stepfamilies is also planned on October 14, Futris, Adler-Baeder and Higginbotham will lead this session. Interested parties can find out more and register online.

You may wish to consult:

Futris, T (ed). (2007) “Cultivating Healthy Couple & Marital Relationships: A Guide To Effective Programming” the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension.

Amato, PR (2000) The Consequences of Divorce for Parents and Children”, the Journal of Marriage and Family, (62) 4, 1269-1287.

The NERMEN Web site, and instructions for ordering the Guide to Effective Programming

Institute for American Values (2008) “The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-Ever Estimates for the Nation and All Fifty States” Retrieved 11 August 2008 from http://www.georgiafamily.org/upload/COFF%20Final%20Report.pdf

The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy Marriage Initiative Web site.

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