McHale James P, Irace Karina, Cowan Philip, Cowan Carolyn Pape, Odgaard Eric
Family Study Center, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2024 Oct 9;15:1463773. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1463773. eCollection 2024.
When interventionists stimulate productive father-mother dialogues around coparenting, there are numerous potential benefits for families. Families stand to benefit from more positive involvement of fathers with both coparents and children, key contributors to healthy child developmental outcomes. In this report, we introduce a new strategy and rating system for helping practitioners and supervisors assess the nature and quality of coparenting-related dialogues and conversations in the context of couples group interventions.
The system derives from analysis of 24 relationship-enhancement groups, 13 enrolling English-speaking couples and 11 enrolling Spanish-speaking couples, all parents of young children. All groups were co-led by a male-female team explicitly trained to focus on marital and parenting themes and supervised to address couples issues - not coparenting issues explicitly. All co-leaders spoke the native language of group participants. We documented how frequently coparenting events occurred, and how the nature and quality of events varied within and across groups.
Overall, in both English- and Spanish-speaking groups expressly assembled to focus on marital and parenting issues, coparenting events occurred relatively infrequently. At the same time, both mothers and fathers appeared motivated to raise and discuss issues associated with their coparenting, and extended discussions about coparenting issues broached by the parents blossomed in approximately 37% of all instances. Process-oriented (rather than didactic) co-leader responses appeared especially helpful in scaffolding prolonged coparenting discussions.
We propose that use of the system as a training, supervision and self-assessment tool can help clinicians become more consciously aware of how well their interventions succeed in promoting and scaffolding coparenting conversations during group interactions.
当干预专家围绕共同养育子女的问题激发父母之间富有成效的对话时，家庭会从中获得诸多潜在益处。父亲在与共同养育者及子女的互动中更积极地参与，这对家庭有益，而这也是孩子健康成长的关键因素。在本报告中，我们介绍了一种新的策略和评分系统，以帮助从业者和督导评估在夫妻小组干预背景下与共同养育相关的对话和交流的性质和质量。
该系统源自对24个关系改善小组的分析，其中13个小组招募说英语的夫妻，11个小组招募说西班牙语的夫妻，所有成员均为幼儿的父母。所有小组均由男女搭配的团队共同带领，这些团队经过专门培训，专注于婚姻和育儿主题，并接受督导以解决夫妻问题——而非明确针对共同养育问题。所有共同带领者均说小组参与者的母语。我们记录了共同养育事件发生的频率，以及这些事件在小组内部和小组之间的性质和质量如何变化。
总体而言，在专门为关注婚姻和育儿问题而组建的说英语和说西班牙语的小组中，共同养育事件发生的频率相对较低。与此同时，母亲和父亲似乎都有意愿提出并讨论与共同养育相关的问题，在所有案例中，约37%的情况下，父母对共同养育问题展开了深入讨论。以过程为导向（而非说教式）的共同带领者回应似乎对促成关于共同养育的长期讨论特别有帮助。
我们建议将该系统用作培训、督导和自我评估工具，这有助于临床医生更有意识地了解他们的干预措施在促进和支持小组互动期间的共同养育对话方面的成效如何。
