`Healthy Families’ Program Aims to Help Couples Emotionally, Economically

KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ The Bush administration has high hopes for the likes of Sonya Bristlin and Bobby Martinez.

Thanks to recent local funding of the federal “healthy marriage” initiative, Bristlin and Martinez learned last summer how to argue. About picking the right time. About starting gently and really listening, without malice or hostility.

“We see what pushes the other person’s buttons and try not to do that,” Bristlin said.

The couple, who have two children, were early participants in a program aimed at lifting more poor families into the middle class.

By helping expectant or new parents improve their relationships, the initiative seeks to keep more families intact. That is important because single parenthood is a key indicator of poverty.

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 set a goal of increasing the number of two-parent families among low-income people. In 2002, the federal government began awarding grants, and in late 2006 it pledged $75 million annually for five years to 126 agencies.

One grant went to the Healthy Families Counseling & Support program, based in Kansas City, North. Karen Daentl, the program’s director of development, sought to add training to enhance the relationships between parents, and she now directs the program.

At sites in Clay and Platte counties, two or three groups meet one night a week for 14 weeks to talk, watch videos and role-play.

“Most of us are short on some of the interpersonal competencies,” said Bill Coffin, a marriage education specialist with the federal Administration for Children and Families. He said that training to address those shortcomings largely has been a middle- and upper-class phenomenon.

One goal of the grants is to level the playing field.

Research has proven that a free dinner is a good motivator, so pizza and fruit salad were the first order of business at a group meeting last month at Second Baptist Church in Liberty, Mo. The turnout was small _ one couple who were expecting a baby in a few months, plus Bristlin and Martinez. Bristlin and Martinez were there for a refresher after completing the program in September.

The subject was resolving disagreements through compromise. A key to reaching agreement is to keep on talking _ “again and again and again,” said Charles Schlee, a therapist and one of the group leaders.

Although marriage and relationship training has a proven track record with middle- and upper-income couples, it is not yet clear how much it can help people of lesser means. The federal government is funding two large research projects to evaluate the effects.

Alan Hershey, who heads an assessment of couples training in seven cities, said that efforts to keep low-income couples together and happy were important, given what is known about child welfare.

“Kids who grow up with both of their married parents do better in school, do better economically later on, have fewer problems with criminal justice, are less likely to be poor,” he said. “That’s the motivation for this.”

Theodora Ooms, a researcher for the Center on Law and Social Policy, said that the lives of low-income unmarried couples with children are under so many pressures that it is not reasonable to expect relationship education to be a panacea.

But she added that the earliest anecdotal reports from healthy-marriage initiatives were “very hopeful, and I’m talking about low-income couples who aren’t married.”

Relationship training today is where parent education was 60 years ago, Ooms said. Back then, people questioned the need for such an education. Now it’s taken for granted.

But Paula England, a sociology professor at Stanford University, said that the benefits of promoting marriage as an anti-poverty strategy were not borne out by the facts. The men who might be marriage prospects for poor women are mostly “unemployed, in prison and don’t have much money,” she said.

Some people theorize that marriage would assist low-income people by creating some “economies of scale,” regardless of household income. However, England said, nearly half of unmarried expectant couples already enjoy those savings by living together.

Coffin said his agency sees marriage education as one of several strategies to reduce poverty, but he knows it won’t help everybody. Still, if it could double the number of happy marriages among the target groups, he said, “think of the thousands of kids whose lives would be advantaged.”

In the duplex they share with 5-month-old Makia Martinez and 15-year-old Channing Holm, Bristlin and Martinez are working hard to work things out. Not long after they graduated from relationship training, troubles came to a boil, and Bristlin, 31, told Martinez, 38, to move out.

There were “trust issues,” Bristlin said, and Martinez was not helping as much with Makia as Bristlin wanted. Tight finances added to their burdens.

Bristlin compiled a to-do list for Martinez _ including going to church and to a couples counselor _ and let him back in a week later.

Bristlin said they now are focused on their relationship and it feels much better. They go to counseling and to church, and this month Martinez will join a group aimed at engaging men more in their children’s lives.

Bristlin, for her part, spends less time chatting online and has removed all men from her MySpace page and her cell-phone contacts.

Just a few months ago, Martinez said, he was “not in the game. I was sitting on the bench. Now I’m in the game, with the bases loaded.”

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PHOTO (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): HEALTHYFAMILIES

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