Congratulations! You have a new baby. Don’t forget you also have a marriage. Having a baby is a joyous experience, but even the best relationships are strained during the transition from duo to trio. In And Baby Makes Three, Love Lab experts John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman teach couples the skills needed to maintain […]

Connections: Relationships and Marriage (Connections) is a high school marriage education curriculum designed to teach students how to develop healthy relationships and marriages. This study evaluated the effectiveness of this curriculum over 4-years postintervention with a matched set of 72 high school students who were in either the Connections group or a control group. Findings […]

This fact sheet reviews research findings to explore the impact of a mutual child have on a new stepfamily marriage, why couples elect to have a mutual child, and what effect the mutual child has on the relationships within the stepfamily. Findings indicate having a mutual child reduces the risk of divorce, while simultaneously negatively […]

The current study examined the learning processes involved in professionally supported self-directed couple relationship education (CRE). Fifty-nine couples completed Couple CARE, a systematic, self-directed CRE program designed in flexible delivery mode to be completed at home. Couples watched a DVD introducing key relationship ideas and skills and then completed a structured guidebook. The learning process […]

A series of studies examined the impact of family type on the well-being of adolescents. The studies involved a national sample of adolescents (ages 12-18) living in the four most prevalent family structures in the United States: intact, first-married family units; divorced, single-parent families; stepfamilies; and continuously single-parent families. Several features of families were explored, […]

This fact sheet cites statistics that indicate the share of children living in married-couple plunged from 73% in 2000 to 68% in 2008, and that the most recent data available for 2008 indicate that the share of rural children living in married-couple families is 1 percentage point below that of children in metropolitan areas (68% […]

This fact sheet reports the findings of a study that examined the family experiences of 194 male children at age 10 to predict their later involvement in delinquent acts (police arrests) at age 17. Findings showed that being in a stepfamily, rather than residing with both biological parents, more than doubled the risk of juvenile […]

This article discusses the financial stress couples may feel and recommends the following strategies for coping with finances: remember that your relationship is about more than the bottom line, share your history, give a little credit, forget budgets and create a spending plan instead, have a regular meeting to talk about finances, and divide your […]

Findings from a study that investigated the effects of remarriage on coparenting are shared. The study followed divorced persons whose marriage ended in 1986 for 3 years. At that point 28.5% of the women and 38.3% of the men had remarried from the 372 women and 277 men involved in the study. Several aspects of […]