Randomized Controlled Trial of Prenatal Coparenting Intervention (CoparentRCT)

Seventy-five randomly-assigned control group families will receive county services as-usual (TAU) for pregnant parents and assistance of the partnering health and human service agencies with referrals to desired services, while 75 experimental group families will receive the same services and aid, plus a 6-session prenatal intervention with a post-natal booster session. The intervention addresses the importance of safe, healthy families for early infant development, the impact a cooperative and sustained coparenting alliance can have in promoting positive infant development, challenges unmarried parents face cultivating a coparenting alliance together when their commitment to one another as romantic or married partners is in doubt, and ways to surmount these obstacles, maintain rapport, and sustain a strong alliance. Participating families, both at intake (prior to the intervention) and then again at 3 and 12 months post-partum, will report beliefs about fatherhood; extent of depressive symptomatology; and quality of the mother-father partnership, including intimate partner violence (IPV). State-of-the-field coparenting observations will be conducted at each follow-up, along with new measures of perceived coparenting communication and respect, father engagement, parent stress, and (at 12 months) infant socioemotional adjustment. Analyses will examine impact of the intervention on promoting more supportive, coordinated post-partum coparenting alliances and more positive adult and infant outcomes. Exploratory analyses will examine questions relevant to father associations with child adjustment and whether the dyadic coparent intervention has an impact on IPV.