Perinatal Intervention and Long-Term Outcomes

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this proposal is to evaluate the long-term effects of a universal preventive intervention for couples expecting a first child on parent adjustment, parenting, and child outcomes from six to eight years after birth. A key innovation of this transition-to-parenthood model, called Family Foundations (FF), is the focus on enhancing the coparenting relationship, based on evidence that coparenting is a causal influence on parent adjustment, parenting quality, and child outcomes (Feinberg, 2002, 2003; Minuchin, Rosman, & Baker, 1978). Given the positive results of FF to date in two trials, and the program's potential population reach, it is critically important to understand the potential of FF for enhancing child well-being over a longer period of time and across both family and school settings. Thus, we propose to assess not only children's self-regulation and emotional/behavioral adjustment (e.g., internalizing and externalizing behavior problems), but children's school adaptation and academic achievement in the early years of elementary school as well. Additionally, we propose to leverage the experimental design to test the causal pathways in the underlying theory, thus providing a test of whether program impact on coparenting and parent adjustment lead to change in parenting quality, which in turn together influence children's self-regulation and adjustment.