I sought to investigate the potential efficacy of an online divorce and co-parent education program. Across 9-years of evaluation data for the Focus on Kids online program, participants (N = 6,679) reported a high degree of program satisfaction. According to pre-post test reports, average knowledge of how to support children across the divorce…

Divorce education is designed for divorcing parents with minor children, and in a growing number of states, participation has become court-mandated to finalize a divorce. To increase accessibility, some states have adopted brief, online formats for divorce education programming. Evaluations are encouraging; however, less is known about how…

Although divorce education programming is prevalent, research on how programs benefit certain ethnic groups is sparse. Addressing this research gap is important given the increasing ethnic diversity in the United States. In the current study, we applied a mixed-methods approach to examine the experiences of divorcing/separating Latinx parents (n…

When completing a needs assessment, Extension professionals should include both objective county data and stakeholder input data. Specifically, Extension professionals should identify potential areas of need, source available objective data, source data from relevant county stakeholders, and analyze similarities and differences in objective and…

This article describes a quasi-experimental design study comparing a sample of divorcing parents who attended a divorce education program to a sample of divorcing parents who did not attend a divorce education program. The data were analyzed using four child outcomes (emotional symptoms, conduct problems, peer problems, prosocial behaviors), with…

The goal of this article is to provide a framework for practitioners to update their curriculum using an in-depth case study of the Parents Forever program. As new research and best practices change, curriculum authors and program administrators should consider revising both the content and method of delivery of their courses. However, little…

Although the principles and strategies outlined in Cline and Fay's (1990) Parenting with Love and Logic have been the foundation for several parent and educator training curricula over the last 30 years, there has been a dearth of empirical research to evaluate these programs (Fay, 2012). Prior research has documented the impact of cumulative…

Many parent and family education programs lack a clearly articulated program theory that is solidly founded in the social science literature and used to guide rigorous evaluation. This article describes the program theory for Parents Forever, a divorce education program developed by the Minnesota Extension to serve divorcing parents. The Parents…

Programs aiming to help parents are often challenged in analyzing open-ended survey questions from large samples. This article presents qualitative findings collected from 1,287 participants with a child 5 years of age or younger who completed the program evaluation for the Co-Parenting for Successful Kids online program, a 4-hour education course…

The research on children whose parents are separated or divorced presents much debate regarding the role of risk factors and the influence of interventions to mitigate negative outcomes. Reviews of research on divorce have consistently supported findings that children of divorce have a higher incidence of mental health, substance abuse, academic,…

We examined the impacts of the Co-Parenting for Successful Kids program offered by University of Nebraska Extension. Using a sample of 2,622 parents who participated in the program in 2015, we measured their knowledge change and ability to perform cooperative co-parenting behaviors. Results suggest that the program effectively improved…

Including fathers is the next frontier for infant mental health. In this article, the authors describe the inclusion of fathers as equal partners in Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), an evidence-based treatment for young children experiencing or at risk for mental health problems following exposure to violence and other adversities. The authors…

An online survey was developed to map Extension's presence in divorce education initiatives and to catalogue the amount, type, and availability of resources that each state has dedicated to meeting the needs of this parent audience. Requests for participation were sent to members on the National Extension Human Service listserv and resulted…

Many adults return to formal learning situations to pursue lifelong learning goals because their lives are in transition from dealing with real-life problems such as divorce and re-marriage. The purpose of this study was to describe what couples learned that contributed to the success of their subsequent marriages and how they learned it. The…

Parenting coordination is a nonadversarial dispute resolution process that is court ordered or agreed on by divorced and separated parents who have an ongoing pattern of high conflict and/or litigation about their children. These guidelines are designed to address the developing area of practice known as parenting coordination. In response to the…