USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications

Thinking 3 rather than 2 + 1: How a coparenting framework can transform infant mental health efforts with unmarried African American parents.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

James P. McHale

Vikki T. Gaskin-Butler

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

ISSN

0736-8038

Abstract

More than half of poor African American infants are born into "fragile families" and nearly half grow up in single-mother families with little or no father involvement. However, most prenatal interventions fail to help unmarried mothers talk and plan together with their baby's father, especially when fathers are nonresidential. This article details one of the nation's first interventions explicitly designed to support coparenting and triangular (mother-father-infant) relationships in African American families where the parents are unmarried, be they coupled or uncoupled. The Figuring It Out for the Child (FIOC) project in St. Petersburg, FL, successfully partnered with local community leaders in designing, implementing, and evaluating a novel dyadic, prenatal intervention enrolling both coresidential and non-coresidential African American parents. The authors provide an overview of the state of the field when the project began, explain the significance of the project's community connectedness, summarize details of outreach efforts, and highlight noteworthy findings relevant to this issue.

Comments

Abstract only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Published in Zero to Three, 35(5), 49-58. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.

Language

en_US

Publisher

Zero to Three - National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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