Couple Care for Parents: Dyadic, Skills-Based Primary Prevention for Partner Violence in Perinatal Parents

Couple CARE for Parents is a preventive intervention that addresses interpersonal processes and promotes skills-based changes in couples with a newborn. Couple CARE for Parents uses an approach developed in Australia that is relatively easy and inexpensive to disseminate widely (i.e., brief home-visitation and video-and telephone-assisted skills training). It has demonstrated efficacy for significantly preventing relationship deterioration in three Australian randomized trials (Halford, Petch, & Creedy, 2004; Halford, Moore, Wilson, Dyer, & Farrugia, 2004; Halford, Sanders, & Behrens, 2001).

Arresting the normal decline of couple relationship satisfaction in new parents (Schulz et al., 2006) may also protect against intimate partner violence (IPV), as relationship satisfaction is one its strongest predictors (e.g.,Pan et al., 1994). Given the high prevalence of partner physical and emotional aggression in couples with newborns, (Bowen, Heron, Waylen, & Wolke, 2005) and the impact of these behaviors on both parents and children (e.g., Coker, Davis & Arias, 2002), the need for efficacious preventive interventions is acute.

The present RCT tested the effects of Couple CARE for Parents on IPV among couples of newborns. Participants were couples who had never experienced clinically-significant IPV and who had three empirically documented risk factors for the development of IPV: youth (at least one partner <30 years old), parenting a newborn (<3 months old), and psychological aggression in the past year. Families were recruited from maternity wards from two large Suffolk County Hospitals, and completed assessments when their babies were less than 3 months and approximately 8 months, 15 months, and 24 months. Couples were randomly assigned to either immediately receive the Couple CARE for Parents program (n = 180), or to receive a modified version of the program two years later (n = 173; waitlist control).

We will examine both the effect of Couple CARE for Parents on IPV and the mechanisms of that effect. Intention-to-treat analyses will be conducted within the context of latent growth curve modeling to test for intervention effects on change in IPV via intermediate effects on several factors hypothesized to mediate the program’s effect on IPV (e.g., relationship satisfaction, parenting stress, communication skills, conflict behaviors, partner attributions, expectation of partner, self-regulation). If our hypotheses are correct, couples in the control group, in comparison to those in the intervention group, will exhibit greater increases in IPV, driven by intermediate worsening of putative mediators (e.g., decreases in relationship satisfaction, increases in parenting stress).