In this article, we examine family-based interventions designed to increase parenting effectiveness, fathers' positive involvement, and couple relationship quality, all with the goal of enhancing children's development. We focus on the fact that government funding policies, service delivery systems, and research evaluations of interventions to benefit children and families typically operate in separate silos. We provide a theoretical model, along with empirical evidence, to argue that a more integrated, collaborative perspective is likely to produce more optimal outcomes for parents and children than current siloed attempts to improve child and family well-being. We discuss some of the obstacles to using evidence to guide policy decisions. We offer suggestions for policy makers and service providers in an attempt to describe a more integrated approach to supporting family well-being, and to encourage the increased use of systematic data in making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources for family support.

This chapter reviews family systems and developmental psychopathology, noting some aspects of the political /policy/practice context about the role of families in the development of psychopathology. To provide a focused account of family systems theory, it illustrates examples drawn primarily from the United States. After a brief historical look at how these theories have changed over time, the chapter illustrates how family systems and family risk factors approaches can be applied to the understanding of developmental psychopathology. It examines how family processes are implicated in explaining what happens when nonclinical families go through major life transitions, both expected and unexpected. The chapter then shows how formulations from a family systems or family risk factor perspective can provide value-added information, both in predicting the trajectories people follow in their journeys toward or away from diagnosed disorders, and in planning interventions for those at risk or distressed.

A diverse sample of 239 primarily low-income couples participated in a random controlled trial of the Supporting Father Involvement couples group intervention. In this report, we examined the value of adding measures of fathers' attachment style and parenting to mothers' measures in order to explain variations in children's behavior problems. We also tested the hypothesis that the link between intervention-induced reductions in couple conflict and reductions in anxious/harsh parenting can be explained by intervention effects on parents' attachment insecurity or on anxiety and depression. Fathers' attachment security and parenting behavior added significantly to mothers' in accounting for children's internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors. Fathers' anxious attachment style and anxiety/depression mediated the link between post-intervention reductions in parental conflict and anxious/harsh parenting. For mothers, only improvements in attachment security accounted for those links. The findings support the need for attachment researchers to consider the contributions of both parents to their children's development.

To address the problem of fathers' absence from children's lives and the difficulty of paternal engagement, especially among lower income families, government agencies have given increasing attention to funding father involvement interventions. Few of these interventions have yielded promising results. Father involvement research that focuses on the couple/coparenting relationship offers a pathway to support fathers' involvement while strengthening family relationships. Relevant research is reviewed and an exemplar is provided in the Supporting Father Involvement intervention and its positive effects on parental and parent-child relationships and children's outcomes. The article concludes with policy implications of this choice of target populations and the need to develop new strategies to involve fathers in the lives of their children.

INTRODUCTION: When interventionists stimulate productive father-mother dialogues around coparenting, there are numerous potential benefits for families. Families stand to benefit from more positive involvement of fathers with both coparents and children, key contributors to healthy child developmental outcomes. In this report, we introduce a new strategy and rating system for helping practitioners and supervisors assess the nature and quality of coparenting-related dialogues and conversations in the context of couples group interventions. METHOD: The system derives from analysis of 24 relationship-enhancement groups, 13 enrolling English-speaking couples and 11 enrolling Spanish-speaking couples, all parents of young children. All groups were co-led by a male-female team explicitly trained to focus on marital and parenting themes and supervised to address couples issues - not coparenting issues explicitly. All co-leaders spoke the native language of group participants. We documented how frequently coparenting events occurred, and how the nature and quality of events varied within and across groups. RESULTS: Overall, in both English- and Spanish-speaking groups expressly assembled to focus on marital and parenting issues, coparenting events occurred relatively infrequently. At the same time, both mothers and fathers appeared motivated to raise and discuss issues associated with their coparenting, and extended discussions about coparenting issues broached by the parents blossomed in approximately 37% of all instances. Process-oriented (rather than didactic) co-leader responses appeared especially helpful in scaffolding prolonged coparenting discussions. DISCUSSION: We propose that use of the system as a training, supervision and self-assessment tool can help clinicians become more consciously aware of how well their interventions succeed in promoting and scaffolding coparenting conversations during group interactions.

Despite the well-established links between couple relationship quality and healthy family functioning, and burgeoning evidence from the international intervention field, there is little or no evidence of the efficacy of couples-based interventions from the United Kingdom (U.K.). This study explored whether the Parents as Partners (PasP) program, a group-based intervention developed in the United States, brought about the same benefits in the U.K. The evaluation is based on 97 couples with children from communities with high levels of need, recruited to PasP because they are at high risk for parent and child psychopathology. Both mothers and fathers completed self-report questionnaires assessing parents' psychological distress, parenting stress, couple relationship quality and conflict, fathers' involvement in child care and, importantly, children's adjustment. Multilevel modeling analysis comparing parents' responses pre- and postintervention not only showed substantial improvements for both parents on multiple measures of couple relationship quality, but also improvements in parent and child psychopathology. Analyses also indicated most substantial benefits for couples displaying poorest functioning at baseline. The findings provide initial evidence for the successful implementation of PasP, an American-origin program, in the U.K., and add support for the concept of the couple relationship as a resource by which to strengthen families.

Objective: To expand the evidence base of the Supporting Father Involvement (SFI) intervention to include child welfare families. Background: Taking a preventive father-inclusive approach, SFI aims to strengthen coparenting, parent–child relationships, and child outcomes. This study replicates 4 prior iterations of the program using the same 32-hour curriculum facilitated by clinically trained staff, case managers, and onsite child care and family meals. Method: Participants (N = 239) included low-income (median = $24,000) coparenting pairs, typically mothers and fathers/father figures, half of whom were Mexican American, with toddlers (median age < 3 years). Questionnaires assessing multiple family domains were administered verbally over an 18-month period. Intervention effectiveness was tested through a randomized control trial with immediate treatment or waitlist–control groups using a moderated mediator structural equation model. Results: The model explained 49% to 56% of the variance in children's problem behaviors (intervention and autoregressive effects). The intervention reduced couple conflict, which reduced anxious and harsh parenting, leading to better child outcomes. The intervention was equally effective for community and child welfare–referred families and family dynamics pathways were similar across conditions. Conclusion: With its intentional outreach and inclusion of fathers, SFI offers an effective intervention for lower risk child welfare–involved families. Implications: Results argue for the utility of treating community and child welfare parents in mixed-gender prevention groups that focus on strengthening multiple levels of family relationships.

Despite the benefits for children and families of fathers who are involved positively with their children, most parenting programs in the United States and globally focus on and collect evaluation data from mothers almost exclusively. Engaging fathers is still viewed as a complex endeavor that is only somewhat successful. In this article, we summarize what is known about engaging fathers in parenting programs, then argue that programs are most effective when coparenting is the focus early in family formation. We rely on two decades of the Supporting Father Involvement program as an example of an initiative that has been effective at recruiting and retaining fathers and mothers in various cultural and national contexts. When programs are inclusive in content and focus on process, are sensitive to differences within and across families, and recognize parents as experts on their children, they are more successful in recruiting and retaining diverse groups of fathers and families.

More than US$21 billion is spent annually on biodiversity conservation. Despite their importance for preventing or slowing extinctions and preserving biodiversity, conservation interventions are rarely assessed systematically for their global impact. Islands house a disproportionately higher amount of biodiversity compared with mainlands, much of which is highly threatened with extinction. Indeed, island species make up nearly two-thirds of recent extinctions. Islands therefore are critical targets of conservation. We used an extensive literature and database review paired with expert interviews to estimate the global benefits of an increasingly used conservation action to stem biodiversity loss: eradication of invasive mammals on islands. We found 236 native terrestrial insular faunal species (596 populations) that benefitted through positive demographic and/or distributional responses from 251 eradications of invasive mammals on 181 islands. Seven native species (eight populations) were negatively impacted by invasive mammal eradication. Four threatened species had their International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List extinction-risk categories reduced as a direct result of invasive mammal eradication, and no species moved to a higher extinction-risk category. We predict that 107 highly threatened birds, mammals, and reptiles on the IUCN Red List-6% of all these highly threatened species-likely have benefitted from invasive mammal eradications on islands. Because monitoring of eradication outcomes is sporadic and limited, the impacts of global eradications are likely greater than we report here. Our results highlight the importance of invasive mammal eradication on islands for protecting the world's most imperiled fauna.