Nearly a billion dollars has been spent on marriage promotion since it was first introduced by Republicans in 2006 as part of welfare reform, and extended by President Obama and the Democrats in 2011. Dozens of programs around the nation, including one that I run in the South Bronx, have sought to teach couples how to break the cycle of family instability and poverty. This is all the more important in a community, like the South Bronx, one of the nation’s poorest, where only one in three families is married.

Marriage has been a source of ideological conflict between Democrats and Republicans ever since Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan addressed the impact of family dissolution in the 1960s. Conservatives stress the correlation between family dissolution and poverty, and try to uphold marriage; while liberals take umbrage at what looks to them like an attempt by the federal government to impose religious values on people’s private lives......

......Building Strong Families examined the impact of relationship education on 5,100 low-income unmarried couples in eight urban settings around the nation. Supporting Healthy Marriage examined the impact of the same kind of relationship education on 6,300 low-income married couples in eight urban settings. These two types of programs—relationship education for unmarried couples, and marriage education for married couples—represent the federal government’s attempt to promote marriage and stabilize families. These programs are based on the premise that communication skills can be taught, which in turn will lead to a reduction in relationship conflict. The government has invested heavily in these programs because the single most important predictor of a father’s engagement with his children is how well he and the mother get along, regardless of marital status.The two studies at issue, Building Strong Families and Supporting Healthy Marriage, are important because they are very large-scale multi-site studies, were conducted by neutral think tanks without an ideological agenda (i.e. Mathematica and MDRC), and specifically examined federally funded anti-poverty programs......

.......In both studies, when couples attended relationship workshops, their relationships did improve. The difference between the two studies is that attendance was poor in the Building Strong Families study and fairly good in the Supporting Healthy Marriage study. It is difficult to isolate the factors that account for the improved attendance at Supporting Healthy Marriage workshops since the study was more richly funded, allowing sites to provide greater financial incentives for couples to participate. It also involved married couples who presumably were more committed to improving their relationships than the unmarried couples in Building Strong Families. Whether through financial incentives or by reason of being married, couples need to be motivated to attend relationship workshops. Both studies show that when people are sufficiently motivated to attend these workshops, conflict management skills can be taught, which in turn was shown to improve the quality of those relationships.......

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