Every year, family courts connect large numbers of separating and divorcing parents with parent education programs. That creates an enormous opportunity for prevention: reaching families during a stressful transition with tools that can help parents protect and promote their children’s well-being. However, many parent education programs that reach families through courts have never been rigorously evaluated. At the same time, some of our strongest evidence-based parenting programs have struggled to reach families in real-world court settings.
So how do we bring the reach of the courts together with the evidence of prevention science?
That is the question behind our newly published paper, Building an Evidence-Based Parent Education and Awareness Program in New York Courts: A Research–Practice Partnership.
Published in
Prevention Science
Authors
Karey L. O’Hara & Sheila Sproule
Building the partnership
This project grew from a partnership between the New York State Unified Court System’s Parent Education and Awareness Program (PEAP) and prevention scientists at Arizona State University.
From the beginning, our goal was not simply to conduct a research study in the courts. We wanted to work with the court system to build a study that could meet rigorous scientific standards while also working within the realities of a large public system.
That distinction matters.
Researchers bring expertise in understanding what puts children at risk, what helps protect them, how interventions can target those processes, and how we can rigorously evaluate whether programs are working.
Court leaders bring deep knowledge about the families they serve, how the court system operates, what judges and families need from parent education, and what is actually feasible to implement at scale.
Bringing those perspectives together created an opportunity to build something neither group could have built as effectively on its own.
Testing two different approaches to helping families
Together, we launched a randomized study across 16 New York courts comparing two online parent education programs.
The eNew Beginnings Program (eNBP) takes a broad parenting-focused approach. Much of the program focuses on strengthening parenting and parent–child relationships. It also helps parents understand how conflict can affect children and how to reduce children’s exposure to destructive conflict.
PEACE (Promoting Children’s Emotional Security After Conflict Events) takes a more conflict-focused approach. Rather than assuming that parents can eliminate all conflict after separation or divorce, PEACE focuses on helping parents handle disagreements in ways that protect children. Parents learn strategies for engaging in conflict more constructively, resolving disagreements, reassuring children that they are safe and loved, and repairing ruptures after children are exposed to conflict.
Both approaches are grounded in prevention science, but they emphasize different pathways for supporting children.
That gives us an opportunity to ask a more useful question than simply, “Does parent education work?”
We can begin asking: What changes when parents participate in different kinds of parent education?
Making rigorous research work in the real world
One of the most important lessons from this project has been that rigorous prevention research can be embedded within a functioning public court system—but doing so requires genuine partnership.
For example, parents may be ordered or referred to parent education by a court, but participation in the research study can remain voluntary. We therefore designed the study so that parents could choose whether to participate in the research while still meeting their parent education requirement through an existing certified PEAP program.
We also wanted the study to represent the diversity of communities served by New York courts while keeping the pilot manageable for the court system. The resulting study includes eight Family Courts and eight Supreme Matrimonial Courts spanning urban, suburban, and rural areas, allowing us to include both parents navigating separation and parents navigating divorce across a range of communities and court settings.
Another challenge involved program content. The two programs being tested were not originally designed around New York’s specific parent education requirements. Rather than changing the interventions themselves, we worked together to develop a brief New York-specific introductory module that every participating parent completes before beginning their assigned program, so that all participants in the study receive the same required New York-specific content before starting either intervention.
These might sound like logistical details, but they illustrate something important about doing prevention science in real-world systems: scientific rigor and practical implementation cannot be treated as completely separate problems.
They have to be worked through together.
What have we learned so far?
The study is still underway, so our new paper does not report whether one program produces better outcomes than the other.
Instead, the paper describes how we built the partnership and the statewide randomized trial, along with what we have learned during early implementation.
At the time reported in the paper, 165 parents had accessed the study website and 106 had continued into enrollment. Among parents assigned to eNBP, 85% completed at least one program module. Among parents assigned to PEACE, 73% completed at least one module.
We are also learning where implementation can be strengthened.
For example, referrals have varied considerably across participating courts. We are continuing to work with judges, court staff, and judicial leadership to understand what makes referrals easier or harder and how we can better support participation across sites.
Language access is another important consideration. The interventions evaluated in the current trial are available only in English. We knew this limitation going into the pilot, and improving language accessibility remains an important priority for future work.
Importantly, these challenges are part of what we want to learn. When research is embedded in a real public system, understanding how an intervention can be implemented is essential to understanding whether it can ultimately reach families at scale.
What we have learned about research–practice partnerships
A research–practice partnership does not eliminate the tensions between conducting rigorous science and operating a large public system.
What it can provide is a structure for working through those tensions together.
Throughout this project, scientific priorities have had to be balanced with legal requirements, court operations, family needs, accessibility, confidentiality, and the practical demands placed on judges and court staff.
Instead of researchers designing a trial and then asking the courts to implement it, those considerations were negotiated throughout the design and implementation process. That led to solutions that reflected both scientific and court priorities.
Several things have been especially important: a shared commitment to improving services for children and families, sustained engagement from judicial leadership, and ongoing communication among researchers, administrators, judges, clerks, and other court partners.
For us, that ongoing relationship is just as important as any single study.
Where do we go from here?
As the study continues, we will examine how the two programs affect family processes linked to children’s well-being, including parent–child relationships and how parents experience and manage conflict.
We are particularly interested in whether the programs produce different patterns of change in the processes they are designed to address.
The long-term goal does not necessarily have to be finding one parent education program that is “best” for every family.
Different families come to the court system with different experiences, strengths, and needs. If different interventions are particularly effective at changing different family processes, that creates an opportunity for future research to ask an even more useful question:
Which kinds of support are most helpful for which families?
Over time, this work could contribute to a more responsive parent education system—one in which program decisions are informed not only by whether an intervention has evidence behind it, but also by what a particular family may need.
Why this work matters
If a court asks parents to spend their time completing a program while they are already navigating the stress of separation or divorce, that program should be worth their time.
That means making programs accessible and responsive to families. But it also means asking whether they actually improve the parenting and family processes that matter for children.
Our hope is that this partnership can help New York continue building that kind of parent education system—and provide one example of how prevention scientists and public systems can work together to move research into the places where families already are.
Because ultimately, the goal is not simply to develop effective interventions.
It is to make sure effective interventions actually reach the children and families who can benefit from them.