295 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
R. Kuersten-Hogan, J. P. McHale (eds.), Prenatal Family Dynamics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51988-9_14
Chapter 14
A Prenatal Intervention to Support
Coparenting in Unmarried African
American Family Systems
James P. McHale, Carla Stover, and Katherine McKay
In this chapter, we present the development of a culturally and community-grounded
prenatal intervention developed to support coparenting alliances in lower socioeco-
nomic African American families where parents are unmarried
1
and may be non-co-
residential. We will detail the progression of the initiative, from its initial inception
based on a review of current available interventions and on active engagement with
the community to better understand family circumstances through pilot implemen-
tation and refnement and fnally to implementation of a large ongoing randomized
trial. Our aims are to provide insights into what families and community partners
have taught us about delivering a culturally competent coparenting intervention. As
part of this chronicling, we also provide an overview of our process in obtaining
important prenatal and postnatal family data to evaluate the intervention’s impact
and object lessons learned from that undertaking.
1
Unmarried families are frequently called “fragile families” in the literature (Garfnkel et al. 2001).
For reasons we hope will become clear, we have chosen not to employ this term in the current
manuscript, refecting a shift we have made in our own work over time to highlighting family
strengths rather than family fragility.
J. P. McHale (*)
Family Study Center, Department of Psychology, University of South Florida,
St. Petersburg campus, St. Petersburg, FL, USA
e-mail: jmchale@usf.edu
C. Stover
Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
e-mail: Carla.stover@yale.edu
K. McKay
Private Practice, Saint Petersburg, FL, USA
e-mail: Kmckay@drkatherinemckay.com