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Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D. and Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D. - Guests
Philip A. Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan are clinical psychologists and professors Emeriti at University of California, Berkeley who have conducted three significant longitudinal research studies on couples relationships after the birth of the first child. They have received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention. Their three projects, the Becoming a Family Project, the Schoolchildren and Families Project, and the Supporting Father Involvement Project, which is an ongoing collaboration with Marsha Kline Pruett, Ph.D., M.S.L. ABPP at Smith College and Yale University, have studied the effects of interventions on the couples relationship, father involvement, child wellbeing and a number of other factors. Their group model for couples is being conducted throughout California, in Connecticut, Alberta Canada, England, and Malta. Carolyn and Phil Cowan received the the Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research award from the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA) and the Best Research Article award, along with Marsha and Kyle Pruett, Ph.D., M.S.L. ABPP and Jessie Wong, Ph.D., from the Men in Families Focus Group of the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR). They are the authors of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples, and there are “training the trainer” trainings in their Supporting Father Involvement program through Brazelton Touchpoints Center, which is part of the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (00:22)
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today, I'll be speaking with Philip Cohen and Carolyn Pape Cohen, who are clinical psychologists and professors emeriti at University of California Berkeley, who have conducted three significant longitudinal research studies on couples relationships after the birth of the first child. They have received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention. Their three projects, the Becoming a Family Project, the School Children and Families Project, and the Supporting Father Involvement Project, which is an ongoing collaboration with Marsha Klein Pruitt at Smith College in Yellow University, have studied the effects of interventions on the couple's relationship, father involvement, child wellbeing, and a number of other factors. Their group model for couples is being conducted throughout California, Connecticut, Alberta, Canada, England, and Malta. Carolyn and Phil Cowan received the distinguished contribution to Family Systems Research Award from the American Family Therapy Academy and the best research article award, along with Marsha and Kyle Pruitt and Jesse Wong from the Men and Families Focus group of the National Council of Family Relations. They're the authors of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples, and they're training in their Supporting Father Involvement program through Braselton Touchpoint Center, which is part of the division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Let's listen to the interview. Hi, Phil and Carolyn, welcome. How’re you doing?
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (02:06)
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D (02:08)
Yeah. Hi.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (02:10)
Well, thanks for joining us today. So I know of your work. I particularly learned about your book When Partners Become Parents, and your research back when I was having my first kid. I was interested in this idea of what happens to couples in the transition to parenthood. And then, you're over at UC Berkeley so I reached out and you did a workshop for the Association of Family Therapists Northern California on your research, which was really great. And (you) were even nice enough to let me use one of your slides on one of the graphs of what happens to relationship satisfaction after the birth of the first child, which I've incorporated in some of the trainings that I do. So I'd love to hear about your work and what you're working on now, and particularly before we even kind of get to that, can you say a little bit about, how you got to doing what you're doing and the evolution of your thinking?
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (03:07)
Well, certainly the first part of our work back in the seventies really grew out of our own personal experience as well as professional experiences that we were beginning to have. We were a young couple. We had just moved from Canada, so we knew nobody in California when we first came to UC, Berkeley. We had one daughter who was almost two, and one who was about to be born any second, and eventually had a third. So we have two daughters and a son who are now very, very grown up with partners and, and grown up children of their own. One of the things that surprised us, I think, was the parenting part didn't seem so stressful. Somehow it came naturally. We'd each been working with kids in various situations as teenagers. But we were trying to figure out what had happened to our relationship. It seemed to have come to the back burner, which eventually we discovered was a fairly common occurrence. And we began also in clinical work that we were doing and what was going on at the psychology clinic at UC Berkeley was finding that often parents would call in having a problem with their child. But when working with the parents or one of the parents and that child, it often began to seem to the clinicians as if the child might not be the key problem, there might be something going on with the parents that wasn't recognized or discovered or whatever. And we began to think that it might be helpful if we tried working with parents before they had that first child. And we walked them through what we were now hearing were some of the normal expectable stressors. Many of them, kind of unexpected. To see if we could catch them so that it wasn't 15 years later or 10 years later, and they were saying, “I don't know why I am with this person”, and “this wasn't what I bargained for”. We went to the literature and we can talk more about what wasn't, wasn't in it. but we decided to give it a try and had a bunch of couples who were willing to try.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (05:35)
Oh, great. Wonderful.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (05:38)
Let me just add my part to this. I mean, Carolyn is really accurate in describing the personal part of it. You know, we were a couple going through the transition to parenthood and found that there was not very much work or research on that except to say that it was a crisis and that there were psychiatric problems for dads, that was in the literature.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (06:04)
Okay.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (06:05)
Um, so pretty scary
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (06:07)
One, one article
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (06:08)
Yeah. So, but what we were seeing then, and it's still true some today, is that psychology and all the service professions, if you talk about parenting, what you're talking about is moms. There are many, many, many parenting classes. 90% of them are attended by moms still today. Or family service agencies. If you go in, the walls are pink and the pictures are women and babies. And men are nowhere to be seen. So the notion of one,the importance of fathers began to be big. And, that's increased over time in the literature, and in the service delivery system a little bit, but not a whole lot. And then what Carolyn was describing was that parenting really takes place in a whole family system. So if you're doing a parenting class, you can't just talk about what you do with your kid. But you have to talk about the relationship between the two parents. And we started out with mostly married parents. But over the years we've worked with parents who are separated, parents who are divorced, parents who are fathers and a grandmother of the kid. Or fathers and a friend. So what you're talking about is the environment in which the kid grows up and the relationship environment. So that's been a premise that we've been touting in all the work that we've come to do.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (07:53)
Yeah. So kind of taking the, looking at the parenting also within the context of the system.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:00)
Absolutely. Yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (08:00)
Yeah. Great. And let me ask you, what were you doing before? What were your focuses prior to going to Berkeley and then working on focusing on couples and parenting?
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:12)
Well, in my first life, I was an elementary school teacher in Canada.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (08:17)
Okay.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:18)
And then I became pregnant with our first child. And, it's embarrassing to say, but it didn't occur to me to do both at the same time. To keep teaching and, and be a parent. So, I left my job a couple years before Phil got the offer to come to Berkeley. Right after finishing his PhD. So that's what I was doing.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:48)
And I was pretty much a child clinical psychologist, and the child developmental part was very heavily invested in Piaget and Piaget's notions of how kids develop and make sense of the world, and how kids of different ages make different senses that are logical of the world. When I came to Berkeley and started teaching clinical graduate students, we began to be, we were sort of influenced, affected by the emerging notion of prevention. That was happening in the sixties. Systems could be changed. And so we did some work in the schools in consulting with teachers, but it turns out that that was too late. Because by the time kids get into school, really some of the problems that they had have been going on for a long time. That's when Carolyn got the idea that maybe if we got a group of couples together who were going through a transition together, right around becoming parents for the first time, that that would serve a prevention function. It would include fathers and it would certainly get at the couple relationship.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (10:08)
So it never occurred to us to just offer this to mothers.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:11)
Yes. Yes.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (10:12)
We were already concerned about what was happening to the relationship between parents.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:19)
Exactly.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (10:20)
Not our own, but others around us. And we were seeing as our kids were in their early childhood and middle childhood, many families, lovely, thoughtful, caring people, starting to tear apart relationships that they'd been developing for years because they were just not going well. They were very upset.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:44)
Yeah. Really struggling. Yeah. And, this is such an area of interest. One of the ways that I got to working with couples was working with families. I originally started out focusing in teenagers and families, and I quickly learned, if you're going to work with a family, you need to know how to work with a couple. And learning about your work, and particularly that graph, zero to 14 in your two different studies, just was so significant because I was seeing those families when they were at that level of DAS,in that significant range coming in with the kids. And a lot of times some of the issues were due to attachment injuries that had happened so early on, Like one couple I was working with, the mother wanted to hyphenate the name. The dad blew up on her, and she was pregnant with the first child, and she decided, I'm on my own. I have to take care of myself. And I was now seeing them 23 years later, you know with the kid. That is such a significant time. It's such a vulnerable time also. So it's so great that you focused on this. Tell me about the research and what you found and how you went about it.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (12:04)
Well, I'll start. You can pick up. Well we started and the notion was in the sixties, there were a lot of groups. If you remember, groups were very popular. Not a lot of research on groups either. So Carolyn had this idea of doing a group of couples having a first baby. And I was thinking that it would be really good to evaluate it. And we did a pilot study in which we had four or five couples together, and we explored some ideas, and we began to formulate an idea that there were really five kinds of areas that we needed to cover, not just parenting. We needed to look at them themselves, their wellbeing, their handling of depression and stress. We needed to look at the couple relationship, of course, and communication being key, but not the only thing. We needed to look at parenting. We needed to look at the patterns. This comes from all different kinds of theories. How patterns get transmitted across the generations. To say it in English, what you want to continue from the family you grew up in. And what you don't want to continue. And then there are two of you, and you may have very different things you want to continue and not. So there's a lot of discussion around that. And finally, there are the outside stresses and work, and we needed to do that. So we developed a 16-week, actually the first one was 24 weeks. From the middle of pregnancy until the babies were about three or four months old, of couples meeting together every week. And they'd drop out to have their baby, and then they'd bring the babies to the group. And so the last three months became pretty chaotic, but also a lot of fun sharing babies and crying babies, and crying parents and crying babies.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (14:19)
Yes.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (14:20)
And trying to have a conversation. And what we found, to summarize it really quickly, when we followed these couples and we followed them till their kids were in kindergarten, is that for the couples who didn't have this intervention randomly chosen, their satisfaction with their relationship kept going down in the graph that you referred to. To the point where half of them were in the clinical range, whereas we were able to maintain, it was stable. The couples didn't necessarily get better, but they started really high. Yeah. So they maintained their relationship over a period of five years. And we thought that was really pretty nifty.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (15:12)
Yeah. That's wonderful. And these are nonclinical couples, I think I remember right. These were, you recruited them from OBGYN offices or so on, and so they weren't necessarily coming in because of relationship crisis or clinical reasons. It was just your average heterosexual couple that was coming in.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (15:29)
Yes. It was ordinary people having a first baby but who weren't particularly troubled as they described their life. But of course, many of them had a number of issues that were really getting them into trouble or that were stressing them. And because we started in the last trimester of pregnancy, we had a chance to talk about some of this stuff before the babies actually arrived. And then we could follow, literally, to see what happened to those things that they were worried about, stressed about, that we talked about in the groups that we were trying to help them work on more productively. And they found it extremely helpful. And there were incidents like some years later when we were interviewing some of them again, some of them said, “when we had our second baby, we were trying to figure out what was different - there was something that was a little different.” And one of the mothers said “I know we just didn't have the group. We didn't have this place to work on stuff.” It had become their place to process a lot of what was happening to them, and to find out, this is one of the big keys, but you know that from your work, that they weren't the only ones. They weren't the only ones who were stressed or having a problem, or who got up in the middle of the night and said things they really regretted the next day. That this is a challenging time of life and so it wasn't just something wrong with their relationship.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (17:12)
Yeah. Yeah. And, remind me, because it's been, gosh, about 14 years since I read the book, the biggest piece is that they were just together and around each other and these other couples versus the other couples that were more maybe in isolation and not seeing that everybody was going through some of the same stuff, or, was it you all that that used the term we're all in the same soup? Was that Gottman?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (17:37)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (17:38)
That was one of the key things. And there were so many things that we raised in these five aspects of life that Phil was just describing that they hadn't talked about necessarily before. So not only had they not discussed it with each other, they hadn't heard other women and other men talking about these things from other families. And I saw it as sort of broadening their scope of what's natural in the world when you're building relationships and families, which most people don't get to talk about.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (18:14)
Yeah. Yeah. They were kind of being vulnerable with each other and hearing others' experiences that kind of normalized their own experience and maybe feeling less alone, not only with their partner, but also just in existence.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (18:28)
Right. Yeah. One of the things I want to make sure we convey though, is at this point, it could sound like it was a therapy talk group. And yes, it was therapeutic. It wasn't therapy. And a lot of the work that we did there was a curriculum and there were exercises, there were games. Later on there were videos to react to. There were things like filling out a questionnaire about who does what on a number of tasks and each person filled it out. Did I do more? Did you do more?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (19:09)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (19:10)
And then they started talking about it. So as a way to bring the issue, which is really important, it's the number one conflict for young couples anyway. To bring it out in a safe setting, a supportive setting. That's really important because mostly when couples have disagreements, like you never do the dishes and you're sloppy and whatever, they're at home and it can escalate.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (19:43)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (19:44)
Whereas in a group, it attempts to have a more supportive thing, and then other people chime in. We're doing the same thing. I mean, another exercise in a later version of this having to do with two bags and some crayons. In the first bag, you color it according to how the world sees you. So what are the things that the world sees? And then into that bag, you put another bag that's colored with how I really am.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:21)
Oh, nice.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:23)
So again, it's a therapeutic idea.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:29)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:30)
The discrepancy between what you think about yourself and how the world sees you. But it's a way of bringing it out so that people can talk about it out there. And all the groups that we've done since then have that kind of format.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:47)
Oh, nice. Is this, is this in a manual or anything, Is it published?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:49)
It's now, yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:51)
Oh, great. Nice. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:56)
And, also the role of the facilitators and we've now trained many, many people. We have always used male/female pairs, not because men and women identify necessarily with one or the other, it's just that we've always done it that way. So it's not just women talking to men about these things. So we can ask a question or two when someone makes a statement or a complaint or describes something upsetting. We can ask a little bit more about it to draw them out that they might not, probably wouldn't do with each other. And of course, everyone in the room is also hearing that. So they become examples for each other of what you can talk about and how you can describe things. They can hear how some people have a very blaming, negative way of confronting these things. And others can have a gentler way of doing it. Or our questions invite a gentler way of doing it. So that's the way in which it seems to make a difference. To have the topics there and the feelings in the room and both people in the relationship in the room.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (22:16)
Yeah. Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (22:18)
So we took that approach and it's been a gradual process of developing it. So the pilot study was in the mid seventies. We got a grant to do the study that we were just talking about, in the early eighties. And then we went on to develop it more so that we did another study, again, a random trial with people having a first child about to go to school. So a little bit later. And we followed those families into adolescence. And again, we were able to maintain their satisfaction. And the kids were doing better. because we followed the kids into their classrooms. So when the couples were doing better as couples, their parenting was better, and the kids were doing better and
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:20)
Academically
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:21)
and supposedly according to their teachers.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:24)
Okay. And these were when the first child was about to start elementary school.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:31)
Yeah. Correct. We started working with them at that point.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:31)
Which was where we left off in the first study.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:34)
Yes. Yes.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:36)
As the kids were making the transition to school. So it was another hundred couples. In the second study, it was called the School Children and Their Families Project. The first one was the Becoming a Family Project. And then as time went on and as you probably well know, the government got involved in trying to support stronger couple relationships. They were getting the idea that this made a difference in families. And suddenly fathers, they were noticing fathers importance in families. And the kids were doing better if fathers were positively involved in the family with the mother and with the kids. And so now and for some years, more than 10 years, there's been money to support interventions or programs that support a positive involvement of fathers in their families. And we were asked by the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention, whether we thought our original intervention idea would work with poorer, less resourced families. And we said, we saw no reason why not, as long as we could work with both parents, we could certainly try it. And so for 10 years, the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention supported this program in five different counties that they chose Based on applicants from many different counties, and we trained a whole bunch of people to do this. And in each county there was a family resource center of some type, and this program got added to it, and the funding helped hire a project director, group facilitators, and other support people for the program. And we literally systematically evaluated that for 10 years and, just as that was ending, we were giving a talk in London at the Tavistock Center for couple relationships, where we had spent two sabbaticals, and someone from the British government said, I am going to go back to my people and see if I can get funding to try this here. So eventually, along with Tavistock clinicians, we trained a whole bunch of facilitators there in different parts of London and now all over the uk. That funding has stopped but some of the Tavistock will still train people who have funding of their own from some source to do this sort of thing with families and mostly poorer, less advantaged families. And so that means there have been families from many different ethnic backgrounds and value systems. And because of the five things that Phil was talking about, which are just basic to families,
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (26:51)
Yeah - They apply across the board
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (26:53)
People have different views about how all that works it seems to work, no matter what. We keep saying to people, “what did you have to change for your community to do this?” And every now and then they say “one word in the curriculum” they say, “well, we call this that.” But other than that, it was perfectly fine. So it's been an amazing adventure.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (27:18)
And each of those studies that have been done, the same kind of thing happens. And that is that the people who participate in the groups are less depressed. Their couple relationship has less conflict, including the sample of parents who were referred by the child welfare system for abuse and neglect. So less conflict and less violence. More limits in their parenting, but also more warmth, and the kid's doing better. And one other thing, which is really surprising to us. These families in almost every one of the samples that we've done earn more money.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (28:15)
Oh, interesting.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:16)
Even if it's very little money. Yeah. They're poor.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:21)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:22)
But it seems as if, when they get their act together and they're less stressed and less struggling, they are better candidates for finding a job, keeping a job and so that sometimes plays a part as well.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (28:38)
That's huge. Well, that, yeah, that decrease in stress and conflict and the increase in support sounds like it really reverberates through the whole family and also to society and the community.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:52)
Right. We're outside evaluators for a large program now in Oklahoma City that's funded by the United States government. And it has some of that funding for promoting positive father involvement. And one of the things they required in their last round of grant proposals was that not only did the intervention have to focus on something about the relationship between the parents but also on something on work and employment. So they actually have added an employment component to the intervention, which is separate from the groups A separate program. But they will offer it to anyone who is in these groups, who needs help building a resume, getting in contact with employers to employ them. So little by little the focus on fathers, the focus on couple relationships, all with an eye to how the kids are going to do has become a little more in the common parlance of what you might do in an intervention.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (30:12)
Yeah, definitely. Well, it reminds me of the idea that if the plant is having problems, work with the soil rather than just trimming the leaves, that environment.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (30:27)
Nice.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (30:28)
Yeah. Right. That they're kind of growing in and what they're getting is so interconnected, the kids and their parents and their community and jobs and so on. And, have you done any work with any gay or lesbian or transgender families?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (30:45)
Very little, unfortunately. There have been times when people have approached us. The people in London have done some groups of lesbian parents, And they work in the same way. We haven't researched it or anything, but it seems to work exactly in the same way, except they want to bring in naturally more content on how they got to be parents and the different ways that the participants actually became parents.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (31:21)
And some of their coming out stories, which are very pertinent to what
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (31:26)
It’s the same set of issues. We would like to have done more work with that. And we think it does apply.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (31:37)
So a similar process, but some additional content.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (31:42)
Exactly.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (31:43)
Yeah. Kind of based on their experience. Great. So, one question I've always had, that second study that you did, how long did you go for? I think the graph I have goes till about, I think 14 or 15 years. Did it? I think you were still in the middle of your research at that time, or I don't know if that was the end of the research of the adolescent years.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:05)
We followed them from the time their kids were just before kindergarten until the kids finished high school.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:14)
Oh, great.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:16)
And, again, some of the findings held up for a 10 year period.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:26)
Wow. That's incredible.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:27)
So, you know, it's not just that at the end of the sessions, the couples feel better, but it does tend to maintain and put them on a trajectory which if not upward at least maintains things rather than go down. On the average. It doesn't work for everybody, of course.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:49)
Sure. Right. There's the standard deviation. Some people not.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:54)
I don't know if you remember Keith, but one of the exercises in our Becoming a Family Intervention that we have continued to do throughout all this work, involves a circle that we just call the pie. People are asked to divide the pie as a representation of all the key parts of themselves and to make each slice the size that that part feels. Not necessarily how much time they spend doing it. And then they're invited to do a second one for how I would like it is vs how I’d like it to be.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (33:33)
Oh, that's great.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (33:34)
So we can do all kinds of things with the discrepancy, but I was just going to tell you a little story where one woman from our original ‘becoming a family project’ groups that we sort of stayed in touch with us over the years. She sent us a holiday greeting maybe five years ago. It was many years after her, their daughter was born. And she was giving us holiday greetings and said, you should see my pie now. And that was funny enough, but when we turned the card over, there it was on the back of the card.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:16)
Oh, wow.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (34:17)
So, in other words, sometimes it creates a metaphor that's useful to them to think about.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:25)
Yeah, yeah. Thinking about their life or what's important to them or where they want to take their life. Right. Kind of an image that can really stand out.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (34:35)
Right. And not only how it is, but how it might be.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:38)
Exactly. That's great. Wonderful. Did you happen to get a follow-up on what happened to the couples that did not have the intervention over a longer term? Sometimes I've had folks ask, does it go up after the kids leave the home for the average couple?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (35:00)
It didn't. It didn't in the 10 years that we followed them. I know that there's a kind of myth that there's an upward thrust, but without getting too pedantic and into the weeds of statistics, there are reasons it goes up because couples drop out and get divorced. So the really negative couples aren't in the sample when they're married 15, 16, 17 years.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:33)
Sure.True.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (35:33)
But we did follow the control group as well as the intervention group over these years. So we did have that comparison.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:41)
Yeah. Actually, speaking of divorce, did you find that there was a particular kind of time or, period in the child's life where divorce was more likely than not, or higher levels of divorce?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (35:58)
In the first three years.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:00)
The first three years.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:02)
Yeah. And some other researcher says around seven years. Two periods were it blips up.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:11)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:12)
But we did not find any big divorce effects. Except that people stayed together a little bit longer who had been in the groups if they divorced, but it doesn't prevent divorce.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:35)
Yeah. The intervention sample had the same proportion of divorce as the control group sample.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:42)
Yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:43)
Interesting.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:44)
It's a small proportion. You know, being in a group like that could lead you to, to eventually conclude that, ‘I'm seeing a lot of relationships here, and some of them feel very different than ours. And I like what's going on in ours.’ And so, it could even lead to a different evaluation of their own relationship.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:12)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:12)
So we wouldn't expect it to prevent all divorce.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:17)
Sure, sure. Of course.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:18)
But rather, what we hope is that people will be more thoughtful about what goes into the difficulties they're having and take more time to try to do something about it before they just say, I'm outta here. You know?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:32)
Yeah, definitely.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:33)
And we don't know this at all, but my hope is that those divorcing couples did a better job of collaborating.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:44)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:46)
That's my hope.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:47)
Yeah. So I think you're saying too, that on one hand, being in the group might normalize experiences, like, ‘oh, they're having those experiences too’. Although at the same time, it also might recognize like, ‘what's happening with my partner is not good compared to how all the other partners are kind of doing in their relationship’.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:05)
But some of them have come to understand in ways they might not have before. That what goes on here in this relationship is the atmosphere in which our child is developing.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (38:19)
Yes.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:20)
And it could very well affect them, so we should watch how we treat each other. Even if we decide to break up. We have a few families from that very first study seemed to have done a very good job of splitting up so that they didn't drag the kids through the mud.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (38:43)
Yes. Definitely.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:44)
And they all have relationships together. I mean, the kids have relationships with both.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (38:50)
Sure.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:51)
That reminds me of another thing that we've done in the groups in later years, especially. And by the way, these la later groups like the Department of Child Abuse Prevention, there were a thousand couples in that study overall. So it does tend to get larger as well. But what I was going to say is that in these groups, one of the exercises in the couple relationship is to have two people who are not a couple, role play different kinds of hostility and difficulty. And over here to the right, is a third participant who is to be the child. And the real focus of the discussion is on what the child sees. And how the child feels when the parents are doing this thing. And it is quite vivid. It's really powerful. Even though it's a role play.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (40:03)
It's very powerful.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:04)
That's great. It was also compared to parents that didn't have children, right? And the relationship satisfaction, and that pretty much kind of cruised on in, in the way it was, not necessarily kind of going down. How do you think about what happens when a child comes into a relationship? I mean, of course, there's more stressors. Everybody's exhausted. There's too much to do and not enough time. I do a couple's work. I use emotionally focused couple's therapy. And oftentimes the couple might have gotten along well together, particularly if maybe one was under-functioning, the other one over-functioning. But, the one that was potentially over-functioning could also be very independent. But now, especially in the heterosexual couples where it's the woman, when she has their child, there's a higher level of vulnerability and needing that other partner there and when they can't kind of show up, oftentimes it seems like that's where a lot of the difficulties come from too. When they did not have this need to depend on each other in such a significant way, things were okay. But then when you add that on with a child, it ends up kind of showing where the gaps are in the relationship.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (41:30)
One of the metaphors, I can't remember who wrote about it, but it's like, a pack of bicyclists on a long bicycle journey, and they're going along and everything is just fine. And then they come to a big, huge hill, and some people zip up. They feel just fine. And all of this pack, which is pretty much kept up together, starts to spread out. And I think that's metaphorically something about what you're talking about. Also, I think babies’ vulnerability triggers grownups' vulnerability. Issues that people don't deal with in themselves, get raised about what happened to them and what didn't happen to them.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:32)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (42:33)
And, it's stressful. I mean we're saying the negative.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:39)
Sure
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (42:40)
We're very happy to have three kids. And there have been struggles between us and also with them, but certainly there's more stress in the relationship. I mean, just take a small example like staying in bed on Sunday and reading the New York Times.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:02)
Yep.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (43:04)
Gone.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:05)
Yes.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (43:06)
Gone.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:07)
I remember too. Especially when they were very young, no matter how late you stayed up, they woke up at the same time every morning. So sleeping in was kind of a gone deal unless you were really working in tandem with your partner to let the other one sleep in. And really having to be able to help support each other in this ability to get through. It's wonderful. And it's great to have children. It's beautiful, but it is a lot of work. How couples can come together and do that is tough. Especially, like you're saying, in those early years where everybody's feeling that similar overwhelm and stress. And just even knowing that that's actually the same, everybody's kind of experiencing this similarly, was kind of a relief. To know it's not just ‘they're a jerk’ and things, but actually like, ‘oh, we're all kind of having this experience’.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (44:08)
Well, it's also very hard to nurture another human being if you don't feel nurtured or cared for or replenished in some way. And I think that's one of the things that happens when kids come along, is it brings out, we used to say, the fault lines in relationships, the sort of unsteady parts of the relationships. And sometimes that's because one or another partner is not doing well, mental health wise and sometimes physically, there are illnesses. There are kinds of things that happen that make it even more vulnerable making. And it's pretty hard to have the resources then to care for another one or two little ones who don't understand the nuances of, ‘not right now dear, mommy or Daddy can't manage this’.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (45:08)
Yeah. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (45:09)
They need what they need when they need it. And, that can be very stressful.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (45:14)
I mean, to look at it in an even bigger context outside the family. If you were designing a way to raise little kids, I'm not sure we do it this way. This way being, isolated couples mostly, in apartments or houses or wherever they are, trying to do it all on their own, without any help. And actually without a lot of support from the political structure. I mean, we're still engaged, not us so much, but people are still engaged in trying to get family support, that would be good for, for families that we don't have.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (46:03)
Or family leave.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (46:06)
Yeah. And not only right, do you have a new child that creates this huge stressor and difficulty, but then also a huge added expense of either not working and the loss of income for one, or both parents. And also an increase in expenses with daycare, and preschool. And it's not cheap, especially if you have more than one child. That kind of ignites that time period too, heightening the difficulties that parents go through.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (46:43)
Well, it's very systemic, and still where I think we're fighting, even though when we talk, people agree about this, is that if you want to consider parenting environments for kids, you need to consider broader issues than just the parent and the child, especially just the mother and the child.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (47:12)
Yeah. Well, and also, there's different cultural contexts to raising children. Like, you're saying, maybe some countries have more paternity leave, maternity leave, or so on. Other countries that are maybe more collectivists. There's a whole village that's engaging in the child-rearing process rather than each small family being isolated and separate. Tell me a little bit about anything particularly that you're working on now, or anything that you're seeing in the recent work in literature, that you'd like people to know about in this field working with couples as they transition, but also about the engagement of fathers because I think that is still an issue. I was actually just doing a recent survey with different clinicians who work with families, and exploring what percentage of them work systemically and individually and what percentage of them engage both parents or just one. And the majority just engage one parent, still. And as we know that it's so important and there's such a huge effect in the system.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (48:33)
Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (48:35)
Yeah. Well, one of the things that we've been concerned about, again, it's on the bigger level as we sort of have gotten more experience in direct intervention, and that's the silos. The fact that families are considered, not in terms of families, but are considered in siloed departments. There's mother and child health. There's father support departments.
In one of the articles, I can't recall it now, I think there are 10 different departments at the state level and maybe 15 at the federal level, that could be dealing with families, but they're not talking to each other. So it goes down to the family services which have the same things. There’s individual therapy, there's couples therapy, there's family therapy, but they're not considered when the same person comes into that agency. The person is given what the agency does.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (49:52)
Yeah. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (49:53)
And that's assuming that there's knowledge that there is an agency that one could go to or consult or ask for help from.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:02)
Exactly. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:03)
That's also very siloed. And so, it seems as if in lots of departments we know a lot of things that could be helpful to some of these issues, but they're not necessarily… I mean, there are examples of collaborations. With this new request for proposals for promoting father involvement. That said, you have to also look at the relationship between the father and the mother and something about work and employment. Like they're getting the message
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:34)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:35)
Somewhere from some Of those
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:36)
That it’s interconnected. That it's systemic. There's the whole system. Breaking the system off into little parts is not as effective as treating the whole system.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:49)
Right. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:50)
You know in Oklahoma City, this fantastic place, it's called Public Strategies, and they got funding for the two kinds of funding streams. One for relationship support and one for father involvement support. And we're the outside evaluators on the father-focused one. And there are two other evaluators on the other one. And we have federal oversight people now who are trying to keep track and make sure everything goes according to what people now know about research and systematic analysis and so on. And when we first proposed that this fatherhood intervention was going to have the mothers there too, they said, ‘well, wait a minute - no, no, no. this is fatherhood money.’
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (51:36)
Yeah. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (51:40)
It just proved to us that it is still so separated in some people's minds that they couldn't… I mean, we finally were able to argue with them and make a case for it, that this project was funded because it was unique in having both fathers and mothers.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (51:58)
Oh, good. I think that individual perspective becomes very overwhelming. I have to go do this whole project with the fathers. We have to do this whole project with the mothers, and then the kids need a whole separate thing versus like, actually, one project could address all of that.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (52:15)
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (52:18)
More efficiently, more cost effective. Those small changes in the system have a reverberating effect.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (52:26)
So that's really one of our major concerns right now. The, the other one or an other one is trying to hand off this project, because it's not just us - Carolyn and Phil - but, Marsha Klein Pruitt and Kyle Pruitt joined us for the Supporting Father Involvement study in California and have become our collaborators and colleagues. But the four of us can't train everybody.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (53:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (53:02)
So we are working with Brazelton Institute. But, you know, Berry Brazelton was the pediatrician and he died, but the institute of people who train people to do parenting work, they realized, ‘hey, only training people to work with mothers. We, we should incorporate fathers.’ So they're beginning to take on the idea of training trainers, who will train other people to do this thing.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (53:38)
That's great. And is this also widely available for clinicians that might be interested in providing this in a private practice or something? Or is there a website of where these different groups are that might be able to send people to or someone, or is it all mostly within agencies?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (53:56)
It's mostly within agencies. Now Brazleonton is offering training. I think the next one is in the summer. So that individual clinicians could enroll in, but I think the focus has mostly been on training people in agencies who will,
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:19)
Who have some kind of funding from somewhere.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:22)
Yeah. Yeah. Is there a name for the program? Like the, the trainings they supporting?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:28)
It's either Supporting Father Involvement or, in England and sometimes here, it's also called Parents as Partners.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:38)
Oh, great.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:39)
And there is a website to get more information.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:43)
Oh, perfect.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:45)
Supporting Father Involvement sfi.com.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:53)
Okay. Great. That's wonderful. Well, I'll put that on the website. Thank you so much. But
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:58)
There are not many clinicians that we are aware of that want to take on such a big task like this.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (55:06)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:06)
Because if you're going to work with couples and if you're going to work with groups of couples, some people think, well, maybe you need two facilitators. And the whole thing about cost and price for couples, and not earning as much money…
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (55:23)
Sure. Sure. Well, I think too, there's the Gottman Couples weekend or there's the EFT Hold Me Tight weekends or things like that. It'd be so interesting to have something like this for new parents or becoming parents.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:43)
Right, right.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (55:44)
Definitely.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:44)
Right. If we had another life we could probably
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:48)
We're getting on, as you might have noticed. So it's important to us that some of these other possibilities have happened. There's also a company in Silicon Valley that became aware of our work and wanted to do groups like this for Chinese families then in China. In China, but then the pandemic happened.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:10)
Oh, wow.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:10)
So we had just trained their staff just to show them what it was like with Chinese Americans. That project has stalled just a little bit. It's still supposedly in the books, but, you know, it's a costly enterprise to pull this off for anyone.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:32)
Sure
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:33)
Yeah. And to provide, we always provide food for the families and childcare if they have very young children. So it needs a fair amount of financial backing support.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:45)
Yeah, definitely.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:47)
To do it. So we haven't, the answer is we haven't had a lot of clinicians individually coming to us.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:54)
Got it.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:55)
Only clinicians who come to be trained, for example, in London. Because they've learned about the program, and they're ready to try it as a facilitator, as a group facilitator.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (57:11)
Definitely. Yeah. And I know Gottman has done the Bringing Baby Home kind of workshop or workshop series too. Well, thank you so much for your time. This is great. You have done incredible work. I'll definitely have a link to the book for Parents as Partners, as well as like you're saying maybe that training through Brazleton. It's just been great. And I think it's such an important area that oftentimes gets overlooked because there's a lot of focus on helping children, helping mothers, helping fathers like you're saying. But again, not really that systemic view of helping this couple and this young family as they are growing. And really that prevention is so significant because so many times I see couples with 5, 10, 15-year-old kids, and it all really went awry in those early years.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (58:06)
Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (58:08)
Well, thank you. I really appreciate it.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (58:10)
Well, thank you, great to talk with you Keith. It's really been fun talking to you about it.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (58:17)
Yeah. Wonderful. Take care. Bye-Bye.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (58:20)
You too. Thank you. Bye.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (58:23)
Thank you for joining us. If you're wanting to use this podcast to earn continuing education credits, please go to our website at therapyonthecuttingedge.com. Our podcast is brought to you by the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing in-person and remote therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area. IAP provides screening for licensed clinicians through our in-person and online programs, as well as our treatment for children, adolescents, families, couples, and individual adults. For more information, go to sfiap.com or call (415) 617-5932. Also, we really appreciate feedback and if you have something you're interested in, something that's on the cutting edge of the field of therapy and think clinicians should know about it, send us an email or call us. We're always looking for the advancements in the field of psychotherapy to help in creating lasting changes for our clients.
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today, I'll be speaking with Philip Cohen and Carolyn Pape Cohen, who are clinical psychologists and professors emeriti at University of California Berkeley, who have conducted three significant longitudinal research studies on couples relationships after the birth of the first child. They have received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention. Their three projects, the Becoming a Family Project, the School Children and Families Project, and the Supporting Father Involvement Project, which is an ongoing collaboration with Marsha Klein Pruitt at Smith College in Yellow University, have studied the effects of interventions on the couple's relationship, father involvement, child wellbeing, and a number of other factors. Their group model for couples is being conducted throughout California, Connecticut, Alberta, Canada, England, and Malta. Carolyn and Phil Cowan received the distinguished contribution to Family Systems Research Award from the American Family Therapy Academy and the best research article award, along with Marsha and Kyle Pruitt and Jesse Wong from the Men and Families Focus group of the National Council of Family Relations. They're the authors of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples, and they're training in their Supporting Father Involvement program through Braselton Touchpoint Center, which is part of the division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Let's listen to the interview. Hi, Phil and Carolyn, welcome. How’re you doing?
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (02:06)
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D (02:08)
Yeah. Hi.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (02:10)
Well, thanks for joining us today. So I know of your work. I particularly learned about your book When Partners Become Parents, and your research back when I was having my first kid. I was interested in this idea of what happens to couples in the transition to parenthood. And then, you're over at UC Berkeley so I reached out and you did a workshop for the Association of Family Therapists Northern California on your research, which was really great. And (you) were even nice enough to let me use one of your slides on one of the graphs of what happens to relationship satisfaction after the birth of the first child, which I've incorporated in some of the trainings that I do. So I'd love to hear about your work and what you're working on now, and particularly before we even kind of get to that, can you say a little bit about, how you got to doing what you're doing and the evolution of your thinking?
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (03:07)
Well, certainly the first part of our work back in the seventies really grew out of our own personal experience as well as professional experiences that we were beginning to have. We were a young couple. We had just moved from Canada, so we knew nobody in California when we first came to UC, Berkeley. We had one daughter who was almost two, and one who was about to be born any second, and eventually had a third. So we have two daughters and a son who are now very, very grown up with partners and, and grown up children of their own. One of the things that surprised us, I think, was the parenting part didn't seem so stressful. Somehow it came naturally. We'd each been working with kids in various situations as teenagers. But we were trying to figure out what had happened to our relationship. It seemed to have come to the back burner, which eventually we discovered was a fairly common occurrence. And we began also in clinical work that we were doing and what was going on at the psychology clinic at UC Berkeley was finding that often parents would call in having a problem with their child. But when working with the parents or one of the parents and that child, it often began to seem to the clinicians as if the child might not be the key problem, there might be something going on with the parents that wasn't recognized or discovered or whatever. And we began to think that it might be helpful if we tried working with parents before they had that first child. And we walked them through what we were now hearing were some of the normal expectable stressors. Many of them, kind of unexpected. To see if we could catch them so that it wasn't 15 years later or 10 years later, and they were saying, “I don't know why I am with this person”, and “this wasn't what I bargained for”. We went to the literature and we can talk more about what wasn't, wasn't in it. but we decided to give it a try and had a bunch of couples who were willing to try.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (05:35)
Oh, great. Wonderful.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (05:38)
Let me just add my part to this. I mean, Carolyn is really accurate in describing the personal part of it. You know, we were a couple going through the transition to parenthood and found that there was not very much work or research on that except to say that it was a crisis and that there were psychiatric problems for dads, that was in the literature.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (06:04)
Okay.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (06:05)
Um, so pretty scary
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (06:07)
One, one article
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (06:08)
Yeah. So, but what we were seeing then, and it's still true some today, is that psychology and all the service professions, if you talk about parenting, what you're talking about is moms. There are many, many, many parenting classes. 90% of them are attended by moms still today. Or family service agencies. If you go in, the walls are pink and the pictures are women and babies. And men are nowhere to be seen. So the notion of one,the importance of fathers began to be big. And, that's increased over time in the literature, and in the service delivery system a little bit, but not a whole lot. And then what Carolyn was describing was that parenting really takes place in a whole family system. So if you're doing a parenting class, you can't just talk about what you do with your kid. But you have to talk about the relationship between the two parents. And we started out with mostly married parents. But over the years we've worked with parents who are separated, parents who are divorced, parents who are fathers and a grandmother of the kid. Or fathers and a friend. So what you're talking about is the environment in which the kid grows up and the relationship environment. So that's been a premise that we've been touting in all the work that we've come to do.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (07:53)
Yeah. So kind of taking the, looking at the parenting also within the context of the system.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:00)
Absolutely. Yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (08:00)
Yeah. Great. And let me ask you, what were you doing before? What were your focuses prior to going to Berkeley and then working on focusing on couples and parenting?
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:12)
Well, in my first life, I was an elementary school teacher in Canada.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (08:17)
Okay.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:18)
And then I became pregnant with our first child. And, it's embarrassing to say, but it didn't occur to me to do both at the same time. To keep teaching and, and be a parent. So, I left my job a couple years before Phil got the offer to come to Berkeley. Right after finishing his PhD. So that's what I was doing.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (08:48)
And I was pretty much a child clinical psychologist, and the child developmental part was very heavily invested in Piaget and Piaget's notions of how kids develop and make sense of the world, and how kids of different ages make different senses that are logical of the world. When I came to Berkeley and started teaching clinical graduate students, we began to be, we were sort of influenced, affected by the emerging notion of prevention. That was happening in the sixties. Systems could be changed. And so we did some work in the schools in consulting with teachers, but it turns out that that was too late. Because by the time kids get into school, really some of the problems that they had have been going on for a long time. That's when Carolyn got the idea that maybe if we got a group of couples together who were going through a transition together, right around becoming parents for the first time, that that would serve a prevention function. It would include fathers and it would certainly get at the couple relationship.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (10:08)
So it never occurred to us to just offer this to mothers.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:11)
Yes. Yes.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (10:12)
We were already concerned about what was happening to the relationship between parents.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:19)
Exactly.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (10:20)
Not our own, but others around us. And we were seeing as our kids were in their early childhood and middle childhood, many families, lovely, thoughtful, caring people, starting to tear apart relationships that they'd been developing for years because they were just not going well. They were very upset.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:44)
Yeah. Really struggling. Yeah. And, this is such an area of interest. One of the ways that I got to working with couples was working with families. I originally started out focusing in teenagers and families, and I quickly learned, if you're going to work with a family, you need to know how to work with a couple. And learning about your work, and particularly that graph, zero to 14 in your two different studies, just was so significant because I was seeing those families when they were at that level of DAS,in that significant range coming in with the kids. And a lot of times some of the issues were due to attachment injuries that had happened so early on, Like one couple I was working with, the mother wanted to hyphenate the name. The dad blew up on her, and she was pregnant with the first child, and she decided, I'm on my own. I have to take care of myself. And I was now seeing them 23 years later, you know with the kid. That is such a significant time. It's such a vulnerable time also. So it's so great that you focused on this. Tell me about the research and what you found and how you went about it.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (12:04)
Well, I'll start. You can pick up. Well we started and the notion was in the sixties, there were a lot of groups. If you remember, groups were very popular. Not a lot of research on groups either. So Carolyn had this idea of doing a group of couples having a first baby. And I was thinking that it would be really good to evaluate it. And we did a pilot study in which we had four or five couples together, and we explored some ideas, and we began to formulate an idea that there were really five kinds of areas that we needed to cover, not just parenting. We needed to look at them themselves, their wellbeing, their handling of depression and stress. We needed to look at the couple relationship, of course, and communication being key, but not the only thing. We needed to look at parenting. We needed to look at the patterns. This comes from all different kinds of theories. How patterns get transmitted across the generations. To say it in English, what you want to continue from the family you grew up in. And what you don't want to continue. And then there are two of you, and you may have very different things you want to continue and not. So there's a lot of discussion around that. And finally, there are the outside stresses and work, and we needed to do that. So we developed a 16-week, actually the first one was 24 weeks. From the middle of pregnancy until the babies were about three or four months old, of couples meeting together every week. And they'd drop out to have their baby, and then they'd bring the babies to the group. And so the last three months became pretty chaotic, but also a lot of fun sharing babies and crying babies, and crying parents and crying babies.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (14:19)
Yes.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (14:20)
And trying to have a conversation. And what we found, to summarize it really quickly, when we followed these couples and we followed them till their kids were in kindergarten, is that for the couples who didn't have this intervention randomly chosen, their satisfaction with their relationship kept going down in the graph that you referred to. To the point where half of them were in the clinical range, whereas we were able to maintain, it was stable. The couples didn't necessarily get better, but they started really high. Yeah. So they maintained their relationship over a period of five years. And we thought that was really pretty nifty.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (15:12)
Yeah. That's wonderful. And these are nonclinical couples, I think I remember right. These were, you recruited them from OBGYN offices or so on, and so they weren't necessarily coming in because of relationship crisis or clinical reasons. It was just your average heterosexual couple that was coming in.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (15:29)
Yes. It was ordinary people having a first baby but who weren't particularly troubled as they described their life. But of course, many of them had a number of issues that were really getting them into trouble or that were stressing them. And because we started in the last trimester of pregnancy, we had a chance to talk about some of this stuff before the babies actually arrived. And then we could follow, literally, to see what happened to those things that they were worried about, stressed about, that we talked about in the groups that we were trying to help them work on more productively. And they found it extremely helpful. And there were incidents like some years later when we were interviewing some of them again, some of them said, “when we had our second baby, we were trying to figure out what was different - there was something that was a little different.” And one of the mothers said “I know we just didn't have the group. We didn't have this place to work on stuff.” It had become their place to process a lot of what was happening to them, and to find out, this is one of the big keys, but you know that from your work, that they weren't the only ones. They weren't the only ones who were stressed or having a problem, or who got up in the middle of the night and said things they really regretted the next day. That this is a challenging time of life and so it wasn't just something wrong with their relationship.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (17:12)
Yeah. Yeah. And, remind me, because it's been, gosh, about 14 years since I read the book, the biggest piece is that they were just together and around each other and these other couples versus the other couples that were more maybe in isolation and not seeing that everybody was going through some of the same stuff, or, was it you all that that used the term we're all in the same soup? Was that Gottman?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (17:37)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (17:38)
That was one of the key things. And there were so many things that we raised in these five aspects of life that Phil was just describing that they hadn't talked about necessarily before. So not only had they not discussed it with each other, they hadn't heard other women and other men talking about these things from other families. And I saw it as sort of broadening their scope of what's natural in the world when you're building relationships and families, which most people don't get to talk about.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (18:14)
Yeah. Yeah. They were kind of being vulnerable with each other and hearing others' experiences that kind of normalized their own experience and maybe feeling less alone, not only with their partner, but also just in existence.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (18:28)
Right. Yeah. One of the things I want to make sure we convey though, is at this point, it could sound like it was a therapy talk group. And yes, it was therapeutic. It wasn't therapy. And a lot of the work that we did there was a curriculum and there were exercises, there were games. Later on there were videos to react to. There were things like filling out a questionnaire about who does what on a number of tasks and each person filled it out. Did I do more? Did you do more?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (19:09)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (19:10)
And then they started talking about it. So as a way to bring the issue, which is really important, it's the number one conflict for young couples anyway. To bring it out in a safe setting, a supportive setting. That's really important because mostly when couples have disagreements, like you never do the dishes and you're sloppy and whatever, they're at home and it can escalate.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (19:43)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (19:44)
Whereas in a group, it attempts to have a more supportive thing, and then other people chime in. We're doing the same thing. I mean, another exercise in a later version of this having to do with two bags and some crayons. In the first bag, you color it according to how the world sees you. So what are the things that the world sees? And then into that bag, you put another bag that's colored with how I really am.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:21)
Oh, nice.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:23)
So again, it's a therapeutic idea.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:29)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:30)
The discrepancy between what you think about yourself and how the world sees you. But it's a way of bringing it out so that people can talk about it out there. And all the groups that we've done since then have that kind of format.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:47)
Oh, nice. Is this, is this in a manual or anything, Is it published?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:49)
It's now, yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (20:51)
Oh, great. Nice. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (20:56)
And, also the role of the facilitators and we've now trained many, many people. We have always used male/female pairs, not because men and women identify necessarily with one or the other, it's just that we've always done it that way. So it's not just women talking to men about these things. So we can ask a question or two when someone makes a statement or a complaint or describes something upsetting. We can ask a little bit more about it to draw them out that they might not, probably wouldn't do with each other. And of course, everyone in the room is also hearing that. So they become examples for each other of what you can talk about and how you can describe things. They can hear how some people have a very blaming, negative way of confronting these things. And others can have a gentler way of doing it. Or our questions invite a gentler way of doing it. So that's the way in which it seems to make a difference. To have the topics there and the feelings in the room and both people in the relationship in the room.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (22:16)
Yeah. Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (22:18)
So we took that approach and it's been a gradual process of developing it. So the pilot study was in the mid seventies. We got a grant to do the study that we were just talking about, in the early eighties. And then we went on to develop it more so that we did another study, again, a random trial with people having a first child about to go to school. So a little bit later. And we followed those families into adolescence. And again, we were able to maintain their satisfaction. And the kids were doing better. because we followed the kids into their classrooms. So when the couples were doing better as couples, their parenting was better, and the kids were doing better and
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:20)
Academically
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:21)
and supposedly according to their teachers.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:24)
Okay. And these were when the first child was about to start elementary school.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:31)
Yeah. Correct. We started working with them at that point.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:31)
Which was where we left off in the first study.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:34)
Yes. Yes.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (23:36)
As the kids were making the transition to school. So it was another hundred couples. In the second study, it was called the School Children and Their Families Project. The first one was the Becoming a Family Project. And then as time went on and as you probably well know, the government got involved in trying to support stronger couple relationships. They were getting the idea that this made a difference in families. And suddenly fathers, they were noticing fathers importance in families. And the kids were doing better if fathers were positively involved in the family with the mother and with the kids. And so now and for some years, more than 10 years, there's been money to support interventions or programs that support a positive involvement of fathers in their families. And we were asked by the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention, whether we thought our original intervention idea would work with poorer, less resourced families. And we said, we saw no reason why not, as long as we could work with both parents, we could certainly try it. And so for 10 years, the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention supported this program in five different counties that they chose Based on applicants from many different counties, and we trained a whole bunch of people to do this. And in each county there was a family resource center of some type, and this program got added to it, and the funding helped hire a project director, group facilitators, and other support people for the program. And we literally systematically evaluated that for 10 years and, just as that was ending, we were giving a talk in London at the Tavistock Center for couple relationships, where we had spent two sabbaticals, and someone from the British government said, I am going to go back to my people and see if I can get funding to try this here. So eventually, along with Tavistock clinicians, we trained a whole bunch of facilitators there in different parts of London and now all over the uk. That funding has stopped but some of the Tavistock will still train people who have funding of their own from some source to do this sort of thing with families and mostly poorer, less advantaged families. And so that means there have been families from many different ethnic backgrounds and value systems. And because of the five things that Phil was talking about, which are just basic to families,
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (26:51)
Yeah - They apply across the board
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (26:53)
People have different views about how all that works it seems to work, no matter what. We keep saying to people, “what did you have to change for your community to do this?” And every now and then they say “one word in the curriculum” they say, “well, we call this that.” But other than that, it was perfectly fine. So it's been an amazing adventure.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (27:18)
And each of those studies that have been done, the same kind of thing happens. And that is that the people who participate in the groups are less depressed. Their couple relationship has less conflict, including the sample of parents who were referred by the child welfare system for abuse and neglect. So less conflict and less violence. More limits in their parenting, but also more warmth, and the kid's doing better. And one other thing, which is really surprising to us. These families in almost every one of the samples that we've done earn more money.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (28:15)
Oh, interesting.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:16)
Even if it's very little money. Yeah. They're poor.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:21)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:22)
But it seems as if, when they get their act together and they're less stressed and less struggling, they are better candidates for finding a job, keeping a job and so that sometimes plays a part as well.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (28:38)
That's huge. Well, that, yeah, that decrease in stress and conflict and the increase in support sounds like it really reverberates through the whole family and also to society and the community.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (28:52)
Right. We're outside evaluators for a large program now in Oklahoma City that's funded by the United States government. And it has some of that funding for promoting positive father involvement. And one of the things they required in their last round of grant proposals was that not only did the intervention have to focus on something about the relationship between the parents but also on something on work and employment. So they actually have added an employment component to the intervention, which is separate from the groups A separate program. But they will offer it to anyone who is in these groups, who needs help building a resume, getting in contact with employers to employ them. So little by little the focus on fathers, the focus on couple relationships, all with an eye to how the kids are going to do has become a little more in the common parlance of what you might do in an intervention.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (30:12)
Yeah, definitely. Well, it reminds me of the idea that if the plant is having problems, work with the soil rather than just trimming the leaves, that environment.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (30:27)
Nice.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (30:28)
Yeah. Right. That they're kind of growing in and what they're getting is so interconnected, the kids and their parents and their community and jobs and so on. And, have you done any work with any gay or lesbian or transgender families?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (30:45)
Very little, unfortunately. There have been times when people have approached us. The people in London have done some groups of lesbian parents, And they work in the same way. We haven't researched it or anything, but it seems to work exactly in the same way, except they want to bring in naturally more content on how they got to be parents and the different ways that the participants actually became parents.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (31:21)
And some of their coming out stories, which are very pertinent to what
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (31:26)
It’s the same set of issues. We would like to have done more work with that. And we think it does apply.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (31:37)
So a similar process, but some additional content.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (31:42)
Exactly.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (31:43)
Yeah. Kind of based on their experience. Great. So, one question I've always had, that second study that you did, how long did you go for? I think the graph I have goes till about, I think 14 or 15 years. Did it? I think you were still in the middle of your research at that time, or I don't know if that was the end of the research of the adolescent years.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:05)
We followed them from the time their kids were just before kindergarten until the kids finished high school.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:14)
Oh, great.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:16)
And, again, some of the findings held up for a 10 year period.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:26)
Wow. That's incredible.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:27)
So, you know, it's not just that at the end of the sessions, the couples feel better, but it does tend to maintain and put them on a trajectory which if not upward at least maintains things rather than go down. On the average. It doesn't work for everybody, of course.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:49)
Sure. Right. There's the standard deviation. Some people not.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (32:54)
I don't know if you remember Keith, but one of the exercises in our Becoming a Family Intervention that we have continued to do throughout all this work, involves a circle that we just call the pie. People are asked to divide the pie as a representation of all the key parts of themselves and to make each slice the size that that part feels. Not necessarily how much time they spend doing it. And then they're invited to do a second one for how I would like it is vs how I’d like it to be.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (33:33)
Oh, that's great.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (33:34)
So we can do all kinds of things with the discrepancy, but I was just going to tell you a little story where one woman from our original ‘becoming a family project’ groups that we sort of stayed in touch with us over the years. She sent us a holiday greeting maybe five years ago. It was many years after her, their daughter was born. And she was giving us holiday greetings and said, you should see my pie now. And that was funny enough, but when we turned the card over, there it was on the back of the card.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:16)
Oh, wow.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (34:17)
So, in other words, sometimes it creates a metaphor that's useful to them to think about.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:25)
Yeah, yeah. Thinking about their life or what's important to them or where they want to take their life. Right. Kind of an image that can really stand out.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (34:35)
Right. And not only how it is, but how it might be.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:38)
Exactly. That's great. Wonderful. Did you happen to get a follow-up on what happened to the couples that did not have the intervention over a longer term? Sometimes I've had folks ask, does it go up after the kids leave the home for the average couple?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (35:00)
It didn't. It didn't in the 10 years that we followed them. I know that there's a kind of myth that there's an upward thrust, but without getting too pedantic and into the weeds of statistics, there are reasons it goes up because couples drop out and get divorced. So the really negative couples aren't in the sample when they're married 15, 16, 17 years.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:33)
Sure.True.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (35:33)
But we did follow the control group as well as the intervention group over these years. So we did have that comparison.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:41)
Yeah. Actually, speaking of divorce, did you find that there was a particular kind of time or, period in the child's life where divorce was more likely than not, or higher levels of divorce?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (35:58)
In the first three years.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:00)
The first three years.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:02)
Yeah. And some other researcher says around seven years. Two periods were it blips up.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:11)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:12)
But we did not find any big divorce effects. Except that people stayed together a little bit longer who had been in the groups if they divorced, but it doesn't prevent divorce.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:35)
Yeah. The intervention sample had the same proportion of divorce as the control group sample.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:42)
Yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (36:43)
Interesting.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (36:44)
It's a small proportion. You know, being in a group like that could lead you to, to eventually conclude that, ‘I'm seeing a lot of relationships here, and some of them feel very different than ours. And I like what's going on in ours.’ And so, it could even lead to a different evaluation of their own relationship.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:12)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:12)
So we wouldn't expect it to prevent all divorce.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:17)
Sure, sure. Of course.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:18)
But rather, what we hope is that people will be more thoughtful about what goes into the difficulties they're having and take more time to try to do something about it before they just say, I'm outta here. You know?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:32)
Yeah, definitely.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:33)
And we don't know this at all, but my hope is that those divorcing couples did a better job of collaborating.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:44)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (37:46)
That's my hope.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (37:47)
Yeah. So I think you're saying too, that on one hand, being in the group might normalize experiences, like, ‘oh, they're having those experiences too’. Although at the same time, it also might recognize like, ‘what's happening with my partner is not good compared to how all the other partners are kind of doing in their relationship’.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:05)
But some of them have come to understand in ways they might not have before. That what goes on here in this relationship is the atmosphere in which our child is developing.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (38:19)
Yes.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:20)
And it could very well affect them, so we should watch how we treat each other. Even if we decide to break up. We have a few families from that very first study seemed to have done a very good job of splitting up so that they didn't drag the kids through the mud.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (38:43)
Yes. Definitely.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:44)
And they all have relationships together. I mean, the kids have relationships with both.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (38:50)
Sure.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (38:51)
That reminds me of another thing that we've done in the groups in later years, especially. And by the way, these la later groups like the Department of Child Abuse Prevention, there were a thousand couples in that study overall. So it does tend to get larger as well. But what I was going to say is that in these groups, one of the exercises in the couple relationship is to have two people who are not a couple, role play different kinds of hostility and difficulty. And over here to the right, is a third participant who is to be the child. And the real focus of the discussion is on what the child sees. And how the child feels when the parents are doing this thing. And it is quite vivid. It's really powerful. Even though it's a role play.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (40:03)
It's very powerful.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:04)
That's great. It was also compared to parents that didn't have children, right? And the relationship satisfaction, and that pretty much kind of cruised on in, in the way it was, not necessarily kind of going down. How do you think about what happens when a child comes into a relationship? I mean, of course, there's more stressors. Everybody's exhausted. There's too much to do and not enough time. I do a couple's work. I use emotionally focused couple's therapy. And oftentimes the couple might have gotten along well together, particularly if maybe one was under-functioning, the other one over-functioning. But, the one that was potentially over-functioning could also be very independent. But now, especially in the heterosexual couples where it's the woman, when she has their child, there's a higher level of vulnerability and needing that other partner there and when they can't kind of show up, oftentimes it seems like that's where a lot of the difficulties come from too. When they did not have this need to depend on each other in such a significant way, things were okay. But then when you add that on with a child, it ends up kind of showing where the gaps are in the relationship.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (41:30)
One of the metaphors, I can't remember who wrote about it, but it's like, a pack of bicyclists on a long bicycle journey, and they're going along and everything is just fine. And then they come to a big, huge hill, and some people zip up. They feel just fine. And all of this pack, which is pretty much kept up together, starts to spread out. And I think that's metaphorically something about what you're talking about. Also, I think babies’ vulnerability triggers grownups' vulnerability. Issues that people don't deal with in themselves, get raised about what happened to them and what didn't happen to them.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:32)
Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (42:33)
And, it's stressful. I mean we're saying the negative.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:39)
Sure
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (42:40)
We're very happy to have three kids. And there have been struggles between us and also with them, but certainly there's more stress in the relationship. I mean, just take a small example like staying in bed on Sunday and reading the New York Times.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:02)
Yep.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (43:04)
Gone.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:05)
Yes.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (43:06)
Gone.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:07)
I remember too. Especially when they were very young, no matter how late you stayed up, they woke up at the same time every morning. So sleeping in was kind of a gone deal unless you were really working in tandem with your partner to let the other one sleep in. And really having to be able to help support each other in this ability to get through. It's wonderful. And it's great to have children. It's beautiful, but it is a lot of work. How couples can come together and do that is tough. Especially, like you're saying, in those early years where everybody's feeling that similar overwhelm and stress. And just even knowing that that's actually the same, everybody's kind of experiencing this similarly, was kind of a relief. To know it's not just ‘they're a jerk’ and things, but actually like, ‘oh, we're all kind of having this experience’.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (44:08)
Well, it's also very hard to nurture another human being if you don't feel nurtured or cared for or replenished in some way. And I think that's one of the things that happens when kids come along, is it brings out, we used to say, the fault lines in relationships, the sort of unsteady parts of the relationships. And sometimes that's because one or another partner is not doing well, mental health wise and sometimes physically, there are illnesses. There are kinds of things that happen that make it even more vulnerable making. And it's pretty hard to have the resources then to care for another one or two little ones who don't understand the nuances of, ‘not right now dear, mommy or Daddy can't manage this’.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (45:08)
Yeah. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (45:09)
They need what they need when they need it. And, that can be very stressful.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (45:14)
I mean, to look at it in an even bigger context outside the family. If you were designing a way to raise little kids, I'm not sure we do it this way. This way being, isolated couples mostly, in apartments or houses or wherever they are, trying to do it all on their own, without any help. And actually without a lot of support from the political structure. I mean, we're still engaged, not us so much, but people are still engaged in trying to get family support, that would be good for, for families that we don't have.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (46:03)
Or family leave.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (46:06)
Yeah. And not only right, do you have a new child that creates this huge stressor and difficulty, but then also a huge added expense of either not working and the loss of income for one, or both parents. And also an increase in expenses with daycare, and preschool. And it's not cheap, especially if you have more than one child. That kind of ignites that time period too, heightening the difficulties that parents go through.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (46:43)
Well, it's very systemic, and still where I think we're fighting, even though when we talk, people agree about this, is that if you want to consider parenting environments for kids, you need to consider broader issues than just the parent and the child, especially just the mother and the child.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (47:12)
Yeah. Well, and also, there's different cultural contexts to raising children. Like, you're saying, maybe some countries have more paternity leave, maternity leave, or so on. Other countries that are maybe more collectivists. There's a whole village that's engaging in the child-rearing process rather than each small family being isolated and separate. Tell me a little bit about anything particularly that you're working on now, or anything that you're seeing in the recent work in literature, that you'd like people to know about in this field working with couples as they transition, but also about the engagement of fathers because I think that is still an issue. I was actually just doing a recent survey with different clinicians who work with families, and exploring what percentage of them work systemically and individually and what percentage of them engage both parents or just one. And the majority just engage one parent, still. And as we know that it's so important and there's such a huge effect in the system.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (48:33)
Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (48:35)
Yeah. Well, one of the things that we've been concerned about, again, it's on the bigger level as we sort of have gotten more experience in direct intervention, and that's the silos. The fact that families are considered, not in terms of families, but are considered in siloed departments. There's mother and child health. There's father support departments.
In one of the articles, I can't recall it now, I think there are 10 different departments at the state level and maybe 15 at the federal level, that could be dealing with families, but they're not talking to each other. So it goes down to the family services which have the same things. There’s individual therapy, there's couples therapy, there's family therapy, but they're not considered when the same person comes into that agency. The person is given what the agency does.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (49:52)
Yeah. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (49:53)
And that's assuming that there's knowledge that there is an agency that one could go to or consult or ask for help from.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:02)
Exactly. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:03)
That's also very siloed. And so, it seems as if in lots of departments we know a lot of things that could be helpful to some of these issues, but they're not necessarily… I mean, there are examples of collaborations. With this new request for proposals for promoting father involvement. That said, you have to also look at the relationship between the father and the mother and something about work and employment. Like they're getting the message
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:34)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:35)
Somewhere from some Of those
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:36)
That it’s interconnected. That it's systemic. There's the whole system. Breaking the system off into little parts is not as effective as treating the whole system.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:49)
Right. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (50:50)
You know in Oklahoma City, this fantastic place, it's called Public Strategies, and they got funding for the two kinds of funding streams. One for relationship support and one for father involvement support. And we're the outside evaluators on the father-focused one. And there are two other evaluators on the other one. And we have federal oversight people now who are trying to keep track and make sure everything goes according to what people now know about research and systematic analysis and so on. And when we first proposed that this fatherhood intervention was going to have the mothers there too, they said, ‘well, wait a minute - no, no, no. this is fatherhood money.’
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (51:36)
Yeah. Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (51:40)
It just proved to us that it is still so separated in some people's minds that they couldn't… I mean, we finally were able to argue with them and make a case for it, that this project was funded because it was unique in having both fathers and mothers.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (51:58)
Oh, good. I think that individual perspective becomes very overwhelming. I have to go do this whole project with the fathers. We have to do this whole project with the mothers, and then the kids need a whole separate thing versus like, actually, one project could address all of that.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (52:15)
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (52:18)
More efficiently, more cost effective. Those small changes in the system have a reverberating effect.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (52:26)
So that's really one of our major concerns right now. The, the other one or an other one is trying to hand off this project, because it's not just us - Carolyn and Phil - but, Marsha Klein Pruitt and Kyle Pruitt joined us for the Supporting Father Involvement study in California and have become our collaborators and colleagues. But the four of us can't train everybody.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (53:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (53:02)
So we are working with Brazelton Institute. But, you know, Berry Brazelton was the pediatrician and he died, but the institute of people who train people to do parenting work, they realized, ‘hey, only training people to work with mothers. We, we should incorporate fathers.’ So they're beginning to take on the idea of training trainers, who will train other people to do this thing.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (53:38)
That's great. And is this also widely available for clinicians that might be interested in providing this in a private practice or something? Or is there a website of where these different groups are that might be able to send people to or someone, or is it all mostly within agencies?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (53:56)
It's mostly within agencies. Now Brazleonton is offering training. I think the next one is in the summer. So that individual clinicians could enroll in, but I think the focus has mostly been on training people in agencies who will,
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:19)
Who have some kind of funding from somewhere.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:22)
Yeah. Yeah. Is there a name for the program? Like the, the trainings they supporting?
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:28)
It's either Supporting Father Involvement or, in England and sometimes here, it's also called Parents as Partners.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:38)
Oh, great.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:39)
And there is a website to get more information.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:43)
Oh, perfect.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:45)
Supporting Father Involvement sfi.com.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (54:53)
Okay. Great. That's wonderful. Well, I'll put that on the website. Thank you so much. But
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (54:58)
There are not many clinicians that we are aware of that want to take on such a big task like this.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (55:06)
Yeah.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:06)
Because if you're going to work with couples and if you're going to work with groups of couples, some people think, well, maybe you need two facilitators. And the whole thing about cost and price for couples, and not earning as much money…
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (55:23)
Sure. Sure. Well, I think too, there's the Gottman Couples weekend or there's the EFT Hold Me Tight weekends or things like that. It'd be so interesting to have something like this for new parents or becoming parents.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:43)
Right, right.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (55:44)
Definitely.
Philip A. Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:44)
Right. If we had another life we could probably
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (55:48)
We're getting on, as you might have noticed. So it's important to us that some of these other possibilities have happened. There's also a company in Silicon Valley that became aware of our work and wanted to do groups like this for Chinese families then in China. In China, but then the pandemic happened.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:10)
Oh, wow.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:10)
So we had just trained their staff just to show them what it was like with Chinese Americans. That project has stalled just a little bit. It's still supposedly in the books, but, you know, it's a costly enterprise to pull this off for anyone.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:32)
Sure
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:33)
Yeah. And to provide, we always provide food for the families and childcare if they have very young children. So it needs a fair amount of financial backing support.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:45)
Yeah, definitely.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:47)
To do it. So we haven't, the answer is we haven't had a lot of clinicians individually coming to us.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (56:54)
Got it.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (56:55)
Only clinicians who come to be trained, for example, in London. Because they've learned about the program, and they're ready to try it as a facilitator, as a group facilitator.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (57:11)
Definitely. Yeah. And I know Gottman has done the Bringing Baby Home kind of workshop or workshop series too. Well, thank you so much for your time. This is great. You have done incredible work. I'll definitely have a link to the book for Parents as Partners, as well as like you're saying maybe that training through Brazleton. It's just been great. And I think it's such an important area that oftentimes gets overlooked because there's a lot of focus on helping children, helping mothers, helping fathers like you're saying. But again, not really that systemic view of helping this couple and this young family as they are growing. And really that prevention is so significant because so many times I see couples with 5, 10, 15-year-old kids, and it all really went awry in those early years.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (58:06)
Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (58:08)
Well, thank you. I really appreciate it.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (58:10)
Well, thank you, great to talk with you Keith. It's really been fun talking to you about it.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (58:17)
Yeah. Wonderful. Take care. Bye-Bye.
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D.: (58:20)
You too. Thank you. Bye.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (58:23)
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