Areas of family life education

1. Areas of family life education Pre-marital preparation

2. Conceptual Understanding • Marriage preparation programs are offered to adolescent, young adult, and remarrying partners to increase readiness for predictable tasks of married life and reduce their likelihood of distress and divorce. • Couples are assisted by a trained and knowledgeable professionals to understand and apply their life’s experience thus far to a new dynamic relationship–marriage. • They are further equipped with skills and tools to better assist them in the other areas of their lives.

3. Cntd…. • For relationship enhancement;training workshops, self-help materials, marital therapy, and/or support services are offered to individuals, dating couples, cohabitants, and married couples to improve knowledge of relational issues, interpersonal skills, personal insight, behaviour change

4. Definition… • Markmanand Hahlweg(1993) stated that “the prevention perspective has the goal of starting with happy couples (even though they may be at risk for future distress) and helping them maintain their relatively high levels of functioning”

5. Cntd.. • Premarital education is defined as a knowledge and skills-based training procedure which aims at providing couples with information on ways to improve their relationship once they are married (Senediak, 1990)

6. Cntd.. • Premarital education programs are based in a prevention perspective that has the goal of starting with happy couples (even though they may be at risk for future distress) and helping them maintain their relatively high levels of functioning

7. Cntd.. • The two major goals of premarital preparation programs is to prevent marital distress and divorce • Programs are geared at providing couples with an awareness and understanding of potential problems, as well as providing couples with information and resources to effectively prevent such problems

8. Cntd.. • Pre-marriage education encourages the couple to think objectively and wisely about getting married. • It also empowers them to cancel getting married if they discover that it will be unwise.

9. Cntd… • Prevention of distress, including dating or domestic violence and conflict, and prevention of divorce by altering malleable risk factors 2) Competence-building, by enhancing self- and other-awareness, knowledge of couple issues, interactive skills, and access to resources and (3) Intervention, including individual or couple therapy as appropriate, to resolve conflict, promote healing, teach skills for growth, or to deter partners from entering a high-risk marriage.

10. Mechanism of premarital preparation There are three main groups that provide most premarital education: (1) Clergy, (2) Professional counsellors or therapists, and (3) Physicians.

11. Cntd.. • Clergy: Clergy provide the greatest amount of formal premarital education, as part of optional or mandatory marriage preparation programs before church weddings • Professional counsellors or therapists do some premarital education, often for those who have been divorced and are preparing to marry again • Physicians: They do some premarital education as well, but that is usually limited to one meeting where they give contraceptive and sexual information

12. The Stages of Pre-Marriage Preparation • Informal Stage: This is the time when children best learn from the modeling of parental attitudes and behaviors and from their own experimentation 1) The parental modeling stage(from birth to pre- teens) or the formation years 2) The personal exploration stage(teens to young adulthood) or the experimental years. • The Formal Stage: This is the time when structured, formal training and education of life’s issues and marriage itself take place.

13. Topics including: communication, conflict resolution, roles in marriage, commitment, financial management, sexuality, parenting expectations, and partners’ families of origin

14. Topics to be covered in pre-marital preparation • Roles in marriage. • Sexuality. • Finances. • In-laws. • Health and family planning • Values and goals. • Communication. • Creative problem solving. • Love and feelings. • Issues of power and control. • Starting a home. • The wedding. • After the wedding.