James Mchale

• Ph.D., University of California Berkeley
• Managing Director at University of South Florida St. Petersburg

Despite prompts from the field of family therapy since its inception, contemporary infant mental health theory and practice remain firmly rooted in and guided by dyadic-based models. Over the past 10 years, a groundswell of new empirical studies of triadic and family group dynamics during infancy have substantiated that which family theory has cont...

This special issue on fathers was conceived as a rallying cry for all professionals to examine their practices of including fathers in their services. For too long, our profession has either ignored fathers’ important influences on infants and toddlers or given lip-service to their importance while allowing the status quo of not including fathers t...

In the infant mental health field, scant conceptual attention has been given to coparenting and family adaptations of non-white family systems, with no evidence-based, community-informed coparenting interventions responsive to unmarried Black mothers' and fathers' life circumstances. This study examined 1-year post-partum child and family outcomes...

Tracing its beginnings to the mid‐1990s, coparenting theory and research, guided greatly by Minuchin's structural family theory, have deepened socialisation perspectives in the field of developmental psychology. Coparenting theory has perhaps had its largest impact in the field of infant‐family mental health, where empirical investigations of copar...

Since the early 1990s, coparenting—a conceptual framework connecting clinical insights from structural family therapy to theory and research on the development of infants and toddlers within relationship systems—has brought new perspective to family and developmental science while hinting at ramifications for clinical practice. Coparenting theory a...

"Framing the Work" is a manual destined to practitioners regrouping standardized protocols for assessing and improving coparenting dynamics into infant mental health interventions, ensuring that all caregivers—not just the primary caregiver—collaborate to enhance the child's development within a supportive family environment.

Concordance between partner reports of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is generally low, but self-reporting of IPV and concordance between partners among expectant parents in marginalized communities has not been explored, nor have associations among each partner’s reports of IPV and their behaviors in observed conflict discussions. This study will...

Introduction Despite compelling evidence that high-quality early care has an enduring impact, there has been little coordinated effort to transform services delivery to infuse Trauma-Informed Family Centered (TI-FC) principles into community-based agencies serving children and their families. A need for more culturally attuned, family-sensitive, ev...

This qualitative study explores infant‐family mental health experts' perspectives and experiences regarding the inclusion of infants in the family therapy setting. Infant socioemotional development is relational in nature and evolves in the context of both dyadic attachment relationships and broader multi‐person co‐parenting systems. Given this, we...

This position paper from a core group of infant mental health academics and clinicians addresses the conspicuous underrepresentation of the infant in mainstream family therapy. Despite infants' social capacities and clear contributions to family dynamics, they remain largely overlooked within this therapeutic context. We suggest that family therapi...

When working with families of infants and toddlers, intentionally looking beyond dyadic child-parent relationship functioning to conceptualize the child's socioemotional adaptation within their broader family collective can enhance the likelihood that clinical gains will be supported and sustained. However, there has been little expert guidance reg...

In deze studie is onderzoek gedaan naar de effectiviteit van een prenatale interventie ter bevordering van een gezonde co-ouderrelatie voor ongehuwde moeders en vaders met een laag inkomen die hun eerste kind verwachten. Aan deze studie namen 180 moeder-vader dyades van Afrikaans-Amerikaanse en gemengde afkomst deel. De dyades zijn random toegeweze...

This study examines the efficacy of a prenatal intervention designed to promote healthy coparenting relationships in families where low-income, unmarried mothers and fathers were expecting a first baby together. One hundred thirty-eight Black and mixed-race mother–father dyads participated. Coparent dyads were randomly assigned to either a treatmen...

The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify recurring themes about impending coparenthood common among prenatal dyadic conversations shared between unmarried parents. Forty Black mothers and fathers expecting a first baby together met with a male-female mentor team for facilitated dialogues six times during the pregnancy, with sessions au...

This overview describes the changes and challenges families commonly encounter during the transition to parenthood. Family theories are introduced as framework for conceptualizing prenatal family dynamics and relationships observed during pregnancy. We frame prenatal family dynamics within family systems and structural family theories as well as wi...

This chapter selectively revisits several important themes from the collection of original research studies assembled for this volume, including coherence in prenatal family dynamics across time, family membership, interactional contexts, and resilience of families in overcoming hardships and stressors experienced during transitions to parenthood....

Lower socioeconomic African American families have historically been underrepresented in observational studies of coparenting, particularly unmarried African American families in which mothers and fathers are parenting their shared children together in both co-residential and non-co-residential living arrangements. This bias exists because most pri...

This chapter traces the literature on coparenting and couple interactions across the transition to parenthood and provides the backdrop for research described in the remainder of this book. In this review, we highlight unique methodological issues that arise during prenatal observations of family dynamics. Since prenatal observations of two-parent...

This book examines family interactions and relationships during the transition to parenthood. It offers a unique integration of different lines of research on prenatal family dynamics contributed by leading family researchers in North America and Europe who use observational approaches to study emergent family processes. The book explores prenatal...

Biomarkers may serve as objective measures in complicated grief (CG) potentially capturing responses to stress reduction treatment. This paper reports challenges in obtaining and assessing salivary cortisol and α-amylase (sAA) for a recent randomized clinical trial. Within-session changes in salivary cortisol and sAA for 54 older adults with CG who...

Parenting coordination is a dispute resolution process to assist the subset of separating/divorcing parents who remain entrenched in high conflict coparenting post‐separation/divorce. Based on factors known to impact positive child outcomes, its goals include assisting parents to protect children from their conflict and implementing a framework tha...

During late adolescence, interpersonal acuity and decisiveness are facilitative of transitions to emerging adulthood. Disruptions in these capacities may be traceable to phenomena evoked by origin family coparental conflict - paralysis of initiative and hypersensitivity to conflict. Documenting such connections can lead to more beneficial intervent...

In a small pilot study, 31 interviewees, including 12 parenting coordinators, 11 mothers, and 8 fathers representing 14 different parenting coordination cases retrospectively described child and family functioning both pre‐ and post‐parenting coordination in phone interviews. They also detailed how often and how well different issues that arose dur...

This article describes and outlines a brief intervention designed to help bring high conflict divorcing parents back together in solidarity with the express purpose of bettering the family climate for their shared child or children. "Through the Eyes of the Child", a six-session intervention based on principles of a Focused Coparent-ing Consultatio...

We examined the responsivity of unmarried African American fathers to bids from their 3-month-old infants during the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP), and the responses of mothers subsequent to father-baby exchanges. Twenty mother-father-infant triads (75% noncoresidential) with parents between the ages of 14 and 53 took part in the investigation. All...

In this report, coparenting behaviors during triangular interactions among families raising a 3-month-old infant in Turkey are examined. Given the significant role played by extended family members in Turkish culture, coparenting dynamics were examined as mothers and babies played together with grandmothers, as well as together with fathers. Forty-...

This article provides a brief history of key developments in the growth of the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) paradigm that paved a foundation for new scholarship featured in the papers that follow. We outline core, foundational elements of the LTP work, highlighting the close interplay between clinical and research applications, the systems orientat...

Samples: A model with depression, marital satisfaction, and child symptoms as predictors of a latent factor of observed coparenting cooperation and warmth showed good fit to data in both samples, suggesting the model was relevant for each. Parameter estimation showed that higher coparenting cooperation and warmth was predicted by lower maternal de...

Despite incontrovertible evidence documenting effects of fathering on child outcomes, social work practice has unyieldingly resisted the pursuit of father engagement as a requisite outcome of competent clinical child intervention. Reasons behind this resistance are already well understood, and several promising programs have provided reassuring evi...

McHale, Rao, and their colleagues have been encouraging ‘emic’ approaches to the study of coparenting since the late 1990s, calling upon indigenous researchers to explore and illuminate the meaning of coparenting within their specific national and cultural contexts. Toward this end, the articles in this special section mark a watershed moment of so...

Background: Most prenatal preventive interventions for unmarried mothers do not integrate fathers or help the parents plan for the development of a functional coparenting alliance after the baby's arrival. Furthermore, properly trained professionals have only rarely examined the fidelity of these interventions. Purpose: This report examines whet...

This report examines effects of a coparenting intervention designed for and delivered to expectant unmarried African American mothers and fathers on observed interaction dynamics known to predict relationship adjustment. Twenty families took part in the six-session "Figuring It Out for the Child" (FIOC) dyadic intervention offered in a faith-based...

This report examines coparenting and triadic interactions in 19 unmarried, first-time African American families as fathers, mothers, and 3-month-old infants navigated the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP; E. Fivaz-Depeursinge & A. Corboz-Warnery, ). Parents in 10 of the 19 families reported coresidence at the time of the 3-month assessment, and the othe...

This chapter summarizes prototypic forms of family functioning in East and Southeast Asian countries, and recent historical trends that have prompted a variety of family adaptations over the past quarter century. We focus on common cultural values pertaining to the family, parenting practices shaped by Confucian and Tao doctrines, cultural mores co...

With a large and growing share of American families now forming outside of marriage, triangular infant-mother-father relationship systems in "fragile families" have begun to attract the interest of family scholars and clinicians. A relatively novel conceptualization has concerned the feasibility of intervening to support the development of a sustai...

Results of semistructured interviews with 45 pregnant unmarried first-time African American mothers indicated a wide range of expectancies concerning the coparenting relationship they would develop with others once their baby arrived. Most common coparenting systems projected by respondents involved maternal grandmothers and/or the babies' fathers,...

This report details findings from the nation's first statewide study on parenting coordination. A survey was presented to all known practicing parenting coordinators (PCs) in Florida (N = 207), with 67 (32%) responding. Data concerning PC demographics, how PCs do their work, and how they perceive their clients at different stages of the parenting c...

Introduction : what is coparenting? / James P. McHale and Kristin M. Lindahl -- Coparenting in diverse family systems / James P. McHale and Karina Irace -- Coparenting in two-parent nuclear families / Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, Daniel J. Laxman, and Allison Jessee -- Coparenting in extended kinship systems : African American, Hispanic, Asian heritage, a...

The number of incarcerated mothers has risen steadily in the past 20 years, with a majority of the mothers' children being cared for by relatives, usually the maternal grandmother (Smith, Krisman, Strozier, & Marley, 2004). This article examines the unique coparenting relationship of grandmothers and mothers through qualitative individual interview...

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full‐text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ). Using new methods designed to assess coparenting between incarcerated mothers of preschool‐aged children and the maternal grandmothers caring for the children during th...

IntroductionWhat is effective co-parenting?Co-parenting as a triangular conceptCo-parenting and division of laborCo-parenting and children's adjustmentWhat do mental health professionals need to know? The essentialsInstruments of choice: observational, interview and self-report survey dataConclusion References

Outlines the conceptual model and some pragmatics for delivery of the brief "Focused Coparenting Consultation" intervention

This chapter examines the vital but overlooked importance of coparenting coordination and collaboration for families and in children's lives. Though slowly garnering attention in basic and applied research studies and in family preventive and intervention efforts, coparenting relationships and dynamics have not received the concerted attention of r...

Focusing on identity development explorations enables a greater understanding of contexts that affect immigrant adolescents. Utilizing thematic and grounded narrative analysis of 46 journal writings, during a one-month period, from first and second generation Vietnamese adolescents ranging in age from 15 to 18 (26 residents of a culturally and poli...

The aim of this paper is to present McHale's coparenting scale,a self-administered questionnaire enabling assessment of the quality of coparenting, and first steps in structural and construct validation of the French version. A total of 41 French speaking Swiss families and 84 US families completed this questionnaire and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study to consider whether attachment security in mothers and fathers promotes more successful early coparenting adjustment, to assess the role of marital quality in amplifying or diminishing any such effects, and to examine interactive effects of maternal and paternal attachment status on coparenting. DESIGN: Eighty-f...

Infants appear to be active participants in complex interactional sequences with their parents far earlier than previously theorized. In this report, we document the capacity of 3-month-old infants to share attention with two partners (mothers and fathers) simultaneously, and trace links between this capacity and early family group-level dynamics....

This study examines early withdrawal in the coparenting system, and the utility of a brief problem-solving discussion about coparenting responsibilities as a means for evaluating such withdrawal. One hundred and fifteen couples were evaluated both prenatally and at 3 months postpartum. During prenatal assessments, parents rated their personalities...

This paper examines changes in how parents interact with their toddler-aged children as they move from dyadic to family contexts. Levels of parental involvement and quality of parenting behavior in the two different contexts were examined in sixty two-parent families with a 30-month-old son or daughter. An independent evaluation of marital distress...

Attendant to the exponential increase in rates of incarceration of mothers with young children in the United States, programming has been established to help mothers attend to parenting skills and other family concerns while incarcerated. Unfortunately, most programs overlook the important, ongoing relationship between incarcerated mothers and fami...

Prior research has indicated that expectant parents overestimate the extent to which fathers will take part in the "work" of parenting, with mothers often becoming disenchanted when these expectations are violated following the baby's arrival. In this study, we examine the role of violated wishes concerning childcare involvement in accounting for v...

FCS2277, a 7-page fact sheet by James McHale, Jason Baker, and Heidi Liss Radunovich, will help anyone who is "coparenting" children--raising children with the help of another adult. It explains why cooperative and respectful coparenting is key to the healthy development of children and will help coparents understand whether their coparenting relat...

This brief for families is published by the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), an Equal Opportunity Institution authorized to provide research, educational information and other services only to individuals and institutions that function with non-discrimination with respect to race, creed, color, religion, age, disability, sex, sex...

This study examined short- and longer-term sequelae of parents' prenatal expectations of their future family process, and traced subsequent stability in coparenting solidarity from infancy through the toddler years. One hundred and ten couples expecting a first child participated in prenatal assessments of coparenting expectations and differences,...

Contents: What is coparenting and why is it important? / with Regina Kuersten-Hogan -- Our study of coparenting from pregnancy through toddlerhood / with Jean Talbot, Allison Lauretti, and Christina Kazali -- Looking ahead : imagining family life during pregnancy / with Jean Talbot and Christina Kazali -- Early adjustment : the coparental alliance...

A look at how far the study of the whole family has advanced and how far it yet has to go.

This article examines patterns of adjustment among urban middle-school children as a function of involvement in organized team sports. Four hundred twenty-three seventh-grade students (216 boys and 207 girls) reported on their involvement in sport, self-esteem, delinquent activity, and drug use during the year preceding the survey. Physical Educati...

This volume is dedicated to emerging directions in the study of coparenting dynamics and relationships within families. Precisely when the field of coparenting studies began depends on the lens taken by the historian. As early as the 1950s, when the family therapy movement took root in clinical psychology, clinicians began cautioning about the prob...

Contemporary family research studies have devoted surprisingly little effort to elucidating the interplay between adults' individual adjustment and the dynamics of their coparental relationship. In this study, we assessed two particularly relevant "trait" variables, parental flexibility and self-control, and traced links between these characteristi...

Though the study of coparenting is still in its infancy, an explosion of coparenting research is in the wings. This paper identifies several emerging issues in coparenting theory and research to guide work in the years ahead, including issues in definition, conceptualization, and measurement; the interface between coparenting and adult development;...

In the decade since the first observationally based empirical studies of coparenting process in nuclear families made their mark, most investigations of early coparenting dynamics have examined whether and how such dynamics drive child development trajectories, rather than identifying factors that may contribute to the differential development of s...

Mothers of preschoolers in China and India reported on the value they accorded to items tapping two socialization goals, Filial Piety and Socioemotional Development and two parenting styles, Authoritative and Authoritarian. In both cultures, maternal valuing of Filial Piety was associated with greater exertion of parental control, whereas greater v...

This book assembles 11 of the leading thinkers and researchers in the field of family psychology to create a compendium summarizing both what psychology researchers have learned about the family and where the field should be going next. It evolved after the volume's contributors met with other distinguished family scholars to discuss family influen...

Fifty-two married partners played with their 30-month-olds in both dyadic (parent-child) and whole family contexts and reported on their own coparenting activities (family integrity-promoting behavior, conflict, disparagement, and reprimand). Coparenting behavior observed in the whole family context was evaluated for antagonism, warmth and cooperat...

Excerpt only. Full-text article is available only through licensed access provided by the publisher. Published in The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 161(1). 115-121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221320009596698 Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided below.

This report examines how contemporary middle class urban mothers in Beijing, People’s Republic of China (PRC), characterise their own co-parenting conduct in the family. One hundred mothers of 4-year-old preschoolers (95% of whom were only-children) estimated how frequently they engaged in several different activities hypothesised to contribute to...

Excerpt: “This chapter describes a system for evaluating several dimensions of coparenting and family process, introducing concepts based on the framework of structural family theory (S. Minuchin, 1974). The Coparenting and Family Rating System (CFRS) and its scales were developed as an alternative to several family-rating approaches that existed a...

This paper outlines recent conceptual and methodological developments in the assessment of triadic and family group process during infancy and toddlerhood. Foundations of the emerging family group process are identified, and conditions specific to the assessment of the family during the early phases of family formation are summarized. Both microana...

Investigated 4-year-olds' depictions of family relationships during a semistructured doll play task. Examined developmental and family correlates of these depictions, and their relative stability over a 1-month period. Forty-nine children related stories about happy, sad, mad, and worried families using dolls reflecting their own family configurati...

Most prior studies of family-peer linkages during the preschool years have asked how mothers' or fathers' parenting practices contribute to early social competence. However, recent evidence from studies of family group-level processes raise the possibility that coparenting and family group process may also influence early social competence. This st...

This study examines longitudinal correlates of coparental and family group-level dynamics during infancy. Thirty-seven couples observed at play with their 8-11-month-old infants (15 boys, 22 girls) rated their child's internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and their own coparenting behavior 3 years later. Teachers also rated child behavior at th...

Although prior research indicates that parental reports of their young children's early social adaptation outside the home do not reconcile well with observations of social behavior in context, some of this inconsistency may be attributable to the "problem-oriented" biases inherent in many commonly used parent rating scales. Might greater concordan...

This article introduces a new self-report instrument designed to measure the frequency of parental behaviors thought to promote or undermine children's sense of family. Members of 103 married couples rated their behavior in both public (all family members present) and private (alone with child) contexts. Factor analyses of these data revealed four...

Results from a series of new studies clearly indicate that family-level dynamics can help to explain individual variability in a variety of measures of early socioemotional development. With some of the more basic questions concerning the relevance of whole-family processes put to rest, new and more complex questions now loom for the field.

Despite advances in family and child research over the past decade, most studies continue to examine dyadic subsystems of the larger family system rather than the full family context. With few exceptions, empirical support for the utility of whole-family analysis in child development research remains to be established. This sourcebook draws togethe...

The interaction patterns of 47 intact couples at play with infant sons and daughters were examined. Play in the triad was characterized along dimensions of hostility-competitiveness, family harmony, and parenting discrepancy, and correlates of these 3 patterns were investigated. Though family patterns were generally not related to self-reported dis...

Covert antisocial behaviors such as stealing, destroying property, and cheating carry high risk for delinquency. An individual laboratory setting was devised in which youngsters could take desired objects and use answer keys to assist with worksheets. Twenty-two boys with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 22 comparison boys were o...

Covert antisocial behaviors such as stealing, destroying property, and cheating carry high risk for delinquency. An individual laboratory setting was devised in which youngsters could take desired objects and use answer keys to assist with worksheets. Twenty-two boys with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 22 comparison boys were o...

In the past decade investigators have begun to emphasize the clinical, prognostic, and theoretical importance of hyperactive children’s social interactions (Barkley, 1982; Campbell & Paulauskas, 1979; Milich & Landau, 1982; Pelham & Bender, 1982; Whalen & Henker, 1985). Indeed, such social and interpersonal phenomena as disruptive interactions in c...

Soon after infants begin to reach, they devote an increasing amount of time to manipulating objects. They finger, bang, and rotate objects often with great interest and delight. They do so in a variety of situations, whether it be in the context of solitary play or social interaction. Most parents, in fact, recognize this proclivity and tolerate it...

"Submitted on the tenth day of July, 1984." Thesis (M.S.)--Tulane University, 1985. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-78).