CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In many states, including Illinois, married couples with children who want to untie the knot must complete court-mandated educational programs - either in group settings or through online classes - before judges will finalize their divorces.
While online programs provide a convenient means for some parents to satisfy court mandates, there have been no formal assessments of the programs' quality and effectiveness, a research team at the University of Illinois found when it reviewed six popular online divorce education programs utilized by courts throughout the U.S.
Divorce requirements and educational provisions vary from state to state, and within states, much is left to judges' discretion in each county, said Jill R. Bowers, one of the study's co-authors and a doctoral student in the department of human and community development at the U. of I.
In Illinois, divorcing couples that have minor children are required to complete at least four hours of parenting education programs under a rule adopted by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2006.
The Sixth Judicial Circuit Court in Champaign County - and about 30 other family courts throughout Illinois, other states and Canada - uses the Children First parenting program, which was created in the late 1980s by a task force of family court judges, attorneys and mental health professionals in St. Clair County, Ill., that hoped to curb the amount of post-divorce child custody and child support litigation clogging the courts by sensitizing parents to the impact of divorces and custody battles on children.
Family Service of Champaign County administers the program for Champaign County, which has utilized it since 1990. In special circumstances and with court approval, parents can complete an online version of the face-to-face class.
According to the program's coordinator, Dawn McKinley, 663 Champaign County parents participated in Children First during 2010, at costs ranging from $5 to $160, depending on their income.
"Divorce is a time when resources such as time, money and child care are often limited, making an online class more feasible to divorcing parents," Bowers said. "Face-to-face classes might not be the best option - or an option at all - for some families."
"Recommending that the partners work together as co-parents is a great suggestion if it's an amicable situation, but that's not always the best recommendation, to encourage contact between the parents when there's a potentially dangerous situation," said doctoral student and co-author Elissa Thomann Mitchell. "The programs didn't always take those contextual issues into consideration."
Accordingly, the research team found "surprising and concerning" that few of the online programs addressed special circumstances such as domestic violence and substance abuse. Likewise, fewer than half of the programs addressed the emotional turmoil and complexities that many adults experience during divorce, such as changes in economic status and the challenges of maintaining relationships with friends and extended family members. Most of the adult-focused content in the videos dealt with co-parenting issues and parent-child relationships.
All six programs emphasized parental sensitivity to children's experiences, addressed general parenting skills and promoted parental cooperation and conflict reduction, but only two of the programs offered parents specific age-appropriate strategies for helping children adjust to their new circumstances.
While divorce education programs have been around since the mid-1970s, online training is much more recent: The oldest of the six online courses that the researchers examined became accessible on the Web in 2007.
All of the online programs reviewed were first-generation versions, apparently created by transferring the face-to-face presentations directly to the Web with few modifications. As a result, many of the limitations and problems with the face-to-face programs identified by previous researchers also applied to the online versions, the U. of I. team said.
Program administrators could make better use of the enhanced capabilities that technology offers by utilizing online tools such as chat rooms or blogs or by creating online communities - where users could pose questions to experts and peers, share information and support one another - to make the material more engaging and broaden its educational potential, Mitchell said.
"A lot of the technology that allows interactivity has just been developed in the last few years, so I think we're going to see more" online programs utilizing it, Bowers said.
"The program administrators allowed us to go in and assess these innovative programs," Bowers said. "Each of their efforts is noteworthy, and their intentions are similar to ours in that they really want parents to have adequate coping skills and the abilities to help them navigate the divorce process as co-parents. When we shared our results with them, the administrators were receptive to the feedback that we offered."
U. of I. faculty members Jennifer L. Hardesty and Robert Hughes Jr., the head of the department of human and community development, also co-wrote the study, which appeared in the October issue of the journal Family Court Review.