Trajectories of Change Following Relationship Education for Couples Raising Children With Disabilities

ABSTRACT Couples raising children with disabilities face unique and ongoing stressors that challenge their capacity to parent effectively and threaten the health of their couple and coparenting relationship. This may be especially true among couples receiving child welfare services. Guided by the vulnerability–stress–adaptation model, the current study explores whether and how participation in a couple relationship education (CRE) program, ELEVATE , may promote the ability of couples raising children with disabilities to develop healthy couple relationship skills, support each other as coparents and reduce parenting stress. Using a sample drawn from participants in a federally funded CRE program who were receiving child welfare services, we examined trajectories of change on measures of parenting stress, couple relationship skills and coparenting support collected across three time points from different‐sex couples raising children with disabilities ( n = 127 couples) versus without disabilities ( n = 493 couples). On average, couples raising children with disabilities reported greater levels of parenting stress at baseline (particularly mothers) and experienced greater reductions in parenting stress than couples raising children without disabilities. Also, while our findings showed no significant changes in coparenting support, participants in both groups reported significant growth in couple relationship skills following program participation.