You can become a marriage and couples educator.
Train and qualify to teach the courses and offer programs
in your congregation, community center, school, on your base, in
your clinic – in any setting.
What is Marriage Education?
Marriage Education teaches couples the information
and skills that will help them create and maintain strong, stable,
satisfying relationships. Marriage Education is based on new research
about what makes marriages succeed or fail. It includes 1) information
on the benefits of marriage; 2) on what to expect along the way – provides
a roadmap of the normal stages and challengs; and 3) teaches the behaviors that will
help build a strong marital bond and keep love alive. There are a wide
variety of courses and curricula available for couples of any social class or
ethnic group and for couples at any stage – from single to dating, engaged,
cohabiting, newlywed, new parents, parenting teens, long married, remarried, or experiencing
marital crisis. There are also a wide variety of marriage education curricula
for teaching in high schools and youth groups.
Training takes from one to four days.
You can train and qualify as an instructor to teach dozens of programs in the pre and post conference
training institutes at the annual Smart Marriages® conference. Training is less
expensive here than in other locations, subsidized by the conference.
However, if you can't make it to the conference, see the Directory of Programs
for training locations across the country. Look in the Become a Marriage Educator section.
Or, buy a KIT and skip the training.
There are also dozens of "teach out of the box (TOOB)" programs –
The leaders have recorded the training on DVDs and put them "in a box" along with
leader guides and workbooks. Just purchase the kit, watch the training, and start teaching.
At the annual Smart Marriages Conference, we offer
TOOB training workshops.
Training isn't required, but these sessions provide an opportunity to spend 90 minutes
with the program founders to receive guidance about how to
best teach the classes. Or, some are offered as pre or post full day Institutes in
order to give you more in-person time with the
program founders: Toobs offered as pre and post Institutes: 107, 112, 115, 901, 902, 905, 906, 914.
Who can become a Marriage Educator?
Anyone with a passion for helping strenghten marriage in their community.
Research shows that lay leaders (that means ordinary people) and clergy can
teach the courses as well as – or better – than mental health professionals (those with
mental health degrees and licenses).
That's because Marriage Education is NOT therapy. It does not involve a diagnosis
or "treatment". It is EDUCATION. Therefore, you do NOT need
a mental health degree or license to become a qualified and certified
marriage, couples or family education instructor.
To understand: Just as it doesn't take a heart surgeon to teach smoking cessation or
diet and exercise classes, we don't need a therapist or counselor to teach couples the
information and best practices or behaviors that will help them make their marriage
or relationship successful.You do not need a college degree or even a high-school
diploma to teach the courses. You just need to know the material and how to teach it.
The dozens of marriage education courses listed in the
Smart Marriages® on-line Directory:
- Can be taught by lay educators, teachers, clergy – or by mental health professionals.
- Leader training takes one to three days (depending on the program) for the courses that
require in-person training and certification: PREP, PAIRS, Relationship Enhancement, Couple Communication, etc.
- Or, many programs require no "in-person" training – the "training" is contained in the leader Kit.
Click on the "Teach Right Out of the Box/TOOB" section.
- Teaching is most effective in classroom settings – couples learn the skills better in a group setting
than in the more expensive, labor intensive, one-trainer/counselor-to-one-couple model.
- Are not therapy or counseling – couples don’t share personal issues or feelings in the classroom.
These are not encounter groups. Marriage education does not involve diagnosis or "treatment".
-
Skills work with premarital & engaged couples, cohabiting couples, newlyweds, and long-married, and/or, troubled couples. It's fine to combine couples at any stage in the classroom.
- Education normalizes conflict and disagreements as part of every marriage and as part of every loving relationship.
- Includes instruction in basic communication skills: speaker-listener, time outs, shared meaning,
conflict-management, problem solving, empathy-building, softened start-up, love maps, etc.
- Courses usually eight to 20 hours long, and are usually taught in a weekend or one-night-a-week format.
Can be as short as 4 hours and as long as a semester.
- Skills, once learned are modeled at home where "the children are watching" and thus are likely to also reduce divorce in future generations.
- Skills also generalize to relationships with co-workers, neighbors, peers, in-laws, etc. improving relationships in the workplace, in school, in the community.
- Assume men and women are equally capable of learning the skills and are equally invested in
having satisfying, successful marriages.
- Are effective across all economic and ethnic groups.
- Are easily adapted for special populations - stepfamilies, first-time parents, couples facinglng separations
or military deployment, couples having children out-of-wedlock, couples facing serious illness (heart-attack-recovery,
cancer, etc.); for teaching in special settings: religious, military, prison, child-birth clinic, welfare, high-school, etc; and
have been adpated for specific ethnic groups: African American, Hispanic, Korean, Native American, etc.and for
specific religions: Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, etc.
There are also programs for families – skills for working with whole families together such as the Family Wellness Program,
Parenting Education, Fathering Education, School & Youth Education. See the Directory and the Conference Program.
******************
Which sounds more romantic? Is it more romantic to say,
"Beloved, I see that the divorce rate is 50%. Let's get married anyway and
let's assume that our love is so special, so passionate, that we'll make it.
That we'll stay together till death us do part."
Or, can we get to the place where people will realize that the true romantic
would say, "Beloved, the divorce rate is 50%. I want to marry you and I
love you so much that I want to learn everything the experts know about
what makes marriage succeed or fail so that we can work to make sure our
love and our marriage last." . . .
I believe that in the near future – if those of us in the coalition do our job –
couples will come to accept that the most romantic thing they can do is to
walk hand-in-hand into a course on making marriages work. That taking such
a course will become as much a part of the wedding tradition as the bridal shower
or the bachelor party. That not taking such a course will come to be seen as
foolhardy, reckless, uninformed, and unsophisticated. That the time will come
when none of us would dream of giving our children a big wedding and not also
giving them a marriage education class. That we will also know what to give them
at the first baby shower. That along with prenatal classes a couple will also sign
up for a booster course on keeping love alive. And that employers and insurers will
come to recognize that such courses will easily pay for themselves.
And, that changing marketplace demands will move marital healthcare into the 21st century.
Diane Sollee, Director, Smart Marriages®, An Optimistic View of the Future of Marriage,
Communitarian Conference, Washington, DC, 1996 - for more marriage educator quotes
like this one from Marriage Education guru Bernard Guerney founder of the Relationship Enhancement (RE)
program: "The major value judgment underlying the RE programs is that lack of understanding
or, worse, misunderstanding, of self and one's intimates is bad and understanding is good. The
fundamental goal of the program is to increase understanding of one's self and one's partner along
dimensions directly pertinent to the relationship." - that's what it's all about!
***********************
What is the Foundation of this Approach? - interview with a community marriage organizer