Partners in Prevention

Partners in Prevention... educating, mentoring, and counseling young adults on the benefits of waiting until marriage to conceive a child to ensure healthy, happy families.

Promoting... self-esteem, healthy relationships, male responsibility, and abstinence plus contraception education through creative strategies using media campaigns, direct intervention, and public forums.

Goal... to reduce the incidence of non-marital births without increasing the incidence of abortions.

 

Women who wait until marriage to have children are:

• half as likely than single mothers to engage in substance abuse, and to experience depression.
• less likely to divorce later
• more likely to seek prenatal care in the first trimester
• half as likely to become victims of domestic violence.

Children born to a married couple:

• tend to have higher birth weights and lower infant mortality rates than children born to unmarried couples.
• have fewer emotional and behavioral problems, and report higher self-esteem
• are more likely to stay in high school, have greater success in college, and have low divorce rates later in life
• are less likely to display violence or to engage in delinquent acts.

Partners in Prevention promotes male responsibility for healthy relationship choices and supports fatherhood within marriage. Today, 4 out of 10 children grow up in single-parent homes without their fathers. These children are five times more likely than children born to married couples to be raised in poverty. They are ten times more likely to commit suicide when a father is not present in the home. The majority of hardcore criminals grew up in single-parent families without a father. Girls born without a present and supportive father are more likely to become single parents than girls from two-parent families.

Partners in Prevention admires the role of the successful single parent, but supports and promotes the ideal of the two-parent, father-present family. Research suggests that marriage provides the best foundation to ensure a healthy, happy family. Research also suggest that young men want to be good fathers but need education and resources to be made available to them which supports this desire. Partners in Prevention hopes to make this a reality. Restoring fatherhood is a high priority because we know that fathers really do make a difference to the health and welfare of families.

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