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Healthy Marriage/Relationship Building
Heritage Keepers® Healthy Marriage Initiatives are designed to educate, mentor, and coach couples and individuals about what a healthy marriage looks like and how they can increase their success at having one, if desired. Read more from our Frequently Asked Questions on Healthy Marriage and our Building Real Solutions.
The initiatives exist to help couples - who have chosen marriage for themselves - gain greater access to marriage education services where they can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage. Heritage Keepers® Healthy Marriage Initiatives have four major components:
- Pregnancy Care Clinic activities focus on crisis pregnancy centers to help them provide marriage education services to their clients. Heritage Keepers® was awarded in 2005 a four year demonstration project designed to improve child well-being by understanding and removing barriers to and strengthening family formation and healthy marriages. Federal funding for this Healthy Marriage Initiative provided by the Administration for Children and Families, Child Welfare Bureau.
- African-American and Hispanic activities will promote and strengthen healthy marriages within their respective communities by addressing their unique cultural, linguistic, demographic and socio-economic needs.
- Marriage Mentor Training is available for couples in long term successful marriages that want to help another couple prepare for or strengthen their marriage.
- Community activities focus on training and technical assistance for faith and community-based organizations, and other agencies interested in strengthening their capacity to provide family formation and marriage education services.
All parents want the very best
for their children.
Heritage Keepers®
helps couples strengthen
their own relationships so
that they can provide the
love and support their
children need for a healthy
and happy future.
Children can be very stressful on a couple, and
every parent deals with issues in life such as:
- Communication and solving problems
- Time together and time with family
- Trust and intimacy
- Paying the Bills
- Finishing my education
- Saving for a house, business or education
- Working together as a TEAM
- Is marriage important to me? To my child?
- Is our relationship worth the effort?
Heritage Keepers® and Lowcountry Crisis Pregnancy Center work together to teach couples that are:
- at least 18 years old
- romantically involved, cohabiting or married, (eligible to marry each other)
- parenting or expecting a child together,
- have a desire to form a healthy relationship, marriage and family.
Heritage Keepers® covers some of the
following topics:
- Listening to & learning
about each other
- Fighting FOR the
relationship rather
than against each
other
- Handling anger and
hurt
- Solving problems
- Should we get
married?
- Should we live
together first?
- Commitment
- Is a life long marriage
possible? for us?
- Parenting yours, mine
and ours
- Importance of Dads
and Moms
- Finding a good job
- $avers and $penders
- Saving for the future
Too many children in South Carolina are born to unmarried mothers and into poverty that lasts a lifetime. In Why Marriage Matters, Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences, researchers have concluded that children who grow up in low-conflict families with married biological parents do better compared to children in any other family structure. Children from divorced or never married parents have lower grades, are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of high school compared to children from married low-income parents.
Heritage’s Healthy Family Formation goal is to lift South Carolina out of poverty by providing the necessary education and skills to form healthy relationships, prepare for and strengthen marriages so that their children are nurtured.
Read more from our Frequently Asked Questions on Healthy Marriage and our Building Real Solutions.
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