This study assesses whether government‐supported Healthy Marriage Initiatives (HMIs)—educational programs to help couples form and sustain healthy marriages and relationships—have had a measurable impact on population‐level family outcomes. We compiled data on funding for these initiatives between 2000 and 2010 and aggregated these data to the state level for each year. We employed pooled time‐series regression with fixed state and year effects to estimate the effects of funding on population‐level outcomes taken from the American Community Survey. Cumulative per capita funding for HMIs between 2005 and 2010 was positively associated with small changes in the percentage of married adults in the population and children living with two parents, and it was negatively associated with the percentage of children living with one parent, nonmarital births, and children living in poverty. These results were diminished, however, when an influential outlier—Washington, DC—was removed from the analysis. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed.

OVERVIEW Numerous studies have found links between the quality of the parents' relationship and positive outcomes for children and families. 1 Yet very little research has examined whether this association holds across various population subgroups, especially among disadvantaged groups. 2 Is the quality of the parents' relationship really associated with outcomes for children of low-income couples? For ethnic minority couples? For unmarried couples?To address this issue, Child Trends analyzed data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health. Analyses focus on more than 64,000 respondents 3 whose children were between the ages of six and 17.Results indicate that the parents' relationship quality is very consistently and positively associated with a range of child and family outcomes, including: child behavior problems (externalizing), child social competence, child school engagement, child internalizing (depression), parent-child communication, and parental feelings of aggravation. This association holds across varied subgroups, including: white, black and Hispanic couples; married and cohabiting couples; lower and higher income families; boys and girls, teens and younger children, immigrants and non-immigrants; and parents with postsecondary education, a high school education, and less than a high school education. In addition, the association holds in all but one comparison when social and economic differences are taken into account.