Philip A. Cowan, PhD
Carolyn
Pape Cowan is Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University
of California, Berkeley where she is co-director of 3
longitudinal preventive intervention projects: Becoming a Family,
Schoolchildren and Their Families, and Supporting Father Involvement.
Dr. Cowan has published widely in the professional literature on family
relationships, family transitions, and the evaluation of preventive
interventions. She is co-editor of Fatherhood today: Men's Changing Role in the
Family (Wiley, 1988) and The Family Context of Parenting in the
Child's Adaptation to School (Erlbaum, 2005), and
co-author with Phil Cowan of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life
Change for Couples (Erlbaum, 2000), which has been
translated into 6 languages. Prof. Cowan consults widely on the
development, training, and evaluation of interventions for parents. 
Philip
A. Cowan is Professor of Psychology Emeritus
and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of
California, Berkeley. He is co-director of 3 longitudinal
preventive intervention projects with Carolyn Pape Cowan. Dr. Cowan
served as Director of the Clinical Psychology Program and the Institute
of Human Development at UC Berkeley. In addition to authoring numerous
scientific articles, he is the author of Piaget with Feeling
(Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1978), co-author of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life
Change for Couples (Erlbaum, 2000), and co-editor
of four books and monographs, including Family Transitions
(Erlbaum, 1990), and The Family Context of Parenting in the
Child's Adaptation to School (Erlbaum, 2005). For more than three decades, Phil and Carolyn Cowan have conducted longitudinal studies that include randomized clinical trials of couples group interventions. The central theme of their work is that positive couple relationships play a central role in creating a positive context for parenting, and help to enhance children's development and adaptation. The Becoming a Family Project showed that a 6-month-long weekly couples group with clinically trained leaders was able to maintain marital satisfaction of new parents over a period of 5 years, while control group couples showed the normative decline in marital satisfaction found in more than 30 studies in the US and abroad. The Schoolchildren and Their Families Project offered 4-month-long weekly couples groups in the year before their first child entered elementary school; these groups were able to reduce marital conflict, increase parenting effectiveness, and reduce children's behavior problems in kindergarten - effects that were maintained over ten years and facilitated the children's transition to high school. In 1999, the Cowans received an award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research from the American Family Therapy Academy.
In the Supporting Father Involvement Project, the Cowans work with Marsha and Kyle Pruett in collaboration with the Office of Child Abuse Prevention, a unit of the California Department of Social Services. In addition to their participation in creating the overall design of the intervention, they supervise the intervention evaluation arm of the project. In this project, couples groups and fathers groups meeting weekly for 4 months are able to increase father involvement, maintain couple relationship satisfaction, reduce parenting stress, and prevent the development of behavior problems in children - all central risks for child abuse.
Carolyn and Phil Cowan were among the founding members of the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization that has been devoted to working with the media on finding balanced ways of presenting family issues for the past 10 years.