Housing Young Families Together to Promote Permanent Connections

Ten years ago, when homeless teen couples arrived at the doors of Our Family Services, babies in arms and in search of housing, staff of the Tucson, AZ, human services agency were forced to keep them apart. The organization had a policy of housing girls and boys separately.

Many couples refused to split up. Some stayed together on the street or couch surfed. A few had partners sneak in past curfew.

Not comfortable with any of these scenarios, Our Family Services established a program where young parents could live together with their children. The program offers intensive case management, counseling, and life skills and parenting education for up to eight families: 16 young adult clients, ages 18 to 21, and their children.

Our Family Services is one of a few programs for runaway and homeless youth that allow young couples, with or without children, to live together. The policy runs counter to standard practice at most organizations, which typically house young people according to gender and have rules against partners living together. Proponents of the live-together approach say the benefits of such arrangements, including increased commitment to the program, a built-in support system, and a greater likelihood that couples will stay together after they leave, outweigh the challenges and dramas that can go along with young adult relationships.

“It’s not right for all couples,” says Ricardo Fernandez, who runs the Teens in Transition program at Our Family Services, “but for some committed young people, we can help promote a permanent connection.”

In It for the Long Haul

At Community Action Partnership in Western Nebraska, couples need not have a child together to live together and be considered a family, says Vicky Lawton, director of youth programs. “So many of our youth come in saying, ‘I have no one,’” she says. “We think the best way to help youth develop a support system is to build on an existing relationship and help it succeed.”

That success depends on staff nurturing the relationship and paying careful attention to make sure the young people’s bond is healthy and strong. And to do that, adult staff members might have to ditch some preconceived notions about young adult relationships, chief among them the idea that young love is not serious and is unlikely to last.

In fact, youth in committed relationships tend to be more mature and grounded than most youth who aren’t in a long-term relationship, Fernandez says. He sees young couples provide each other social and emotional support and pool their resources for daily living.

And allowing youth to live together may make their relationships more long lasting: Both Fernandez and Lawton say that couples who live together tend to stay together. Fernandez says that 80 percent of couples housed together at Our Family Services stay together for at least six months after exiting the program. (That’s when staff typically follow up with them.) Lawton sees similar patterns at her program. “They may have rough, rocky times, but most of the time, they end up staying together,” she says.

Still, young adult relationships can involve a lot of drama, Lawton says. And while most difficulties can be addressed with counseling and mediation, Lawton concedes that working with couples takes more planning, involves more work, and requires more training. In Lawton’s and Fernandez’s programs, counselors, or coaches, help couples work together as a team and improve their relationships. Lawton advises finding a counselor with expertise in family therapy who can help young people work on individual issues as well as issues related to family dynamics.

Finding Strength in the Relationship

To those who worry that cohabitating young couples might encourage reckless behavior in each other, like using drugs or having unprotected sex, Fernandez points out that peer pressure can be a powerful, constructive influence. He often sees partners support positive behavior and motivate each other to work on goals, like the time a young woman helped her boyfriend quit using drugs.

There have been times when one partner is doing something illegal or unsafe, but “on the whole,” Fernandez says, “it’s just easier for them to have someone they can rely on, and the strengths of the relationship outweigh the challenges.”

And while some research has found that parenting youth who live together are more likely to have additional children, Fernandez says that at Our Family Services rates of second pregnancy among young women who live with their partners are not significantly different from youth housed singly.

Managing Breakups

As hard as staff work to support young people, sometimes a breakup is unavoidable. But if a relationship does go south, Lawton says that helping to manage the breakup is just as important as helping young people stay together.

Both programs maintain individual files for each young person, so they can continue to provide separate housing and support to each partner. “Even in the worst case scenario,” Lawton says, “where abuse is involved, you can’t simply say, ‘Oh, I’m glad that person is gone.’ We don’t ever just drop anyone from receiving care and services.”