The National Association for Relationship and Marriage Education, NARME, is holding its second annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland on July 19-25, 2012. This is the leading marriage skills education conference in the U.S., largely filling the role of the Smart Marriages conferences that were held from 1997 to 2010, including many of the same people — family therapists, educators, clergy, and others interested in helping people improve their marriages, including a few from the legal professions.
Most of the over 100 sessions are on various aspects of marriage education programs. There are several programs on African-American communities and military families, domestic violence screening, and relationship education for teens. Relatively new topics include fatherhood programs; adapting to men’s learning styles; new options for online education programs, and other ways of disseminating knowledge other than in-person classroom-style programs.
Sessions of possible interest to family lawyers and judges include Prof. William Doherty on “Discernment Counseling for Crisis Marriages”; Houston collaborative divorce lawyer Michael Hiller on “Reconciliation Law: Working With the Legal System to Give Couples the Option of Staying Together”; a plenary address by former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears (a native Virginian and first cousin of our late Chief Justice Hassell), and an overview of joint custody nationwide. There are a couple of sessions on modest divorce law reform proposals for one-year waiting periods like the one Virginia already has, but which involve divorce education and relationship education as well.
For more information and registration go to www.narmeconference.com. A list of sessions and speakers is at www.narmeconference.com/presenters. There are substantially reduced fees for attending only one or two days. Most sessions are July 23-24; the other days are mostly pre-conference trainings.
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