Marsha Kline Pruett, M.S., M.S.L., Ph.D., ABPP

Kline Pruett's writings include over 150 scholarly articles, chapters, co-edited and co-written books, including: Your Divorce Advisor: A Lawyer and a Psychologist Guide You Through the Legal and Emotional Landscape of Divorce (2001, Simon and Schuster); and Partnership Parenting (2009, Perseus). Kline Pruett has maintained a clinical practice since 1990 and has treated individual adults and children, couples and families. She also provides clinical consultation to programs and institutions, with organizational, family, and (delete- alternative) dispute resolution foci. Her private practice and consulting includes couples and coparent counseling and consultation, father involvement consultation, therapeutic coordination in legal cases, child custody case consultation, and expert witness testimony.

Since much of her scholarship and clinical work has implications for family policy, Kline Pruett writes for lay as well as professional audiences. She also works locally and nationally with task forces (e.g., governor- or judicially-appointed) charged with developing best practice guidelines or legislation. She has taught in the doctoral and masters programs at the Smith College School for Social Work and teaches undergraduate psychology seminars at Smith College.

She is involved in projects spanning supporting father involvement group interventions in the U.S., Canada and abroad including the evaluation of online parenting programs, and the design and evaluation of model ADR programs that help families resolve disputes inside and outside of the adversarial system. She has been a key consultant for numerous prevention programs, including the Out of Court Divorce program in Denver, CO and the Family Resolutions Specialty Court in Hampshire County, Massachusetts. In collaborative ventures with colleagues, she has designed a grid for decision-making about young children and overnights and a step-up template for increasing parenting time across the age spectrum, which are used extensively throughout North America and abroad. Her research on a model continuum of effective and cost-efficient co-parenting services in the Connecticut courts, father involvement, and parenting plans for young children earned her the Association of Family and Conciliation Court’s Stanley Cohen Award for Distinguished Research. She is a past president of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and the current social science editor for the Family Court Review.

One primary area of research and intervention concentrates on increasing fathers' involvement with their children. The Supporting Father Involvement project aims to reduce child abuse and neglect and enhance family well-being through an intervention that encourages father involvement and couple co-parenting (among married and unmarried parents). The State of California funded a 10-year study that examined the efficacy of father-only versus couples intervention groups against a third condition control group. In the last phase of the project, intervention effectiveness was compared for child welfare-involved and non-involved families. The project produced data about how to involve men early in their children’s lives, and how to best work with parents and other caregivers as a team to promote children’s development. Since funding has ended, the project continues through private sources in various locales in California, and has spread to Alberta Canada, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and the U.K. A program for Indigenous families in Western Canada and for families in mainland China are also underway. In 2017, the UK version of SFI (Parents as Partners) won a “Best Family Support Intervention” National Award. Recently, the SFI program was integrated into the Brazelton Touchpoints Center, and training can be obtained throughout the country and abroad in combination with this extensive, reputable early childhood program.

Kline Pruett and colleagues are currently tackling writing projects aimed at better defining and understanding parent-child contact problems (PCCPs) and dynamics related to children resisting or refusing to spend time with one parent, favoring the other, due to multi-factorial reasons potentially including child abuse or intimate partner abuse in the family, alienation of the child from one parent due to the behaviors of the other, substance abuse, parenting styles, and characteristics of the child, family, and psychosocial systems surrounding the family. In collaboration with Drs. Michael Saini and Jonathan Alschech, she is working on the validation of a coparenting tool that will be valid across genders and cultural groups. The tool has been translated into six languages and is currently being validated in English, Mandarin and Spanish. She is involved in making research more accessible through various curricular and continuing education training programs for professionals from various disciplines. She speaks regularly nationally and abroad, provides training to mental health and legal professionals, and she disseminates her work through media presentations and guest interviews across electronic and print mediums.