Family Life
Modern Life Pace and Family Priorities
The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued repeated calls for more unstructured play time for children and less organized activity—not because orga...
6 min read
Family Life
Creating a nurturing family environment and daily routines.
Family Life
Family Memories and Their Importance
Researchers Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at Emory University set out to understand what psychological factor best predicted children's resilience. A...
6 min read
Family Life
Managing Conflicts Between Children at Home
Research on sibling relationships finds that siblings between the ages of two and four have a conflict roughly every 17 minutes on average. That numbe...
6 min read
Family Life
Family Meals: Why They Matter and How to Make Them Work
The family meal has more research behind it than almost any other family practice. Studies spanning 25 years and dozens of countries consistently find...
6 min read
Family Life
How to Maintain a Child's Routine While Traveling
The most common mistake families make when traveling with young children is trying to maintain everything. They protect nap time so zealously that the...
7 min read
Family Life
Long Car Trips With Young Children
A four-hour drive that takes a couple ninety minutes of easy highway time can turn into a six-hour ordeal with a toddler in the back seat. The differe...
6 min read
Family Life
Family Life With Young Children: Routines, Relationships, and Resilience
Adding a young child to a household changes it in ways that parents consistently underestimate. The predictable shifts—less sleep, less money, less sp...
8 min read
Family Life
Family Life During Unemployment
Job loss is among the most disruptive events a family with young children can face. The financial pressure is immediate and concrete, but research sho...
7 min read
Family Life
How Family Identity Is Formed
Psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at Emory University spent years studying what gives children psychological resilience. Their landmark fin...
7 min read
Family Life
Family as an Interconnected System
Murray Bowen, the psychiatrist who developed family systems theory in the mid-twentieth century, made a simple but disruptive observation: you cannot...
6 min read
Family Life
Internal Family Support During Parental Exhaustion
Parental burnout is a clinically recognized phenomenon with documented neurological effects. Research led by Moïra Mikolajczak at UCLouvain found that...
7 min read
Family Life
Holidays as Part of Family Culture
Childhood holiday memories are extraordinary for their specificity. Adults rarely remember "Christmas was nice" in the abstract—they remember the part...
5 min read
Family Life
How Relationships Between Partners Change After Having Children
The Gottman Institute's largest longitudinal study of new parents found that 67% of couples experienced a significant decline in relationship satisfac...
6 min read
Family Life
Setting Boundaries With Grandparents
Setting a boundary with a grandparent feels, to many people, like an act of ingratitude—a rejection of someone who loves your child and is trying to h...
6 min read
Family Life
The Role of Grandparents in a Child's Life
Grandparents occupy a position in children's lives that neither parents nor teachers nor friends can quite replicate. They have enough relational auth...
5 min read
Family Life
How to Make Flying With a Young Child Easier
Flying with a toddler or preschooler is an endurance sport. You can train for it. There are genuine techniques that make meaningful differences. But y...
5 min read
Family Life
Flying With Infants: Realistic Expectations
Flying with an infant under 12 months is a fundamentally different challenge than flying with a toddler. Infants can't be entertained with activities....
6 min read
Family Life
Flexible Schedules for Families With Young Children
The incompatibility between standard working hours and the reality of young children's needs is one of the most common sources of sustained parental s...
5 min read
Family Life
What the First Month of a Newborn's Life Is Like
Nobody prepares you adequately for the first month. Not because the information doesn't exist, but because there's a category gap between reading abou...
6 min read
Family Life
Emotional Bonding Between Father and Child in Everyday Routines
Fathers' bonding with their children often receives less attention than mothers', partly because of a persistent cultural assumption that attachment d...
6 min read