Families face unprecedented challenges. Stresses come from many directions and impose great burdens on all families. There was a time when most young people got family life training from their parents.

However, today, with greater challenges than ever, we provide less training and preparation for family roles than in the past. It is no wonder that families feel flooded by the challenges they face. Many people feel that they know a lot about families because they grew up in one. Yet there are big surprises in recent discoveries in family life education. Many of the processes that people assume to be helpful in families are not. Research continues to show new and better ways to strengthen couple relationships and to raise healthy, balanced children. Examples of a few of the intriguing discoveries that need to be delivered to families include the following:

• Kindness may be more important in family relationships than communication skills.


• Children’s character and moral development may depend more on the cultivation of empathy than anything else.


• One characteristic of resilient children--- those who flourish in spite of challenges---is that they have someone in their lives who is crazy about them.


• The healthiest people are not the most realistic. Research shows that the healthiest people tend to be unrealistically optimistic.


• Emphasis on self-esteem may have created more problems than it solved.


• People systematically distort information. Those who focus on problems often create greater problems. Those who focus on strengths tend to transcend many problems.


• Controlling stress is not done by avoiding it as much as using the resources we have and managing the way we think about it.