Family Stories

Different can be great! Makayla is visiting friends in her neighborhood. She sees how each family is different. Some families have lots of children, but others have none. Some friends live with grandparents or have two dads or have parents who are divorced. How is her own family like the others? What makes each one great? This diverse cast allows readers to compare and contrast families in multiple ways.

In The Secrets of Happy Families, New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler has drawn up a blueprint for modern families — a new approach to family dynamics, inspired by cutting-edge techniques gathered from experts in the disciplines of science, business, sports, and the military. Don't worry about family dinner. Let your kids pick their punishments. Ditch the sex talk. Cancel date night. These are just a few of the surprising innovations in this bold first-of-its-kind playbook for today's families. Bestselling author and New York Times family columnist Bruce Feiler found himself squeezed between caring for aging parents and raising his children. So he set out on a three-year journey to find the smartest solutions and the most cutting-edge research about families. Instead of the usual family "experts," he sought out the most creative minds—from Silicon Valley to the set of Modern Family, from the country's top negotiators to the Green Berets—and asked them what team-building exercises and problem-solving techniques they use with their families. Feiler then tested these ideas with his wife and kids. The result is a fun, original look at how families can draw closer together, complete with 200 never-before-seen best practices. Feiler's life-changing discoveries include a radical plan to reshape your family in twenty minutes a week, Warren Buffett's guide for setting an allowance, and the Harvard handbook for resolving conflict. The Secrets of Happy Families is a timely, counterintuitive book that answers the questions countless parents are asking: How do we manage the chaos of our lives? How do we teach our kids values? How do we make our family happier? Written in a charming, accessible style, The Secrets of Happy Families is smart, funny, and fresh, and will forever change how your family lives every day.

"A Celebration of Family: Stories of Parents with Disabilities" contains the stories of thirty families. In every family, one or both parents have disabilities: physical, mental, sensory, and/or intellectual. The stories illustrate the infinite variety of the American family. It is that variety that gives the family both its strength and its beauty. Like individuals, no two families are the same.In the course of discussing their family experiences, the parents cover a number of topics. Most stories concern having children through birth, but there are also stories about fostering and adopting. Four stories concern single parenthood. Many parents talk about adaptations and accommodations they made to be effective parents, but even more talk about how wonderfully adaptive their children were to their disabilities. Many parents talk about individual discrimination and societal bias they have faced. A number of stories highlight the decision-making process to have children when the possibility exists of passing on an inheritable condition. Parents are included that had children before they acquired a disability and they relate how that acquired disability affected their family. Several stories discuss legal and policy issues around parenting with a disability. The stories contain humor, compassion, and gratitude. They are proof that one thing you can get any parent to talk about is their children. As one parent in the book puts it, "if you suck as a person, you are going to suck as a parent, whether you have a disability or not. If you are compassionate and caring and nurturing as a person, you will be like that as a parent, too.

This edited book draws from work that focuses on the act of telling family stories, as well as their content and structure. The process of telling family stories is linked to central aspects of development, including language acquisition, affect regulation, and family interaction patterns. This book extends across traditional developmental psychology, personality theory, and family studies. Drawing broadly on the epigenetic framework for individual development articulated by Erik Erikson, as well as on conceptions of the family life cycle, the editors bring together contemporary examples of psychological research on family stories and their implications for development and change at different points in the life course. The book is divided into sections that focus on family stories at different points in the life cycle, from early childhood and the beginnings of narrative skill, through adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, and then mature adulthood and its intergenerational meaning. During each of these periods of the life cycle, research focusing on individual development within an Eriksonian framework of ego strengths and virtues is highlighted. The dynamic role of family stories is also featured here, with work exploring the links between family process, intergenerational attachment, and storytelling. Sociocultural theories that emphasize how such development is situated in the wider cultural context are also featured in several chapters. This broad lifespan developmental focus serves to integrate the exciting diversity of this work and foster further questions and research in the emerging field of family narrative. The book is intended primarily for researchers and advanced-level students in the fields of developmental and personality psychology, as well as those in family studies and in gerontology. It may also be of interest to those in the helping professions who are concerned with family therapy and family issues, and may--due to its content and illustrative material--have appeal to a wider market of the lay public. The chapters are written in a readily accessible style and the analyses are presented in a fairly non-technical way. Because family stories are charted across the lifespan, it would be a suitable companion book to a more traditional lifespan textbook in certain courses.

Family Stories By: Sharon Hacker A collection of memories and information from the author's ancestors

Inspired by her mother’s numerous tales of growing up in Nebraska during the Depression, and as her life as a young bride and as a nurse, Mary Jane began compiling these anecdotes years ago when she began to realize their significance to her family’s history. With the birth of nieces and nephews and the death of her beloved mother came the realization that life does not last forever and the imperative to preserve these family treasures became even greater. With generous and enthusiastic contributions of photos, facts, details and insights, family members enhanced these stories and provided depth and luster to this glimpse into an American family descended from immigrants. Although it is typical in many ways, this family is unique – as perhaps all families are unique – and the author’s gratitude to her parents, her sister and each of her relatives is boundless.

"This book is a memoir in poetry about family stories, mother-daughter relationships, women’s work, mothering, writing, family secrets, and patterns of communication in close relationships. Faulkner knits connections between a DIY (do-it-yourself) value, economics, and family culture through the use of poems and images, which present four generations of women in her family and trouble “women’s work” of mothering, cooking and crafting. Family stories anchor family culture and provide insight into relational and family life. This work may be used as a teaching tool to get us to think about the stories that we tell and don’t tell in families and the importance of how family is created, maintained, and altered in our stories. The poetry voices the themes of economic and collective family self-reliance and speaks to cultural discourses of feminist resistance and resilience, relational and personal identities. This book can be read for pleasure as a collection of poetry or used as a springboard for reflection and discussion in courses such as family communication, sociology of gender and the family, psychology of women, relational communication, and women’s studies. “Sandra’s innovative arts-based social science text demystifies poetic inquiry, providing readers both an embodied example of excellence and detailed exercises for use when practicing one’s own craft.” – Elizabeth A. Suter, University of Denver “Through this book, Faulkner presents a refreshing way of understanding, researching, and teaching about the communication in families.” – Pamela J. Lannutti, La Salle University “Faulkner takes readers into the personal lives of four generations of mothers and daughters, poetically uncovering concrete aspects of social processes of family, motherhood, relationships, and writing. A fusion of social science and art that invites engagement of all your senses to understand the felt truth of lived experience.” – Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida “Captivating, nuanced, and often surprising, Faulkner’s work is a vital contribution that bridges the chasm between traditional interpersonal communication research and brave new artistic worlds for relationship studies.” Jimmie Manning, Northern Illinois University Social Fictions Series International Editorial Advisory Board Carl Bagley, University of Durham, UK Anna Banks, University of Idaho, USA Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida, USA Rita Irwin, University of British Columbia, Canada J. Gary Knowles, University of Toronto, Canada Laurel Richardson, The Ohio State University (Emeritus), USA Sandra L. Faulkner is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at BGSU. Her teaching and research interests include qualitative methodology, poetic inquiry, and sexuality in close relationships. Left Coast Press published her books Poetry as Method: Reporting Research through Verse and Inside Relationships: A Creative Casebook on Relational Communication. Her poetry appears in places such as Qualitative Inquiry, Women & Language, Storm Cellar, Literary Mama, and Sugar House Review, and her chapbook, Hello Kitty Goes to College, was published by dancing girl press. She lives in NW Ohio with her partner, their warrior girl, and a rescue mutt. "

"Introduce children to reading with very short, illustrated stories. Two or more words from the same word family are used in each story, and they are underlined as clues for the beginning reader. Following each story are two multiple choice questions that reinforce comprehension as well as a simple writing exercise."--Page 4 of cover.