Creating Sustainable Relationships
An interview with leadership expert Will Marré suggests that new approaches to over-complicated modern lifestyles will not only help people improve their personal effectiveness but will also yield immense interpersonal benefits.
Healthy Family Communication: Silence Is Not Golden
Although silence has been called "the true friend who never betrays," a growing body of literature suggests that silence is a destructive force in family relationships. Fortunately there are far more effective strategies for ensuring healthy family communication.
Family Violence
The family hearth is expected to be a serene and sheltering haven from life's battering storms. Unfortunately, for many it is a perilous place. What causes families to turn this potential sanctuary into a fierce battleground?
Who Am I? The Question of Youth Violence
Research suggests that a child who lacks a positive sense of identity is much more likely to turn violent. Gina Stepp explores five life skills parents can teach their children to protect them from becoming victimizers.
Teen Pregnancy: The Tangled Web
Cold statistics say very little about how to address the complex global problem of teenage pregnancy. What are the issues, and what role do adults need to play in resolving them?
Teens, Parents, and Teen Parents
Vision interviews Bill Albert, chief program officer for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, about the importance of healthy family relationships.
Green With Compassion
When human relationships are good, life is good; and perhaps the most important relationship when it comes to ensuring that life is good, or that it’s even possible at all, is the crucial interaction that occurs between people and the land they inhabit. Unfortunately humanity’s track record with regard to its other relationships does not bode well for the planet.
If We Could Talk Like the Animals
Miscommunication seems to be a much bigger problem for humans than for “lower” animal species. How can we improve our communication skills and thereby our relationships?
Communicating With Style
Deborah Tannen holds the esteemed rank of University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. A respected linguistics scholar who has written extensively within the scholarly community, she is also author of six books for popular audiences. Vision’s Gina Stepp talked with Tannen about some common misperceptions that can get in the way of effective communication.
Parent Talk
Ruth Nemzoff, a mother of four and grandmother of six, is a researcher and resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. At the heart of Nemzoff’s research and writing is the fact that we are all flawed human beings, and that the task of building relationships requires forgiving each other for our humanness—that is, our flaws. To do this, we in turn need to forgive our own parents.
Special Report on Teen Pregnancy: Childhood Interrupted
When discussing solutions to problems like teen pregnancy, it isn’t unusual for governments to overlook the important contributions to be made by families. Research repeatedly discloses that the most important factor in the prevention of teen pregnancy is the quality of family relationships from early childhood through adolescence.
Teen Pregnancy and TV: The Good, the Bad and the Reality
Gina Stepp's conversation with Bill Albert (chief program officer for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy) leads to a discussion of the roles that family and media play in teen pregnancy rates.
Forgiveness (or Something Like It)
Even without a universally accepted definition of forgiveness, researchers agree that when we don’t work toward a state of mind of something like forgiveness, we are the ones who suffer the most harm.
Special Report: The Many Faces of Forgiveness
Vision explores the subject of forgiveness: what it is, what it isn’t, and how it plays out in our politicized world as well as in our individual lives.
To Be a Village
An old African proverb observes that it takes a village to raise a child; but in our fragmented, pressured society the traditional village that would support a growing child or teenager is a rarity.
Building Resilience in a Turbulent World
Some people seem to have a knack for coping with stress and trauma. Vision explores what it takes to develop robust emotional health in an increasingly turbulent world.
Special Report: A Tribute to Fathers
Father's Day in the United States is often attributed to the efforts of Sonora Smart Dodd of Washington, who proposed the day in 1909 to honor her own father for raising six children alone after the death of his wife.
Childhood: The New Age of Anxiety
Anxiety levels in American children have increased dramatically since the first effective scale for measuring childhood anxiety was published in 1956.
Boys to Men: Smoothing the Way
Are boys in trouble? It would seem so if we are to believe all the headlines thrown our way over the past 10 years.
Grand Cultures: Strengthening Grandparent and Grandchild Ties
Social trends over the last century have so dramatically affected family relationships that interaction between grandparents and grandchildren is almost nonexistent in many families. But the intergenerational gap can be bridged.
Single but Not Solitary: Shattering the Myths of Singlehood
Published just over a year ago, Bella DePaulo’s book, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, uses humor and sometimes stinging sarcasm to explain, to singles as well as couples, that singles can be just as happy as their married friends.
Doing Well Versus Feeling Good: The Self-Esteem Debate
Parents and teachers throughout the West have been interested in building self-esteem in children for nearly half a century.
Bouncing Back: Relationships as the Core of Resilience
In psychological terms, resilience is the ability to bounce back from misfortune, change, trauma or loss rather than succumbing to depression. Though it's true that parent-infant attachment is crucial to the physical development of the areas of the brain that foster resilience and the success of future relationships, there are other considerations that may be encouraging to those who have difficult or traumatic childhoods to overcome.
Give Sorrow More Than Words
The last decade has seen great strides in understanding some of the brain science behind emotions like sorrow and joy—at least of the mechanics. One area that begs further study is that of grief and bereavement. How can we use the discoveries of neuroscience to help those who are grieving avoid the pitfalls that often lead to depression? Such discussions must begin with an understanding of how bereavement affects us.
Are Fathers Necessary?
Men have not always made the most positive contributions to their collective reputation, and this has prompted some to question whether they are even necessary. Are fathers useful only for purposes of procreation, or do they fulfill a much larger and overlooked role in the family?
The Lost Relationship: Fathers and Daughters
Linda Nielsen, interviewed recently by Vision’s Gina Stepp , is a psychologist and professor of adolescent psychology and women’s studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Author of Embracing Your Father: How to Build the Relationship You Always Wanted with Your Dad (2004), Nielsen also teaches a “Fathers and Daughters” course, the only one of its kind in the United States for nearly 20 years.
Take My Mother-in-Law . . . Please!
Most women today play many simultaneous roles; wife, mother, step-mother, sister, daughter, aunt, friend, mentor, boss, employee—but being a mother-in-law remains the most challenging one, and it’s loaded with pitfalls. Is the phrase, "a good mother-in-law" an oxymoron?
What's a Mother to Do?
Of all the difficulties single mothers face, their most distressing one may involve coming to grips with the current understanding about fathers. However, single mothers can raise healthy, happy children. Vision interviews Kathy Stevens of the Gurian Institute to find out how single mothers can help their children find positive male role models.
U.S. Study Finds Links Between Religious Participation and Involved Fathers
In recent years, researchers have frequently turned their attention to investigating the importance of fathers to the well-being of their children. Finding after finding suggests that the more engaged and involved a father is in his children’s lives, the greater the physical, emotional and mental benefits for his offspring.
Mind the Gap
Is it really inevitable that there should be a wide chasm between older generations and younger ones? Is the generation gap simply a function of progress, because older people are not interested in new trends and younger ones are, or has it been actively cultivated by a society that believes age divisions are inevitable, if not preferable?
Grand Cultures
According to Candace Kemp, a professor at Georgia State University’s Gerontology Institute, grand cultures are patterns of relating between grandparents and grandchildren within families across and within generations.
Study: Parental Relationships and Adolescent Academic Success
Do teens suffer more than minor emotional pangs when their parents permanently separate? A newly released cooperative study comparison by researchers from three American universities has found that consistently they do.
Child-Development Illiteracy: A Growing Problem?
The first needs of human beings include cuddling, healthy touch and gentle, affectionate stimulation. Unfortunately, parental "literacy" in child-development has declined in recent decades, and as a result, too many children suffer the consequences of complete neglect or from high doses of the wrong kind of stimulation.
New Study Explores Adolescent Expectations About Marriage
Vision looks at a new study that explores teen expectations about marriage and views on cohabitation.
Like Father, Like . . . Daughter?
Society is beginning to admit that a father is important to a boy’s well-being, but the question of how important fathers are to the well-being of their daughters has all but been ignored.
Cookie-Cutter Kids: Flaws of the Social-Trends Parenting System
Book Review: Nurture the Nature: Understanding and Supporting Your Child’s Unique Core Personality. Michael Gurian. 2007. John Wiley & Sons, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. 368 pages. Most parents desperately want the best for their children, but a clear vision of what constitutes the best is hard to come by.
The Mother Load
Motherhood entails countless personal sacrifices, but there are tremendous gains as well. Despite lingering assumptions that pregnancy and childcare exhaust a mother's mental capacities, neuroscientists are finding that motherhood is one of the best things that can happen to a woman's brain.
Mother's Day or Mothers' Day?
As Mother’s Day approaches, the ads for cards, flowers, gifts, and special restaurant meals are mingled with complaints about the commercialization of its sentiments and the loss of the true meaning of the day. But a return to a nostalgic past may not be what is required to equip the family to face the rigors and pressures of modern life.
Getting Relationships Right
Arguably, the most difficult part of life is maintaining healthy relationships. What should be at the heart of how we view one another?
A Capable Woman, a Caring Society
The biblical ideal portrayed in Proverbs 31 indicates that the cultural standards the Creator set for His people were far more progressive than many would believe.
In the Bully's-eye
Bullying is not limited to physical violence. Victims are usually reluctant to tell school officials or even their own parents.
Whatever Happened to Childhood?
What can parents do to shield children from the pressure to grow up too fast?
To Have and to Hold
David H. Olson, president of Life Innovations, talks to Vision about the subject of marriage and discusses some of the challenges facing couples today.
Feminism: The Complementary Angle
Does equality have to mean sameness, or can men and women capitalize on their differences to create synergy between the sexes?
Disconnected Relationships
Book Review: Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick; Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam; Refrigerator Rights: Creating Connections and Restoring Relationships by Will Miller, with Glenn Sparks; The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone by Laura Pappano.
Frenzied Families
Do children need endless structured activities in order to be fulfilled and to ensure a competitive edge as they grow up?
Tips For Time-Out
Are we willing to make spending time with our children a top priority?
The Family That Eats Together
Is the tradition of the family meal doomed?
Assault of the Gender Benders
On Men: Masculinity in Crisis by Anthony Clare; The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male by Melanie Phillips.
Taking the Bounce Out of Boys
Vision contributor Thomas Fitzpatrick interviews author Christina Hoff Sommers about the upbringing of boys.
Hands-On Parenting
Vision contributor Rebecca Sweat interviews psychologist William Damon, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and a professor of education at Stanford University. Damon gives advice on raising children in today's society.
Our Appetite for Aggression
"You are what you eat." The proverb is not just about our diets; it's also true of what we put into our minds. A quick look at the latest movie guide, television listing or video-game store offers ample evidence that children are at serious risk of being malnourished or even poisoned in this regard.
Marking the Course
Children need firm parental guidance to help them find their way in life.
Marriage: Mystery and Meaning
Marriage is as old as humanity itself. But how relevant is it today?
A Culture of Divorce
More and more couples are willing to endure the pain of ending a marriage—a fact that is reshaping society itself, according to experts.
The Splice of Life; Sex in the 21st Century
Will biotechnology change our views on sex and procreation?
Children: Our Legacy for the Future
Perhaps the greatest mark any single generation can leave on the next generation is its values. What kind of values are we passing on to our children?
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