Family by God&#039;s Design

Boost Your Children’s Mental Health

The news is out. You can help boost your child’s mental health with this simple, nonpharmaceutical prescription. An analysis of over 375 trials involving more than 38,000 young people found that this simple intervention reduced anxiety and depression in teens. Even better, the biggest improvements in depressive symptoms occurred in fewer than 12 weeks. What...

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December 29, 2025

The #1 Ingredient of Growth & Learning

We all want to learn and grow, don’t we? Even more, we want our children to learn and grow. We want our whole family to become wiser and more mature with each passing day. There is one ingredient that will promote this growth more than any other ingredient: relationships. We learn more effectively and more...

Family Shepherds Honor

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December 15, 2025

Help Protect Your Children From AI

Artificial intelligence continues to present a growing concern for our children and our families. It’s not going away, and it seems to become harder and harder to detect (maybe that reveals my age). And, as you know, it can be misused to spread dangerous and false information. Even more, artificial intelligence can present misinformation in...

Family Shepherds

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December 13, 2025

Happiness or Hope?

Happiness or hope? If you had to choose, which one do you think is most strongly associated with a meaningful life? That’s the question researchers from the University of Missouri asked in a series of six studies involving over 2,300 participants. The results suggest that hope predicts greater meaning in life. Having a sense of...

appreciation family relationships gratitude meaning parenting purpose

December 6, 2025

An Amazing Lesson from Middle School Students

When I think of empathic people, middle schoolers are not the first people that come to mind. However, a group of researchers asked middle school students how they experience empathy and discovered that they have an interesting process for empathy to teach us. When asked about empathy, middle school students spoke about “preparing to empathize.”...

Family Shepherds Grace

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December 1, 2025

Aging, Your Attention & Relationships

I hate to say it, but I’m getting older (at least that’s what I’m told). As we age, our reaction times slow and we find it more difficult to tune out distractions. However, a study completed by USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology suggests a powerful method for enhancing attention and reaction times even as...

Family Shepherds Honor

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November 18, 2025

Maternal Warmth & Teen Health

Mothers are powerful. They have a powerful influence in their children’s lives that begins early and lasts a lifetime. Consider the results of a study conducted at the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at UCLA. This study followed children from 3-years-old through 17-years-old. The researchers assessed maternal warmth when the child was 3-year-old, followed...

Family Shepherds

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November 17, 2025

A Prescription for Your Health…& Your Family

We all know that high blood pressure, smoking, and poor diet represent health risks. As a result, we take measures to bring our blood pressure into a healthy range, we encourage people to stop engaging in behaviors that damage our health, and we encourage a healthy diet. We address these issues because we know they...

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November 10, 2025

Parenting & “The World Is…”

Our beliefs about the world impact how we interact with and move through the world. They also impact the ways in which we teach our children to move through and interact with the world. Perhaps more importantly, these beliefs impact our sense of well-being, our motivation, our curiosity, and even our success. That’s the message...