Family by God&#039;s Design

Parents, Manage Your Emotions

If you’re a parent, you know that raising children arouses a lot of emotions. Those emotions range from joy to sorrow to anger to guilt and more. They occur when we witness our children doing wonderful things and when our children snap back in anger at a limit we set. We experience emotions when we...

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June 13, 2026

Just Imagine

Imagination is a powerful and often underutilized tool for emotional and relational health, at least that’s what I concluded after reading a study led by cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. In this study, participants were asked to categorize 30...

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June 8, 2026

Adjusting to a Changing World

Scientists believe that human beings were designed for a different type of world than the one in which we live. They believe our bodies function most effectively when we live in a world of movement, nature, and short bursts of energy. Unfortunately, we now live in a world that encourages us to sit still—sit still...

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June 8, 2026

Strengthen Your Children’s Feeling of Being Me

As our children grow and mature, they need a positive body image—a body they sense as their own, a body they can listen to in order to better understand their emotions, and a body they accept as part of their identity. A study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences reviewed decades of research on how...

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June 1, 2026

The Impact of Stress on Your Child’s Brain-Gut Communication…& So What?!?

Our bodies, when functioning well, are amazing models of communication and collaboration. Not surprisingly, stress impacts that communication. Researchers at NYU College of Dentistry’s Pain Research Center conducted one animal study and two human studies exploring the impact of stress on children’s digestive systems. One of the human studies involved over 40,000 children and the...

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June 1, 2026

Parents, Sync Up for Best Results

Many couples struggle to parent their children together. They have different ideas about how to discipline, what constitutes acceptable behavior and how to approach behavioral problems. They may even have different ideas about the goal of discipline. If couples do not deal with this difference directly, they will encounter marital stress while trying to nurture...

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May 25, 2026

The Health Risk of a Smartphone

Smartphones grow increasingly pervasive in our society and our children’s lives…and their influence begins at a younger and younger age. A study of over 10,600 adolescent participants compared the physical health of 12-year-olds who owned a smartphone with 12-year-olds who did not own a smartphone. The results of this study offer important warnings for parents....

development emotional development healthy development parenting smartphone technology

May 16, 2026

Your Teen Will Love This Simple Way You Protect Them

According to the CDC, teens are experiencing a crisis in mental health. As parents, we struggle to protect our teens’ mental health, nurturing a lifestyle that will protect their mental health over their lifetime. This study, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, suggests one of the simplest ways to protect teen mental health. Even...

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May 11, 2026

Infants, Screen Time, & The Brain

A study published in eBioMedicine followed 168 children for more than a decade. Starting in infancy, the research team measured the infants’ screen time and then conducted brain scans at 4.5, 6, and 7.5 years of age. Screen use during infancy impact brain development, especially during the sensitive period of infant brain development. Specific to...