Family by God&#039;s Design

A Fall Frenzy of Family Fun

Fall has arrived…and with it the fall frenzy of family fun activities. In case you’re stumped on ideas for fall family fun, try one of these 10 ideas. Have a campfire. Nothing warms a cool fall night like sitting around a bonfire. Invite another family or enjoy s’mores with just your spouse and kids. You...

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September 9, 2017

“Kingdom Family”-Another Great Family Camp Weekend

Just came home from the 2017 family camp weekend at Camp Christian. If you weren’t there, you missed a great weekend of fun, fellowship, and learning of God’s will for our family lives. Ken and Laurie Muller honored us with practical teaching focused on becoming part of the “Kingdom Family.” Using Psalm 128:1 as the...

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September 2, 2017

Don’t Need No App For That!

Seems today you can find an app for anything. People even feel the need to have an app before they do anything. Don’t want to call certain people in a drunken stupor…”there’s an app for that.” (I think it might be better just to avoid the drunken state, but….) Want to track your bowel movements...

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July 31, 2017

Teach Your Children to Live Happy

I’m always on the lookout for ways to promote happiness in my family and teach my children how to live happy lives (Family Fun Night). Researchers from the University of Zurich just added another tool to my Family Happiness Training Toolbox (Generous People Live Happier Lives). In this study, fifty people were given 25 Swiss...

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July 11, 2017

My Cell Phone is Ripping Me Off!!

Let me just give you the quote right here, at the beginning of the blog. “The mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning, even though people feel they’re giving their full attention and focus to the task at hand.” This is the finding of a study out of the...

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June 10, 2017

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A Special Ingredient for Healthy Families

A middle school boy told me what he liked and didn’t like about his family. Interestingly, he liked the family dinners they used to have. He disliked that they no longer had those family dinners. Even as a middle school boy, he missed family dinners! Family dinners provided him the time he desired to slow...

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April 3, 2017

The Family Conundrum We All Face

The Journal of Consumer Research recently published a series of studies exploring the connection between leisure time, busyness, and status (Lack of Leisure: Is Busyness the New Status Symbol). The authors found busyness associated with a perception of high status in the United States. In other words, the busier a person’s life, the more important...

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March 4, 2017

Take Me Out to the Ballgame…For a Better Marriage

Baseball season is fast approaching and that’s good news for marriages. Let me explain. In the early 1990’s Howard Markman, director of The University of Denver Center for Marital and Family Studies, conducted an informal study of cities with major league baseball teams (See Baseball Preserves Marriage). He discovered that cities with major league baseball...

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January 21, 2017

Great Marriages Have CARP

Many people in the area I live (Western PA) know about the carp at Pymatuning, “where ducks walk on carp.” Over 300,000 people a year throw chunks of bread into the water and watch the carp literally swim on top of one another to eat it. So many carp clamber over one another that ducks...