Dear FamilyScholars readers:

In the constantly changing digital age, the FamilyScholars blog has had a relatively long life. Launched in 2003, it hosted a lively discourse until a brief hiatus in 2008, then re-launched in 2010 and has been active ever since. Over the years, dozens of FamilyScholars bloggers have written powerful posts, engaged one another’s ideas, and made friendships or found worthy debating partners in the comments section—in fact, more than a few of our bloggers originally began as commenters at the site. As editor since 2010, I personally have enormously appreciated the variety and depth of relationships I have formed because of this blog.

So it is with some sadness, but also with bright confidence about new possibilities, that I share with you today that the FamilyScholars blog will again go on hiatus. We simply don’t have the staff right now to maintain the blog and the comments section at a high level of excellence. And, more importantly, we want to broaden our outreach on the full range of civil society topics that the Institute engages in the U.S. and the world. (See www.americanvalues.org to learn a lot more.) The new publication, with a new editor, will launch soon. Please do sign up to be alerted about it and share the news with others.

For now, I want to offer gratitude: To all of our FamilyScholars bloggers for the extraordinary, volunteer contributions they have made over the years; to our wonderful Institute for American Values staff who have made this blog technically possible; and, most especially, to our readers who engaged our ideas, kept us sharp, and shared our posts with their friends around the world.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Marquardt

Starts in 28 minutes–join us!

This weekend Bruce Feiler excerpted his book, The Secrets of Happy Families, in the NYT Style section. A friend tells me the book is terrific and has already improved their family life. Feiler focuses on stories:

…a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.

I first heard this idea from Marshall Duke, a colorful psychologist at Emory University. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Duke was asked to help explore myth and ritual in American families.

“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.more

Graham Hill (who sounds like he has embraced two sides of extreme individualism, first buying a huge home alone and filling it with stuff, then buying a tiny home alone and outfitting it with less, but even more ingenuous, stuff), shares in the NYT:

Our fondness for stuff affects almost every aspect of our lives. Housing size, for example, has ballooned in the last 60 years. The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people. This means that we take up more than three times the amount of space per capita than we did 60 years ago.