In The Secrets of Happy Families, New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler has drawn up a blueprint for modern families — a new approach to family dynamics, inspired by cutting-edge techniques gathered from experts in the disciplines of science, business, sports, and the military. Don't worry about family dinner. Let your kids pick their punishments. Ditch the sex talk. Cancel date night. These are just a few of the surprising innovations in this bold first-of-its-kind playbook for today's families. Bestselling author and New York Times family columnist Bruce Feiler found himself squeezed between caring for aging parents and raising his children. So he set out on a three-year journey to find the smartest solutions and the most cutting-edge research about families. Instead of the usual family "experts," he sought out the most creative minds—from Silicon Valley to the set of Modern Family, from the country's top negotiators to the Green Berets—and asked them what team-building exercises and problem-solving techniques they use with their families. Feiler then tested these ideas with his wife and kids. The result is a fun, original look at how families can draw closer together, complete with 200 never-before-seen best practices. Feiler's life-changing discoveries include a radical plan to reshape your family in twenty minutes a week, Warren Buffett's guide for setting an allowance, and the Harvard handbook for resolving conflict. The Secrets of Happy Families is a timely, counterintuitive book that answers the questions countless parents are asking: How do we manage the chaos of our lives? How do we teach our kids values? How do we make our family happier? Written in a charming, accessible style, The Secrets of Happy Families is smart, funny, and fresh, and will forever change how your family lives every day.

The Glass Castle meets The Nest in this stunning debut, an intimate family memoir that gracefully brings us behind the dappled beachfront vista of privilege, to reveal the inner lives of two wonderfully colorful, unforgettable families. On a mid-August weekend, two families assemble for a wedding at a rambling family mansion on the beach in East Hampton, in the last days of the area’s quietly refined country splendor, before traffic jams and high-end boutiques morphed the peaceful enclave into the "Hamptons." The weather is perfect, the tent is in place on the lawn. But as the festivities are readied, the father of the bride, and "pater familias" of the beachfront manse, suffers a massive stroke from alcohol withdrawal, and lies in a coma in the hospital in the next town. So begins Jeanne McCulloch’s vivid memoir of her wedding weekend in 1983 and its after effects on her family, and the family of the groom. In a society defined by appearance and protocol, the wedding goes on at the insistence of McCulloch’s theatrical mother. Instead of a planned honeymoon, wedding presents are stashed in the attic, arrangements are made for a funeral, and a team of lawyers arrive armed with papers for McCulloch and her siblings to sign. As McCulloch reveals, the repercussions from that weekend will ripple throughout her own family, and that of her in-law’s lives as they grapple with questions of loyalty, tradition, marital honor, hope, and loss. Five years later, her own brief marriage ended, she returns to East Hampton with her mother to divide the wedding presents that were never opened. Impressionistic and lyrical, at turns both witty and poignant, All Happy Families is McCulloch’s clear-eyed account of her struggle to hear her own voice amid the noise of social mores and family dysfunction, in a world where all that glitters on the surface is not gold, and each unhappy family is ultimately unhappy in its own unique way.

Set in rural Wales, Happy Families shines a tender, funny and heartwarming light on the lives of three generations of a Chinese immigrant family. When was the last time you paid much attention to the person behind the counter of your local Chinese takeaway? Amy is thirty-four and has just given up her glittering career in the big (Welsh) city to move back in with her grandfather, returning to work in the small-town Chinese takeaway where she spent her bookish and boring childhood. Why? That's a secret she won't tell. Just like the secret of why her grandfather, Ah Goong, and her faith, TC Li, haven't spoken to each other in thirty years. Weirder still, they've lived in the same small flat above the takeaway for the majority of those years, with Amy's mother Joan acting as their unfortunate go-between and buffer. Now Amy's parents have moved, leaving her in charge of looking after the old man. But then Ah Goong collapses in the street and time is running out if Amy wants to play happy families before it's too late.

One of these things is not like the other. That's how Cheri Matzner felt growing up in her adoptive family, and it's what continues to define her as she tries to start a family of her own. Funny and fierce, desperate for connection yet pushing it away with both hands, she needs to jump-start a marriage in danger of flatlining and save her career from scandal. But Cheri is still contending with a complicated relationship with her parents-her aging Italian bombshell of a mother and a distant father who looms large, even in death-unaware of the sacrifices they made to be together or of the difficult truths and lies in their marriage. When tragedy unravels Cheri's well-designed defenses, she is thrust into an odyssey of acceptance that brings her full circle back to her dramatic origins. Sometimes it takes half a lifetime to come of age. To be able to glimpse our parents beyond their roles as our parents. To uncover the many versions of truth within our family stories and within our own. And to laugh at it all just a little bit sooner.

Proven ways to create a more loving family Research proves that happy families are good for health, longevity, peace of mind, productivity, and success. In The Secrets of Happy Families, Scott Haltzman offers an original approach to building family contentment that works for families of all ethnicities and make-ups–two-parent, single-parent, blended, childless, or same-sex couple. He provides a "positive psychology" way of solving family problems through strategy and leadership, including knowing and accepting who you are, taking a leadership role in loving and united relationships, building a network of support in extended families and communities, and making quality time for fun, adventures, holidays, and rituals.

The Simple Science of a Happy Family From raising children to getting along with in-laws, what do people with close and loving families do differently than those with strained or unfulfilling relationships? Sociologists, therapists, and psychiatrists have spent entire careers investigating the ins and outs of family dynamics, yet their findings are inaccessible to ordinary people, hidden in obscure journals to be shared with other experts. Now, David Niven, the international bestselling author of The 100 Simple Secret series has collected the most current and significant data from more than a thousand of the best scientific studies on families and then spelled out the findings in plain English. The advice is based not on one person's unique experiences or opinions, but offers for the first time the research of noted scientists studying average American families. These findings have been boiled down to one hundred essential ways to find and maintain love, joy, and satisfaction in all family relationships. Each statistic is accompanied by a true story about a real family showing the results in action. Don't Forget the Past: Parents who share stories of family history with their children create higher levels of concern for family members and increase the likelihood of their children's happiness. No Price Tag: Once basic necessities are met, the increasing economic status of one's family has zero effect on the likelihood of feeling satisfied with life. Let Every Opinion Be Heard: Senior citizens having trouble living in their own homes are 84 percent more likely to be satisfied with their housing situation if they feel as if their concerns are an important part of selecting a new home or facility. The Greatest Gift: Life satisfaction is 72 percent more likely among those who feel content with their family life.

A groundbreaking guide for parents to help protect the mental health of children aged four to twenty-one. Happy Families: How to Protect and Support Your Child’s Mental Health is the definitive guide to understanding your child’s mental health so they can survive and thrive. Whether you’re afraid that anxiety is controlling your child’s life, struggling with getting your child out of a low mood cycle, or you just want support on how to communicate with them, this book is here to help. Written by an experienced and respected consultant clinical psychologist who works with children, young adults, and their families every day, Dr. Beth Mosley offers a comprehensive toolkit that will help you make sense of what your child is going through and show you how to work through it together. Filled with invaluable tips, quick-fire exercises, case studies, and access to online worksheets, Happy Families has everything parents need to protect and support their child’s mental health.

Young people are entering a world that requires more than straight 'A's (if it ever did) and yearns for the well rounded, multiply intelligent, creative and mature individual that can manage change and complexity without getting upset, petulant and stomping off in a huff. The focus in this informative, entertaining and ultimately practical book is very straight forward: to provide parents with practical skills, based on solid research, to assist their children to become, not only life long learners, but live a long and happy learned life.

In their new book The Happy Family, NY Times #1 bestselling authors Linda and Richard Eyre argue that the social problems that are ravishing America--family breakups, escalating substance abuse, teen pregnancy--are the unfortunate result of hearts and minds turned away from the essentials of parenting, marriage and families. In this landmark work, the Eyres help parents to understand what is happening to their families and why parenting is so difficult today. The eyres present powerful, practical parenting practices, including how to: * Make a conscious recommitment to return your heart to the priority of marriage and family * Teach understanding and discretionary use of the culture at large * Reinvent time management with an emphasis on family * Make communication your constant goal * Create identity, security and motivation for children through family traditions and responsibilities * Use "values therapy" in which the focus shifts away from wrong to the rewards and fulfillment of right.

'The country's living national treasure ... The stories overflow with the kind of insights that only maturity brings. They are also painfully topical ... Fuentes keeps his finger on modern Mexico's pulse' - Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times 'Fuentes, now 80, is still masterful in evoking the lives of damaged characters ... beautifully observed ... a book seething with timeless rancour' - Independent _____________________ A choral novel on the hopes, disillusionments and betrayals of family life in Mexico. _____________________ A rich Catholic rancher wants his four sons to become priests, while the boys themselves have other plans; a bereaved mother explains her daughter's life to the man who killed her; three daughters meet up around their father's coffin for the first time in ten years; a middle-aged couple meet by chance on a cruise-ship and wonder if they were once young lovers. The result is a picture of contemporary Mexico seen through a violently fragmented narrative, not unlike the internationally successful film Amores Perros. The stories are punctuated by a chorus, commenting as if in a Greek tragedy, crudely and unsentimentally on the underbelly of modern Mexican life, offering a raw but richly textured glimpse of the inequalities of that society - street children, junkies, dead rock icons, the ideal wife, a honeymoon gone wrong, a child suicide, a man faking his death and beginning a new life - that throw the middle-class dramas of the linked stories into harsh relief. Happy Families is a dramatic polyphony of the many conflicting strands of Latin America and the modern urban world.