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Hot Topic:
Helping Families Thrive Through Tough Financial Times
Everywhere you turn, the nation’s economic woes are making headlines. Unemployment is up, banks are closing and the cost of many necessities is rising. Families are tightening their belts and struggling to find ways to pay their bills. It may seem hard to believe, but families and youth can thrive nonetheless. Here are some of the many resources available through CYFERnet to help build strong families during tough financial times
Family Communication During Times of Stress
This fact sheet explains the sources of stress, its possible impacts and ways to cope with it by communicating with family members.
Podcasts: Secrets of Parenting
Listen to an entry from Karen DeBord, professor and Extension specialist at North Carolina State University in a series of podcast recordings. She suggests ways to help parents connect and build healthy relationships with their children. These recordings focus on ways to cope during stressful times and simultaneously nurture family strengths.
Research Spotlight Article: Regular Family Dinners Offer Benefits to Modern Families
The image of a happy family sitting down to a relaxed, healthy meal is iconic and idyllic. Some families observe this ritual regularly, while others think of it as a relic from a past time when lives were less hectic. Two land grant university researchers have investigated the potential benefits of family mealtimes on children and come up with statistics that indicate that families that dine together tend to have healthier, more well adjusted children.
What's for Dinner? Creating Family Connections: Archived Webinar
Highlights strategies for helping families connect, starting with mealtime. Learn about the importance of family meals and the relationship between families eating together and childhood obesity, how to work with parents and families to increase their opportunities to eat meals together with Meal Time in Less Time and the Family Table Topper.
Family Table Topper
The Family Table Topper encourages positive family talk by offering questions to help families discuss their personal family values. The “topper” encourages the discussion of the day’s events for each family member and praising each other's accomplishments.
The 20-Minute Mealtime: Brief Encounters that Promote Resiliency
The average family spends 20 minutes at a typical evening meal. Although brief, those 20 minutes provide an important time for family members to reconnect, communicate, and participate in a ritual that symbolizes commitment and continuity to the family.
Enjoying the Family Meal
This brochure provides information on the importance of family meals. It includes suggestions on how to get organized and make mealtimes happen.
Family Meals
Research shows a positive relationship between frequent family dinners and positive teen behavioral outcomes. Teens who regularly dine with their families are less likely to get into fights, think about suicide, smoke, drink, use drugs, and are more likely to have later initiation of sexual activity and better academic performance than teens who do not.
A Family Check-Up: A Web-based, Self-Assessment Program In Family Life, Financial Management, Nutrition, and Food Safety
The Family Check-Up is a user-friendly, web-based self-assessment tool for families that provides immediate feedback.
Spending Time with Your Children
This Ohio State University fact sheet, aimed at parents, provides suggestions for spending "quality time” with the family. It focuses on how the many informal situations in daily life provide occasions for learning important life lessons and building important skills.
Grow Your Impact with Community Gardens: Archived Webinar
Community gardens create ideal educational opportunities for practically all of the content areas of Extension: Nutrition, physical activity, youth development, entrepreneurism, horticulture, family resource management, community development, agriculture education, senior friendly communities, etc. A garden can be a powerful community hub for Extension education and a way to help families thrive during tough financial times.
