NCFR

The National Council on Family Relations, in its October issue of Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies, published a ground-breaking article in the field of family life education "Reconceptualizing the Domain and Boundaries of Family Life Education." Authors are Judith A. Myers-Walls from Purdue University, Sharon M. Ballard from East Carolina University, Carol Anderson Darling from Florida State University and Karen S. Myers-Bowman from Kansas State University. This work sets forth a new model to illustrate how family life education is unique from the fields of family therapy and social work case management.

How well a family recovers from a natural catastrophe may be tied to the household's pre-disaster make up and socio-economic status. In a recent study, Dr. Michael Rendall of the RAND Corporation compared the number of households in New Orleans, LA that broke up following Hurricane Katrina to the national rate of household break-ups over an equivalent period. An estimated 1.3 million people fled the Gulf Coast during that emergency in 2005 - the largest urban evacuation America has ever seen. The results are published today in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

A forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family states that children today are less likely to be born into a "traditional" family structure, defined as two biological married parents. Growing numbers of children in the United States experience multiple family living arrangements during childhood. How these transitions affect the individual child's well-being needs to be fully addressed by researchers and policymakers alike. This article fully reviews the existing research from the past ten years on these topics in an effort to guide and inform current policy debates about the role of marriage in reducing poverty and improving child outcomes.