Parents & Families
Peace and well-being in the world often begins with peace and well-being at home. That's why the Greater Good Science Center has been committed since its founding to nurturing peaceful, compassionate, joyful families.
Our Greater Good online magazine is filled with articles and videos for parents and families to help them foster qualities like gratitude, forgiveness, resilience, understanding, and generosity in themselves and their children. Those resources—many of which were created by GGSC Senior Fellow and parenting expert Christine Carter, Ph.D.—have reached millions of parents and affected countless families. We continue to expand our offerings and reach to parents.
With support from the John Templeton Foundation, in July of 2017 the GGSC launched a new initiative to help parents raise kids committed to the well-being of others. This initiative has two major components for the public.
1. Grants to support innovation in community-based parenting programs. The GGSC provided a total of $1 million in grant funding to 16 community-based organizations (e.g., schools, houses of worship, community centers) that have strong connections to parents of school-age children. Their proposals sought to create or improve a program to help parents build skills like generosity, gratitude, and forgiveness in their kids. The GGSC and a team of scientific advisors has helped these organizations identify research relevant to their programs, translate this research into lessons for parents, and determine how to better evaluate the success of their work.
The winners of the grant are: Camp Kindness Counts, Citywise Mentoring Ltd, Collaborative for Educational Services, Congregation Adat Reyim, Family Engagement Lab, Family Paths Inc, GreatSchools, Kaveri Group of Institutes, Lutheran Social Service, Pinyon Foundation, Senders Pediatrics, Tariq Khamisa Foundation, UCAN, United Schools of Indianapolis, University Village, and Vibrant Faith.
2. Multimedia resources directly for parents. Building on its strong track record, the GGSC has been developing a range of new resources for raising caring, courageous kids, widely sharing with parents the top research and best practices. This includes publishing dozens of new articles for parents on Greater Good, creating several practical exercises for parents to try with their kids on Greater Good in Action, and a series of short videos designed for mobile devices and social media to reach busy parents on-the-go. These resources identify and report on cutting-edge research findings. We will eventually distill some of the key lessons learned from the parenting programs that receive grants through the initiative.
