Our Family Can Do This! Sharing a Positive Outlook

Welcome to Our Family Can Do This! Sharing a Positive Outlook. This collection offers activities to help family members of all ages to build and share positivity. A positive outlook is one of the three key beliefs crucial to family resilience. Families dealing with overwhelming or continuing stressors can lose sight of their strengths and resources. We’ve included ideas to help parents or caregivers, children, youth, young adults, older adults, and the larger community build skills related to the theme of sharing a positive outlook. The materials are written for parents or caregivers to use and share with other family members. All of these activities were chosen to easily fit into everyday routines — sometimes even to make them easier — and all are backed by good science. We hope you find the ideas to be useful, and maybe make life a little easier.

In the video below, Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth speaks with Froma Walsh, one of the world’s leading scientific experts on family resilience, about sharing a positive outlook. As Walsh explains, families whose members share a positive outlook boost their ability to deal with tough times. A pandemic might seem the worst possible time to build this skill, but in fact, building this skill is something that we can control, and even with small amounts of effort it is possible to increase positivity and reduce the power of pessimism, stress and negativity. Positivity helps us to feel better and be healthier, and makes it easier to find ways to tackle the problems we can control and endure those we cannot. We hope you will find the ideas for practicing positivity helpful to your family!

Wellness Wednesday

When the world feels out of control, or when you are going through a challenging time, taking a gratitude walk can help clear your mind and relieve stress. View this collection’s Wellness Wednesday for more information and then share your thoughts on the Families Together Facebook group.