Families

Family relationships, in all their complicated glory. Families explores the intricacies of being parents, siblings, mentors, and friends.

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Stories: 18,587
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Stories in Families that you’ll love, handpicked by our team.

Sunday Afternoon in Hyde Park
In 1975, my father took a Sunday stroll along the stone pathways of Hyde Park in London. A crisp fall day, Speaker’s Corner was in full swing. People shouted from soapboxes. Gathering crowds heckled back. Children ran through the open fields with pinwheels. The grass was so green that my father believed he had stepped into a picture from a traveling book. A young man in his early twenties fresh out of college and looking to make a name for himself as a singer/songwriter in London, the experience was so moving that he penned a song that changed the trajectory of his life. Forty some odd years later, I walk the same pathways to find the places my father sang about to understand how I am like him.
W. Tyler Paterson
Published 3 days ago in Families
Our Last Summer Together
The days of summer in the year of 2003 felt different in ways I can’t explain. The innocence and the love were pure in the purest way possible. It was also the second last summer that I had spent with my father when he was alive. I could trade a hundred summers to live that one summertime all over again or maybe just over and over again. I can’t really be someone who could speak of a million childhood memories with their fathers. I only own a few and even that with no entirety but only glimpses. From those couple of memories, I have a really sweet memory with my father. A memory that I will always cherish.
Mashal Haroon
Published 3 days ago in Families
Sunburnt Sprinkles
We rode bikes down sloped lawns into flooded streets, hitting the water with the tenacity of kamikaze pilots. We waged wars with squirt guns in worlds that didn’t exist, with battle lines drawn in the sunburnt driveways of Merritt Island, Florida. My summers were bright, magical, and long, yawning wide through the eyes of a child.
Sean Kernan
Published 3 days ago in Families
Tree of Enlightenment
When a boy is growing up, there eventually comes a time when he realizes that his father is not infallible, that he needs to make his own decisions in life, that bad stuff can happen to good people, that actions have consequences, and that you have to live with the consequences of your own decisions. Most often, those realizations don’t all occur on the same day, at the same moment. Only rarely do they involve a running chain saw.
Donald J. Bingle
Published 4 days ago in Families
The developmental process of infant intelligence
When our daughter little Dawnxi was first born, she would occasionally grasp what we put in her hand, perhaps this was called "the grasping reflex" and was unconscious. She smiled, which we thought may also be unconscious. Little Dawnxi spent most of the first month of his life sleeping, except for breastfeeding, and at about 1 month of age, little Dawnxi began to smile, initially during light sleep and then, when older, during sleep. At 2 to 3 months of age, little Dawnxi responded quickly and in a coordinated manner to our voices. She would smile at us when we called out to her.
Dawnxisoul393
Published 4 days ago in Families
Through the Candyman’s Yellow Smile
“Just push it a little further,” my grandfather tells me, “Until the shift reaches the letter D.” “Ok,” I tell him, my little awkward fingers wrapped around the contours of the car’s automatic stick shift, its cracked and dried leather scratching and clawing the smooth grooves in my fingers.
Eric True
Published 4 days ago in Families
What it was like growing up in the 80s
There are so many things that kids know nothing about, things I grew up on or people that grew up before the 90s. I think it was a fun time growing up. Things were not like they were today, and not as dangerous, at least where I live.
Kerrie G.Diaz
Published 6 days ago in Families
Using My Own "Pocahontas" Family Story to Search for Truth
As a child, I was fascinated by our family story of Native American heritage. One of my goals as a genealogist is to distinguish (to quote mixed-race author Darnella Davis) “who we are” from “who we think we are.” I was told we were descended from a woman who was part of the "Cornplanter" tribe in Pennsylvania. Although I am pale white, my late brother, Peter, had darker skin and higher cheekbones, and he turned olive-brown in the summer. We assumed that was due to the presumed Native DNA. No. I have done a DNA test and it shows 0.0% Indigenous North American DNA. My story is not unusual.
Andrew Gaertner
Published 6 days ago in Families

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