A groundbreaking plan for creating a genuinely happy home using six simple steps. Here is the "home improvement" book families really need. How Happy Families Happen provides simple steps for transforming the home into a place of emotional and spiritual health. Too many homes today exude unhappiness in the form of bickering, cold silences, disrespect, and separateness. Focusing on how family members set the household mood, the authors present a quick, effective, six-step plan for transforming an unhappy home into one of joy and peace. The authors identify six harmful characteristics (narcissism, neglect, playing favorites, neediness, abusiveness, and submission to abusiveness) and provide a counter plan based on more than 30 years of research. Readers will be fascinated with case histories of families as well as references to families in popular culture. A self-test for rating the happiness in one's childhood home is also included.