John DeFrain is an extension professor of family and community development at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has focused his professional energy for the past 35 years in better understanding how families learn to live happily together.
He cofounded the National and International Symposium on Building Family Strengths, which grew into a consortium of groups organizing 35 allied conferences in the United States and around the world since 1978. Recent gatherings have been held in Australia, China, Mexico, and Korea, and upcoming conferences are planned for southern Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the United States. His research with a team of investigators around the world has collected data on family strengths from 21,000 family members in 27 countries.
DeFrain has served as consultant to courts, universities, churches, agencies, and individual families on marriage, parenting, grief, divorce, and child custody issues. He recently received the Outstanding New Extension Family Specialist Award, and the MISS Foundation Phoenix Award for service to bereaved parents who have lost children.He has coauthored more than 60 professional articles on family issues and 18 books, including Secrets of Strong Families; Sudden Infant Death: Enduring the Loss; Stillborn: The Invisible Death; On Our Own: A Single Parent's Survival Guide; Building Relationships; and Parents in Contemporary America: A Sympathetic View. His most recent books are: The Family Strengths Perspective: Strong Families Around the World; The Dark Thread: Surviving and Transcending a Traumatic Childhood; and Creating Strong Marriages and Families: A Strengths-Based Activity Book.
He and his wife and best friend, Nikki DeFrain, M.S., have three grown daughters connected to two sons-in-law and a great boyfriend-in-law, and a grandson. Nikki was especially important in the development and writing of this textbook, offering support in innumerable areas of the project and expertise in her own areas of study. The DeFrains are very interested in understanding family strengths and challenges from a global perspective, and have traveled and studied family relationships in 17 countries.
