Reconsidering the Family History Project

Today's students usually encounter some version of the family history project multiple times over the course of their elementary and middle school years. Often beginning in kindergarten, this project involves tracing the family's roots and personal histories at least back through grandparents. Photos of relevant family members are glued onto posters or placed in reports that are typically shared with the rest of the class.

Although this project has numerous educational benefits—including making students more aware of diversity in what constitutes a "family," their ancestors' geographic origins, personal stories of individual family members, and so on—tackling the assigment can prove problematic for some children, both emotionally and logistically.

Many students who come from nontraditional families feel self-conscious about their family circumstances. A child may have only one parent, live with two moms or two dads, be raised by a grandparent or sibling, have multiple step-parents, or live in a changing foster-care situation. For such students, the family history project can be upsetting, causing perceived differences to be felt even more keenly.

Children from traditional, intact families can also encounter difficulties with this project. Parents may be unable or unwilling to provide the information or photographs necessary to complete the assignment—or may find doing so burdensome and stressful. Several years ago, the third time my son was assigned a family history project, one experienced parent confided that she had just saved the one from kindergarten so she and her child could reuse all the information and photos when the assignment cropped up again in future years.

A better solution, though, might be for educators to reconsider the family history project altogether. Perhaps another, less potentially problematic assignment might accomplish the same pedagogical goals. True, it might not be as personally relevant to students—but it would also be less likely to cause unnecessary, if unintentional, pain.