When I coerced my family into playing a new card game designed to nurture our empathy, the first question was: How do you win?

"Oh my God, it's not that kind of game," I said.

We're a competitive bunch. Let's just say I've been uninvited from some family game nights due to unsportsmanlike behavior involving a Taboo buzzer. Also, there may have been loud allegations of cheating leveled against certain children based on flimsy circumstantial evidence.

Never mind that. This PeaceMakers game, developed by Suzanne Tucker, a St. Louis mom and parent educator, was bound to increase our compassion and peacefulness toward one another. Who couldn't use a little more of that in their families, especially this time of year?

I was a little skeptical when the game arrived. It's a colorful deck of 42 cards, with a cute animal illustration and a mantra printed on each one. Granted, the target age group for the game is 3 to 9 years old. I was going to try this exercise with a 14-year-old girl who believes in her heart that she is unspeakably cooler than anyone in her family, and an 11-year-old boy who would rather be playing baseball or video games than indulging my empathy-building projects. Oh, and a spouse who likes to win family game nights nearly as much as I do.

The cutesy deck seemed stacked against us.

There are no specific rules, according to Tucker. Everyone takes a turn drawing a card, reading it aloud and then saying something about what they've read. You can relate it to an experience you've had recently, a thought or desire, or even sing, dance or draw in response.

It's less a game, and more a reflection time.

My son drew a card that said, "I stick with things and get things done." He mentioned a school assignment that had taken some time, and we agreed this card described him well.

I drew a card that said, "I am a leader." I added: "Yes, I am a leader in trying to get this family to do things even though no one really listens to me." That probably wasn't in the "positive affirmation" spirit, but Tucker had told me there was no "wrong" way to play.

The girl drew a card that said, "My mistakes help me learn and grow." She said she had nothing to say about that. In fact, she could not think of a single thing to offer in response.

"Just say something," I said, through gritted teeth.

"Fine! You don't have to get so mad!" she responded. She conceded that she may have made some mistakes before, though obviously not as many as the rest of us.

It was my husband's turn, and his card said to sing a song, an instruction he wholeheartedly embraced as he began to serenade us. My son and I cracked up laughing, and my daughter bolted.

"Oh my God, I'm outta here," she said on her way out.

We played a few more rounds, and I have to admit that it was fun and sweet to have a few minutes to say positive things out loud to one another.

Tucker says families can take five minutes to pull a card at breakfast before kids head to school, or perhaps at bedtime to create a moment of calm and sharing. It's a mindful way to bring focus and set an intention.

She launched her idea for PeaceMakers via Kickstarter in March and doubled her fundraising goal within three weeks, raising $7,000. She's shipped boxes all over the world, to more than 20 countries, and is working to get the game into various school districts. Her goal is to help children learn to self-regulate their emotions, and ultimately to see an end to shame, blame and pain in children.

Helping children (and adults) learn to identify their emotions is a critical part of that process.

"Name it to tame it," she said. "Feel it to heal it."

Studies shows that emotionally intelligent people are more successful in life, and high EQ can be more valuable than raw intelligence and experience. Decades of research suggests emotional intelligence is a critical factor that distinguishes successful leaders and star performers in the workplace.

Beyond the skill-building aspect of this game, I enjoyed the experience of just joking around with and listening to the people I cherish.

My husband agreed, although he added, "If that game had a winner, I would have totally won."

Embodying the spirit of the game, I'm willing to say, sure, honey.

You totally won.

Brandon Swenson was 7 years old when he started noticing bruises all over his body. And he had been feeling so tired.

His parents wondered if someone was bullying him at school.

When his pediatrician ran blood tests, he sent them straight to St. Louis Children's Hospital. His white blood cell count was dangerously low. Within hours, doctors started Brandon on chemotherapy.

His parents were told their son had leukemia and would need 2 1/2 years of treatment.

"To go from everything's fine ... to 2 1/2 years of chemo. We were like, 'What?'" recalled his father, Chris Swenson, of Lake Saint Louis, Missouri.

The news spread quickly, particularly among members of Brandon's hockey club, the St. Peters Spirit.

When Kim Dannegger, whose son also played with the St. Peters Spirit, heard about Brandon, she remembers thinking how sad it was. Her son, Jack, was active and healthy, and had perfect attendance the year before in second grade.

A few months later, Jack got a cough. A low-grade fever followed. His mother worried he might be coming down with strep throat.

She took him to the pediatrician, who saw Jack's swollen belly and slightly jaundiced skin and sent them straight to the emergency room.

She had called her husband, who was on a business trip in Kansas City, to come home early. When the doctors reviewed Jack's blood tests, they told her she needed to get her husband on the phone immediately.

"Jack has leukemia," the pediatric oncologist said.

"I don't remember anything after that," Dannegger said.

Jack figured it had to be something bad, because he could hear his father crying on the phone from across the room.

Both Brandon and Jack were given a promising prognosis. A full recovery was likely, but the next 2 1/2 years of treatment would be brutal. And so it began: days, weeks and months in and out of hospitals. Intense chemotherapy, surgeries and painful procedures.

Sometimes, even very brave children surprise us with how they handle adversity.

Brandon's father says he never once heard his son complain. Before Brandon had a central IV line, or port, put in his chest, the nurses had to stick him repeatedly for blood samples. One night, he had to have his blood drawn nearly a dozen times, his father remembered.

"They'd wake him up, and they'd have two people (ready) to hold him down," he said. But they never needed to restrain him. Brandon would put his arm out each time. "By the eighth, ninth and 10th time, he'd wince, but he'd put his arm out," his father said.

Still an avid hockey fan, Brandon kept his sticks with him in the hospital room. He named his IV stand Chris Mason after his favorite goalie, and put a bearded face on it. He wrote in an online journal that he wanted to persuade the nurses to let him put a Blues jersey over the stand.

Jack went through 10 rounds of cranial radiation and faced 111 straight weeks of chemo. Two of the friends he made during his treatment died.

"But they don't have what I have, right?" he asked his mother. She reassured him that he would get better. She kept her own fears buried.

"That first month, all you can do is get on your knees," she said.

The boys began responding to treatments, and when hockey season started, they wanted to play again. The ports that delivered the medicines to their bodies each week were protected behind chest pads. They would show up to practices after chemo, and the coaches would tell them to skate to the bench if they got too tired. But they rarely did.

It was a chance to play.

This year, they both ended up on the same team. When the coach's wife, who is also the team manager, found out Brandon, now 9, and Jack, 10, were finishing up 2 1/2 years of chemo, she wanted the club to recognize the battle they had been fighting off the ice. Parents and friends pledged that for each goal scored this season, money would go to Friends of Kids With Cancer. They wore orange, the color that symbolizes leukemia, and kicked off fundraising with orange balloons. Other teams heard about the boys and asked to contribute.

The week after Brandon's last chemo treatment, and just before Jack's last one, their young teammates staged a surprise before practice. When the boys skated into the rink, they were greeted by a semicircle of about 70 young hockey players down on one knee.

In youth hockey, when a player gets hurt, the others players on the ice take a knee in a show of support. When the injured player returns, they tap the ice with their sticks.

Brandon and Jack seemed confused by the sight: rows of children, all their regular laces replaced with orange ones, banging orange-taped hockey sticks on the ice.

The boys skated to their team bench, and their fathers walked onto the ice and led them to the center of the rink.

Every parent in the stands stood to cheer.

There's a mild-mannered warrior in the front lines of the propaganda wars.

Kylie Peters, a librarian in the Chicago area, has been concerned about the rise of so-called "fake news": deliberately false stories made to appear factual, designed to sway public opinion.

"Librarians are the original search engine," said Peters, who works at Geneva Public Library in suburban Chicago. A recent analysis showed that fake or hoax stories got more reader engagement on Facebook than real news stories during the last three months of the election.

"People think they don't need libraries because of Google. In fact, they need us more than ever to help them combat information overload, and sort and evaluate the current glut of information," Peters wrote in a recent Facebook post. She shared strategies for identifying false information and biases, noting that biases are not always bad -- as long as you know what they are.

Here are her tips for helping your children learn how to distinguish facts from fiction or propaganda online:

"Your first stop when you visit an unfamiliar website should be the 'about' page. Is the information there neutral? Why does this website exist? Who funds the site? Who owns it? Who runs it? What are that person or people's goals? Are contributors paid? What is the submission process for content? All of these can be clues about both accuracy and biases.

"Scroll to the very bottom of the page and look at who owns the copyright. Is it an individual? A business? A smaller division of a large business? What makes this site qualified to provide accurate information on the topic the site covers?

"Does the website cite its sources? Are the sources reliable? Does it link to reliable sites?"

Peters encourages readers to get context clues from a site's domain name -- "sites that end in .gov are from the U.S. government, while .edu is an educational institution" -- and reminds them to trust their guts. If a site looks unprofessional, it probably is.

"Look at graphic design. Your instincts are right on this one: Poor graphic design may be an indicator of low-quality material. The same goes for material with lots of grammar and spelling errors, exclamation points and capital letters."

It gets trickier when it comes time to evaluate the content itself. Keep an eye out for this kind of language, Peters says:

"Watch for 'bias words' that indicate emotion, opinion or slant, or linguistic tricks to make things sound a certain way. Unbiased words will be neutral, and will make sense when used in both a positive and a negative sentence. For example:

'She was applauded for advocating a new immigration policy.'

'She was criticized for advocating a new immigration policy.'

"These both make sense, so in this case, 'advocating' is a neutral description."

One of Peters' most critical tips?

"Don't use Google search rankings as an indicator of accuracy!" To drive the point home, she shared this example: "I just Googled 'Martin Luther King Jr.' and the fourth result was a white supremacist site. We don't know Google's algorithm for search results," she says, and even if someone figured it out, the algorithm is constantly changing.

"The more a site is linked to by other sites and shared on social media, the more likely it is to be high on the results page. Your results may be affected by your location and by your previous searches. Sites portraying a subject positively tend to appear at the top of the page, and negatively, at the bottom." Business considerations are at play, too: "Google owns a lot of products, and it pushes its own properties to the top of the search results.

"Website owners know you're most likely to click one of the top five search results. There are a lot of tricks people will use to make their Google search rankings go up. For example, by artificially increasing the number of links to their site or by showing search engines different data from what they show human visitors. Google tries to catch spam and stop manipulation of its system, but it's an ongoing war."

Think you and your child are ready to spot the fake news from the real? Try this test: Google the phrase "Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" and click on the site that comes up first.

"Can you identify the clues that this is not a reliable website?" Peters asks. "Even better, show the site to someone who doesn't know about it and see if they believe it. This site was specifically designed to teach students digital literacy, and has some built-in clues to help you identify it as false information."

Identifying reliable websites and sources "may sound like a lot of work, but it becomes quick and easy once you've had some practice," says Peters.

Other librarians added their own tips to her suggestions. One mentioned "triangulation," meaning "visiting at least three sites to verify the facts."

If you do get overwhelmed, Peters reminds you that librarians are there to help.

"If you haven't been to your local library lately, you should go," she says. "It's probably a lot cooler than you think."