Family Data and Discipleship

November 2025

When Esteban Gonzalez returned home to Chile after his mission in Ecuador, his father asked if he had considered going to school in the United States—he hadn’t. “I was kind of like Nephi,” says Gonzalez, “trusting in my father’s vision.” And like his scriptural hero, Gonzalez journeyed to a new continent.

Gonzalez wanted to attend BYU but couldn’t because of a mistake on his English proficiency admissions test. Undeterred, he instead attended Ensign College and earned an associate’s degree as a medical assistant while waiting to reapply to BYU.

He returned to Chile, where he met and married Yarella, but they came back to Utah when Gonzalez was accepted at BYU. Later, an opportune interaction with a family life professor led Gonzalez to change his major, and family life took on new meaning for Gonzalez and Yarella when they became parents.

Through Gonzalez’s classes with the BYU School of Family Life, he learned that researching families was a real career path. “I’ve come to see that research about the family unit is a sacred way to understand,” he says. “It’s not just data—it’s discipleship.”