A family of adaptive-filtering algorithms that uses a variable step size is proposed. A variable step size is obtained by minimizing the energy of the noise-free a posteriori error signal which is obtained by using a known $L_1{\hbox{-}}L_2$ minimization formulation. Based on this methodology, a shrinkage affine projection (SHAP) algorithm, a shrinkage least-mean-squares (SHLMS) algorithm, and a shrinkage normalized least-mean-squares (SHNLMS) algorithm are proposed. The SHAP algorithm yields a significantly reduced steady-state misalignment as compared to the conventional affine projection (AP), variable-step-size AP, and set-membership AP algorithms for the same convergence speed although the improvement is achieved at the cost of an increase in the average computational effort per iteration in the amount of 11% to 14%. The SHLMS algorithm yields a significantly reduced steady-state misalignment and faster convergence as compared to the conventional LMS and variable-step-size LMS algorithms. Similarly, the SHNLMS algorithm yields a significantly reduced steady-state misalignment and faster convergence as compared to the conventional normalized least-mean-squares (NLMS) and set-membership NLMS algorithms.