FamilyMany political and societal ventures are debated in terms of their worthiness to be identified as “pro-family.” In some vague way, this is supposed to mean services or laws that are intended to help families survive as the center of children’s lives. But it seems to me that much of what is being offered to families as support is actually not pro-family at all. Perhaps even more important is that much of today’s parenting is not pro-family either.
With regard to the first point, there is a very fundamental philosophical issue here that needs to be addressed. Will families continue to be the primary caretaking unit in our society or do we turn over that responsibility to third parties such as day care, nursing homes, and schools? It appears as if we are increasingly committed to asking others to do our family work for us. If this is true, then, as a society, we may have already ceased being pro-family somewhere along the way.
Social scientists continually provide us with data about the rising percentages of working mothers, single parent families, and dual-income families. They declare that the traditional family model is on life-support, gasping its last breaths, and that new structures are needed in society that reflects these changes. Most of the debate centers on offering affordable, high quality day care. But there are other, more subtle pieces that range from asking schools to play an ever-increasing role in teaching values to reduction in insurance coverage for home medical care.
This focus on the loss of the traditional family is really a red herring issue. Only about one hundred fifty years ago we were primarily an agrarian society and the entire family worked – in the fields or in the shops and small businesses that dominated our commerce. Most children didn’t finish high school and learned to earn a living through on-the–job experience. Early in the 20th century huge waves of immigrants entered our country, urban growth exploded, and hundreds of thousands of women were employed in factories for the financial survival of their families. And during World War II, with millions of men in the military, millions of women took over their jobs.
The traditional family was mostly the post-WW II creation of suburban living when men began to commute to jobs and women had to stay home to take care of the children who were suddenly no longer commodities to help produce a family income. That led to having fewer children, the dominance of the nuclear family, and the steady increase in focusing on the idea that the main purpose of being a parent was to maximize the achievement potential of each child.
I refer to this as the myth of self-actualization, an insidious attitude that is decidedly not pro-family but pro-individual. It is my opinion that this change in family life, intricately woven into societal changes where personal satisfaction and the rapid accumulation of "things" became predominate values, is at the core of many of our problems at home and in society. The inherent roles of greed and immediacy of payoffs in this life model has influenced a range of issues including the lack of ethics in our business, professional, and political leaders to alarmingly high levels of depression and anxiety disorders across all levels of society.
So how has this shift in pro-family to pro-individual values on the part of parents been contributing to these problems? Let us count the ways. Parents turn their lives upside down trying to get their children to their sports practices and music or dance lessons to the point they barely have time to go the bathroom even on the weekends. Family dinners become non-existent. Parents sacrifice monies for tutors and private schools even when it is not essential for their child to have a reasonable learning experience.
Every four years we regale in stories of incredible sacrifice that enables some child to win an Olympic medal. Does anyone look at the harm caused to the siblings whose needs are inevitably neglected or the loss of more meaningful family and life experiences along the way? Or at the hundreds, if not thousands, for whom similar sacrifices were made but they weren’t good enough to make it.
Parents choose houses, preschools, and even toys for their babies that will give their children the best education. Then the parents spend hours battling with children about homework despite the abundant data underscoring school performance as a lousy predictor of life success or happiness. Those choices of where to live often put parents into homes they really can’t afford, creating incredible financial stress.
Children’s rooms are filled with TV’s, stereos, computers, cell phones, electronic games, and designer clothes. Not only more financial stress for many but a clear values statement of the importance of things vs. relationships. Do we wonder why recent generations grow up with a core sense of entitlement instead of a spiritual core that values caring over accumulating?
In the midst of this sacrificing for our children’s alleged needs, parents end up chronically pushing their marital needs to the end of the line. The result is that many more children are exposed to the harmful experience of divorce than is really necessary. Many marriages would survive if husbands and wives simply spent more time together.
It’s essential that parents consciously commit to pro-family values. This means emphasis on the trite but true phrase, there is no “I” in team. There needs to be more focus on the needs of all family members including parents. The family, not the individual, needs to be the unit of priority. There needs to be more focus on giving to the community rather than taking from it. There needs to be less concern about early achievement and more focus on relationship skills and developing resilient children who can accept mistakes and failures as normal, necessary life experiences. All this can make parenting less stressful because it reduces the sense of sacrificing so much in order to give our children the best chance to accomplish the most they can.
To be more specific, try any of the following: Buy a home you can afford; Make lots of children in the neighborhood a priority so your kids can just go out and play; Don’t sign up your children for sports or lessons until they are at least 9 or 10; Before that, encourage them to use their free time to go out and play; Drop the term underachiever from your vocabulary; Stop worrying about what college your child goes to; Focus on your child’s strengths rather than on fixing weaknesses; Ask your child’s teachers to keep homework to a minimum, make it meaningful, and have immediate in-school consequences if it’s not getting done; Commit all family members to doing the community service of each person’s choice; Limit TV and Internet time; Always be in communication with the parents of your children’s friends (all ages) and together establish appropriate community standards for dress and behavior.
If we continue to ignore the consequences of not being pro-family, then we have to face such realities as the high rates of suicide and mental health disorders suffered by our teenagers and young adults because they must carry this burden about “being all you can be.” It is time to seriously commit to the new improved model of family values, one that emphasizes building relationships over maximizing achievement, one that emphasizes that no one dies wishing they had spent more time with their business.
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