Filed under: Family Values
I found Family Value resources today. After I finished yesterday’s post, “Family Values, What are They?” I looked for what is available to help parents parent. Our political parties are speaking about family values but they aren’t saying anything helpful. What could be helpful? What could help parents teach children to become independent, self directed and willing to contribute to the larger community in which they live?
A friend, with a professional background in promoting healthy families, Dr. Laurie Barrett, Palo Alto, CA, offered some suggestions. Within moments, I was scrolling through a wealth of resources designed to help parents parent well.
First, go to www.CYFERnet.org. This stands for Children Youth and Families Education and Research Network. Its tagline accurate describes what you will find, “Practical Research Based Information from the Nation’s Leading Universities.” These are easy to read, research based, usable guidelines, workable suggestions for raising children to become satisfied, self sufficient adults who want to be part of the community. Information is provided by age group, development stage, issue, in materials for use by individuals, groups, professionals. This site is funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, and provides materials developed from research being done at universities throughout the country. Yes! Your tax dollars at work, providing exactly the information and guidance parents can use to be a family that succeeds.
When you have finished there, go to www.brightfutures.org. This site is provided by Georgetown University and was created through the collaboration of thousands of health care professionals committed to helping children and families achieve good health and education. Here are the resources that will help parents understand their child’s development, know what to expect and when to ask for help. Georgetown University is a private university. This work is done through generous gifts from people and organizations who believe in this important work.
This is my new approach. When I hear political organizations speaking about threats to our nation’s family values, I’ll suggest they spend their time promoting resources like these. These materials can help a family create value and protect their greatest resource, themselves.
Filed under: Family Values
I’ve been thinking about family values. The talk stream (I could not call it a discussion) flowing around and through the last election, continually used ‘protecting family values’ as the rational for a policy or action. What are we as voters trying to protect? What is it that families do?
The family is the basic building block of our lives. It functions economically to provide food and shelter (makes it easier to decide who is going to live where and buy the groceries). The family is how we reproduce ourselves, biologically, in a noncompetitive, legally useful manner, (Just who is your daddy?) The family fashions those children into individuals who carry our society forward – do the work, pave the roads, cook the meals, teach the children, heal the sick, manage the Internet, run the government, and open the gates at Disneyland every day.
The family, in this model, is the unit which keeps our society strong and healthy. Political parties grabbed ‘family’ as the justification for everything on their platforms to attract our votes. ‘Family’ is so interesting to us; what is more basic than keeping our society, our way of life, strong and healthy?
What defines ‘Strong and Healthy?’ Here’s a trial balloon: Strong and Healthy means that individuals learn to live successfully as individuals, and successfully within a group, the community, our society. Our American society, more than most, values individual freedom and benefits from individual contribution but we survive because we learned to live in community.
This process of learning to develop as an individual and as part of a group is called “parenting”. The adults, the grownups, are tasked, by intention and default, with training the next generation, teh children, to contribute to ‘Strong and Healthy’, to live independently, to manage for themselves, and to participate in the group, to contributes to society, who we are as a whole.
What we need are family values that help parents teach children become independent, self directed and willing to contribute to the larger community in which they live.
Child development experts can easily describe what independent, self directed children who will participate in the community will look like: These are children who are satisfied with themselves, who are learning to cope with life’s hardships. These children are learning to find meaning and satisfaction in the work they choose to do. They will have good relationships with their parents, and feel close to others who add meaning to their lives. [i]
The ‘family values’ platforms of the political parties do not include any ‘planks’ about helping parents raise children like these, independent, self directed, willing to contribute. There is not a single paragraph about how to teach a child to handle life confidently, to find meaning and satisfaction in what they do. There is no discussion of how to develop good relationships between parents and children.
There are many paragraphs about things that seem distantly related to the core issue, who can married who, decisions about pregnancy, school curriculums, wages, clean air and water, drugs and violence in schools, traditional morals. [ii] All these issues are important but they do not address our most basic need, to equip families to pass on the best of what we are. We are a people who can confidently address what our community needs, because we learned that we can, through that most basic unit of our society, the family. Let’s equip parents to create what we need to be Strong and Healthy, families that give children hope, support, confidence, satisfaction in the work they can do and an unbreakable connection to people who believe in them.
[i]Bettelheim, Bruno, “A Good Enough Parent, A Book on Child Rearing”, p.3,
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, NYNY, 1987
[ii] Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_values, 01 08 07
Other Sources:
“The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”. United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed Dec 10, 1948, Palais du Challoit, Paris, France
The U.S. Bureau of the Census has defined a family as “two or more persons related by birth, marriage, or adoption, who reside together.”
Filed under: The Best Half of Our Lives
This fall, I sat with a group of friends, just a few years older than me and listened to these adorable, loving, outstanding women seriously discuss all the means available to look younger: botox, face lifts, skin treatments, what can be done to take the years away? I was appalled. Why would any one of them submit to any kind of risk or bother to change their beautiful faces?
I speak bravely but I find my own sense of self is not in the right place. While I abhor the idea that any one of my dear friends would invest a single dollar or risk any kind of surgical cosmetic procedure to look younger, I know I long for such answers myself. In the mirror before bed at night and in the morning as I brush my teeth, I see the lines and crevices around my eyes and mouth, the saggy skin below my chin. The question I ask is how will anyone ever love me when I look so old? Compared to all the other young and attractive people around, how will I keep up?
Research by a major consumer products company made a similar finding; as they age, women want to be included. We think we need to look good, or good enough, to be included. We have lived so long, and learned so much and we still think inclusion is about how we look.
But we know, we really do know, inclusion is NOT about how we look. It’s about who we are. The closeness I feel to my friends has NOTHING to do with how they look or how I look. The closeness we feel was built on what we’ve shared, the time we spent together, our conversations, our laughter, the stuff we helped each other live through, marriage, work, children, moving, new houses, new jobs, illness, and best of all, celebrations. We certainly look our best for celebrations. We dress ourselves up and fuss over how we look, but the smiles on our faces are our best feature and it is the smiles that say who we are.
So I’m adding a new step to my routine. When I catch myself in a mirror, first, I’ll smile and then I’ll for sure remember that’s why I’m included.
