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.”
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