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Re-valu-ing
the Family, Part Fifteen: Culprits' and Their Characteristics (Concluded)
by
Richard and Linda Eyre
(www.valuesparenting.com)
From
schools to "self-help" institutions, courts to recreational
clubs, powerful organizations are harming the family.
Note: In this
twenty-six part column, Richard and Linda Eyre explore the recent
revolution of the family from the honored centerpiece of society
to a disrespected and seemingly redundant appendage to the larger
corporate and cultural institutions of our new world. Re-valu-ing
the family, the Eyres believe, is the only alternative to America's
demise. The sequence of the column is: A. Re-valu-ing the family
(part I); B. The "crux" (parts 2 and 3 -- why family is the foundation
for everything, including happiness); C. The "curse" (parts 4 and
5 -- the social problems that plague our society today); D. The
"crisis" (parts 6 and 7 -- the breakdown and breakup of families
that allows and leads to the social problems); E. The "cause" (parts
8, 9, 10, 11 -- the reasons our families are failing); F. The "culprits"
(parts 12, 13, 14, and 15-- how our new, large institutions are
destroying the small, most basic institution of family); G. The
"cure" (parts 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 -- what you as a parent
can do about it); H. The "case" (parts 23, 24, and 25 -- a case
for government and big corporations to pay more positive attention),
and I. Finding or forming a family support group (part 26).
7. Educational
Institutions
Ideally, schools
and parents become partners in the intellectual and character education
of children. In earlier days, schools were run by communities. They
broadened kids' horizons and their levels of diversity and tolerance.
Parents, if not in charge, at least had meaningful input and saw
the schools as extensions of themselves and as "helpers" in bringing
up their children.
Today, the
massive institutions of state school systems, federal education
departments, and national teachers' unions work around parents rather
than through them, assuming much of the responsibility that should
stay with parents and substituting (inadequately) for the family
in many areas.
Filled with
well-meaning teachers and administrators, school systems accomplish
all kinds of good things and would never identify themselves as
being family-destructive in any way. Yet their size and
reach weaken families in at least four primary ways:
A. They assume
responsibility for things like sex education, character education,
behavior monitoring, career counseling, after school care, and
other things that parents should be more involved in. Parents
feel relieved and absolved of those responsibilities and become
more removed and less communicative with their kids.
B. Schools
create a school-culture and a peer-culture that often supersedes
the family culture. Kids' time and loyalty and activity and leisure
and work are all more involved with school and with various types
of sports, music, dance, and other "lessons" than they are with
family, and parents begin to think of themselves merely as the
taxi service that gets them from one thing to the other or as
the "general contractor" who watches the subcontractors of schools,
clubs, teachers, scouting and sports teams who do all of the actual
work with kids.
C. Schools
sometimes teach anti-family or family-irrelevant views of the
world. Overriding emphasis on the scientific, the economic, and
the political worlds can (in the minds of children) seem to supersede
the religious world or the family world.
D. Day care,
preschool, and after-school programs, while providing services
that many families need, can become substitutes for parents and
for family time, creating situations where parents spend less
and less time with children and feel less and less responsibility
for them.
The challenge
for parents, of course, is to value and appreciate all that schools
can do for children but never to let the school culture or the peer
culture supersede the family culture.
8. Courts
and Legal Institutions
There have
always been conflicts and needs for facilitators in the resolution
of conflict. But large legal institutions, for whatever worthwhile
purposes they serve, are inherently interested in their own preservation
and growth and thus they tend to foster and even to create the very
kinds of conflict that support them and keep them viable. (Illustrated
by the old joke about the only lawyer in town who was starving until
a second lawyer moved in and they both got rich.)
There are laws
designed to enhance the commitment of marriage and the responsibility
to children, but lawyers and legal institutions today seem to have
more to do with the dissolving or undoing of commitment and the
dividing of families.
Most laws are
designed for the protection of the individual, not of the
family. Therefore, when two individuals try to use the law to protect
their personal rights, their individual entitlement, they
often proceed by pulling families apart. There are a lot more divorce
lawyers than reconciliation attorneys, more custody battles than
successful parent-parent-child reconciliations, more probate lawyers
than simple wealth transfers, more prenuptial agreements than life-time
marriages, more litigators than arbitrators, more win-lose cases
than win-win scenarios.
There is no
question that we need lawyers and legal institutions. But in families
we have to rely more on love and commitment than on individual rights,
more than giving what is needed than getting what we need, and more
on being there for someone than in having an attorney be there for
you.
Our courts
and public justice system also undermine families by putting the
rights of individuals so far above the needs and nature of family
units. Courts and legal interpretations end up supporting kids who
sue their parents or child protection agencies who take kids away
from parents with hearsay "evidence."
Let's look
separately at the family-dangers imposed by our courts and by our
private legal system.
1. The courts.
It's hard to imagine (and hard to overstate) the power the judicial
branch of government wields through its interpretation of laws.
When a court or a judge writes an opinion, he is taking a law and
telling us not only how to interpret it but how to enforce it. Thus
an anti-family or family-weakening idea (or idea proponent) doesn't
have to get elected to implement a destructive policy, doesn't even
have to influence the elective process or the legislature or city
hall. All he or it (the person or the idea) has to do is to directly
or indirectly influence an opinion written by a judge.
Here's an example.
The United Nations holds a conference on families in Budapest where
unbinding, theoretical resolutions are passed which point in the
direction of easier divorce laws, less restrictive abortion policies,
and overblown concern about population control. The delegates to
this conference are not elected or even appointed. They are just
self-selected people who have various political agendas. No effort
has been made to balance the conference or make it representative.
The resolutions
are not laws or even proposals for legislation. But they go out,
under a United Nations letterhead, and begin to influence judges
and legislators.
2. Our private
litigation system. Litigation in general and in most of its forms
is harmful to families. Typically the only family one could argue
it helps is the family of the lawyer who collects the fees.
And when litigation (or custody or any other legal controversy)
is between family members, it almost always tears apart and destroys
relationships. It is rarely win-win. It is sometimes win-lose. It
is usually lose-lose.
The whole adversarial
mentality of the divorce court and litigation institution spills
over into families where spouses threaten separation rather than
communicating with compromise or where family members "fight it
out" as prequels to court battles rather than hashing things out
in good faith and in private.
This is an
area where we can learn much from the Asian mind set. Most Asian
countries have less than ten percent of the lawyers (and litigation)
per capita than we do. Many have more registered "arbitrators" or
"conciliators" than they do litigating or divorce lawyers. We need
to move
closer to that pattern rather than away from it.
9. Recreational
and Social/Cultural Institutions
Recreation
and social activities used to happen within and among families.
Now it happens more within larger sports, music, cultural, social
and leisure institutions independent of and at the expense of families.
A list of the
social, cultural, and recreational institutions that have come into
being over the last 100 years includes everything from sports leagues
to summer camps, from concert and theater guilds to fraternities,
from spas and gyms to fast-food restaurants. Great and useful as
they all are, they all substitute for family time, and many create
competition rather than cooperation among and between family members.
Furthermore,
many of these teams, clubs, guilds, camps, and societies become
the identity or self-image or pride of individuals more than do
their own families and in this sense they become substitutes for
family and pull away our allegiance and our attention as well as
our time.
So many of
these recreational, social, and cultural things happen during hours
that traditionally have been family time. Evenings, weekends, summer
vacations -- the time blocks that families used to spend together
-- are now increasingly devoted to these other activities and other
groups. Instead of rushing from work to home, we rush from work
to bowling leagues or to the spa or to the concert or to the bridge
club. Instead of a family dinner we re-fuel on the run at McDonald's.
Instead of church and a family gathering on Sunday we do the soccer
league and the flute camp and then watch the big game on TV (the
big games are always on Sunday).
Many parents
consider the games and the camps and the clubs as their family time.
They are with their kids, taking them places, watching them. But
these are poor substitutes for the old traditional kinds of family
time. There is little interaction between and about family members.
Attention is focused on competition and comparing rather than on
cooperation and communication, and the logistics and expenses of
getting to everything, outfitting for everything, paying for everything
creates its share of stress and family tensions.
Few of us would
like to do away with the recreational and social opportunities that
these elements of society give us, but most all parents, when they
think about it, recognize the need to limit and govern and think
about their families' involvement and the tradeoffs and sacrifices
that are involved.
10. Psychological
and Self-Help Institutions (and the decline -- and replacement
-- of religious institutions)
One of the
more subtle and yet dangerously powerful transitions of the last
century is the substitution of psychological and self-help approaches
for religious institutions and approaches of faith.
Most Americans
still go to church and profess belief, but they are inclined, more
and more, to turn to self-help and psychological help in dealing
with their fears and problems as well as their hopes and dreams.
Even the word "spiritual" has come to have more connection to self
than to God. Words like "spirit," "soul," and "faith," once the
domain of the church are trendy and popular now to mean my
spirit, my soul, my inner consciousness, my
faith in myself. As such, they create a dependence on and
reverence for self that can work against a reverence for God and
a dependency on His will and power. With the self-orientation and
self-help can come a kind of selfishness that detracts from family
commitments and family-oriented priorities and solutions.
As mentioned
earlier, most of the self-help books that line the large self-help
sections of bookstores deal with three themes:
A. Gaining
more control.
B. Obtaining
more ownership.
C. Becoming
more independent.
While all three
qualities are important and desirable in certain contexts, each
one, carried to extremes or pursued too vigorously or too exclusively,
can rob us of joy and faith and can seriously undermine our families
because . . .
A. A person
with true faith would give control to God and would not
place his own importance or control above that of another person.
Her or she would be more interested in guidance (seeing
and conforming to God's will) than in control (making things happen
according to his own will). A guidance mentality makes parents
more nurturing and observant and less overbearing and demanding.
B. A person
with true faith would acknowledge God's ownership
of all things and perceive himself as a steward over
what God had entrusted to him. Thus he would be less materialistic
and less inclined to spend all his time chasing possessions and
position. In this stewardship mode, children, spouse, and family
become our respected responsibilities rather than our possessions.
C. A person
with true faith realizes his dependence on God and is
more inclined to be humble and to work with others since
he understands that everyone is linked and thus that we all need
each other. Such persons make better -- and more committed --
spouses and parents than those who perceive themselves as independent
islands who need no one but themselves.
As the institutions
of self-help have grown and as the curses of selfishness
have multiplied (teen pregnancy, violence, substance abuse), most
religious institutions have been too silent, or too insular, or
too cautious in taking strong stands and making a stronger case
for family priorities and family-prioritized life styles. There
are too many politically correct churches and too many religious
leaders and religious teachers who emphasize tolerance at the expense
of all other values and teach us that how you live doesn't matter
much so long as you accept how every other person has chosen to
live.
The challenge
for parents is to realize how dependent they really are, how far
their own skills and insights fall short, and how much they need
God's help to raise God's children.
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© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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