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Eleven Essential Elements
Column
IV
Read
Column I Here
Read Column 2 Here
Read Column 3 Here
Editor's
Note: Richard and Linda Eyre will be guest hosts along
with Dr. Joseph Allen on a "Book of Mormon Symposium at Sea"
leaving March 21. To learn more about this uplifting and exotic
Caribbean cruise click
here
Introduction
Look closely at the title. It says “Emptying” rather than “Empty” because the
challenges of absentee, long-distance parenting begin when the first child
leaves home. Whether we have none left under the roof or ten, the minute one
of them is gone we begin to understand what a different and difficult proposition
it is to be a good steward over and a good parent to a child who isn’t sleeping
down the hall anymore. Any control we ever told ourselves we had is gone. We’re
no longer managers and at best are now mere consultants. Most of our information
has to come secondhand or through “secondary sources” like letters and phone
calls or reports from other people. The “primary source” of actual, personal
observation is now available only occasionally.
Last column we discussed developing a positive perspective and finding
a balance between our own needs (as slightly older, waiting-to-do-some-of-what-we-couldn’t-do-while-they-were-here
parents and their expanding needs as recently-departed kids. This column we’ll
get a little more analytical and look at the eleven essential elements of family
relationships and see how they apply to kids who have moved out and are moving
on.
As we think together, keep in mind the perspective that we have just begun
a parenting role that lasts forever. We’re on page one of a book with infinite
pages and chapters. If we think of it in earthly terms, we’re about at halftime.
In the first half, thirty years give or take, which probably started in our
twenties and ends in our fifties or early sixties, our children lived with
us in our home. The second half, again thirty years plus or minus, will hopefully
take us into our eighties or beyond and be played with our children living
outside our home.
Which half is most important? Which half of a basketball game is most important?
What a tragedy if our team quit playing, quit trying when the buzzer went off
to end the first half?
The fact is that most of the same principles and priorities that applied in
the first half continue to be equally important in the second half.
Eleven Essential Elements of Family Relationships (applied to the emptying
nest):
On the first page of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy makes a most provocative statement.
He says, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way.”
When we first read that sentence, we disagreed with it on two levels. First,
no family is completely happy or completely unhappy, so what was he talking
about? Second, no two families, happy or unhappy, are alike anyway.
But maybe Tolstoy didn’t mean it the way we first read it. Maybe he simply
meant that there are an infinite number of ways to fail as a family, but there
is only one way to succeed. Perhaps he was suggesting that there are certain
essential elements that are a part of all happy families, certain things that
buttress and protect a family from forces that would otherwise tear it apart,
and that these elements don’t change.
Indeed, all families that last and produce security and happiness for their
members do have some fundamental things in common, some elements that may exist
in different forms but that are always present:
1. Commitment and recommitment (frequently stated as well as demonstrated).
2. A clarity of purpose – some kind of formal or informal (written or implied)
family mission statement, a conscious parenting approach or strategy.
3. A true prioritizing of family and family relationships – personal time
management reinvented to reflect family priority.
4. Communication – an insistence on it and a constant effort at it.
5. Family rules, laws, or standards.
6. Some sort of family economy, or a way of dividing family tasks and teaching
responsibility and motivation.
7. Fun and lasting family traditions that involve humor and service.
8. Some sense of heritage, family history, and roots.
9. Efforts to help kids gain or accumulate an understanding of other people,
or other cultures, and of the larger institutions that have an impact on their
lives.
10. Correct principles being taught, including faith and belief.
11. A set of clear and recognized values, which are even more specific than
principles.
Now, here is the question: Are these eleven essential elements as vital
in empty-nest parenting as they are when kids are still at home? If we
stay true
to our perspective of eternal parenting, it is natural to believe that the
same essential elements must always be present if our relationships are to
thrive and continue to grow. Let’s look at each of the eleven and question
just how they can work in an emptying nest:
1. Commitment and Recommitment
Questions: How can you make sure kids who have just left home know that you
are still deeply committed to them, to their needs, to their happiness? As
they go out to face the world on their own, how much do they need the safety
net of our unconditional love and support?
Ideas: Keep telling them! Every letter or e-mail, every phone call, every
visit should include a recommitment – a reminder that while so much has changed physically
and logistically, nothing has changed emotionally. Always say “I love you” rather
than (or in addition to) “Good-bye.” Tell them often that while you will respect
their independence and try to be wise in what and how much you give them, you
will always be there for them and will always be their mom or dad.
Testimony and spiritual commitment ties so closely to family commitment, and
a private family testimony meeting on any Sunday when you might be together
can strengthen the ties that bind. Similarly, use of the priesthood in the
home can deepen both gospel blessings to those with health needs or those facing
important decisions or difficult challenges. Gather as much of your family
as you can for blessings and confirmations as well as marriages. Use the great
commitment of these ordinances to remind you all of your personal commitments
to each other.
2. Clarity of Purpose
Questions: What is the purpose of an adult, empty-nest family? Is it important
that parents and their grown children come together on a purpose and a plan – that
they share common goals and have clearly-defined expectations of each other?
Since most organizations and corporations today have a “mission statement,” should
families have one too? Can that credo or mission statement embrace the principles
you’ve tried to teach and that you hope your departed children continue to
embrace?
Ideas: If we want our families to continue to function and to exist after
our kids leave home, we’d better have some plans about what they will do and how.
Ask each other the basic question, “What is our family now, and how should
it serve each of us?” Try to get everyone involved in writing a family mission
statement. Ask what they think the key principles are that they have learned
and incorporate them into the statement.
3. A True Prioritizing of Family and Family Relationships
Questions: Once our children have left home, are they “out of sight, out of
mind”? Are our kids still the most important thing in our lives? Should they
be? Do we just need to turn them loose and stop thinking about them so much?
Is it time to move on to other priorities? If our kids do still come first,
how do we show it and live it?
Ideas: Family is always first. The minute we lose that sense, we begin
to lose ourselves – our truest identity. They are no less ours when they’re gone – our
stewardship, our joy, our pride, and our concern. Think about their needs every
day. Don’t smother them or try to manage them, but always be aware of them.
When you plan your day (or your week or your month), think of your family first.
There are two simple adjustments you can make in how you make your list
of things to do each day that will bring about a more consistent orientation
to
the priority of kids and family. First, get in the habit of thinking, “What
does my family need today?” and writing down the answers that come to you before
you make your list of “Things to do.” (After all, things are never as important
as people – especially people who happen to be your children.) Second, draw
a vertical line down the middle of your planner page or your list page. Keep
the things (work, business, and church assignments) on the left. Reserve the
right side for family things that may come up. Be willing to “jump the line” and
take care of family whenever a need or idea occurs to you.
4. Communication
Questions: How do we stay in close touch while still giving them their
independence? What are the key things to communicate about? How should
our relationship change
now that they’re grown and gone? How do we approach them as adults but still
as our children? How do we show interest in what they’re doing without being
too intrusive?
Ideas: This should be a great pleasure and reward of empty-nest parenting – kids
whom we can now talk to as adults, as friends, as interesting people who can
expand us even as we expand them. Think of your communication with them as
an interest and a joy. Ask questions of genuine interest rather than interrogation.
Enjoy them as you would a new friend. Realize that the very technology we often
blame for moral and family decline can be assets and powerful keys to our success
in empty-nest parenting. E-mail, computer instant messaging, and low rate,
long-distance calls can keep communication open and current from any distance.
Grab any chance to travel somewhere with an adult child. “Car time” almost
always lends itself to an “opening up” type of communication. Encourage your
grown children to talk to each other often by phone or through “weekly update” types
of e-mail. Consider a brief “online family home evening” once a week from your
various locations through an easy-to-set-up computer “chat room.”
5. Family Rules and Standards
Questions: Do the rules still apply? How would you or could you or should you
enforce them?
Ideas: It’s more a question of standards than of rules once children are gone.
Now is the time they will make truly independent decisions about their behavior.
Encourage them by making full use of the two most important tools you still
have: example and confidence. View your own behavior not only in terms of its
consequences to you but in terms of its impact on them. Look for every opportunity
to show your confidence in them and in their choices. Start a new kind of “rules” that
are really more like pledges. (“We’re willing to listen, day or night, when
someone needs to talk.” “We support each other’s decisions.”)
6. Family Economy
Questions: What expenses should you pay and what should be your children’s
responsibility? At what stage should they be completely on their own? What
are the tradeoffs between gifts and loans? What approach will maximize their
individual initiative and motivation? Do you want them to struggle like you
did or to have the advantages you didn’t?
Ideas: Talk this out together and come to an agreement. Don’t figure it
out as you go. Kids need to know what to expect and what not to expect.
Keep in
mind that the goal is independence and self-reliance.
7. Family Traditions
Questions: How many of your family traditions can be continued in some
form even though the children are not living at home? What new traditions
are starting
to form now that they’re living elsewhere? Why is it important to hang onto
as many traditions as possible? How do you go about establishing new ones (that
center around reunions, weekly e-mails, doing similar things on Sunday, and
so on)? What difference do your family traditions make to a child once he or
she has left home?
Ideas: If traditions are the glue that holds families together, perhaps
we need them even more when our kids are living away from us. Write your
traditions
down or have your children make a list of them to see what they remember. Then
calendar these traditions – the holiday ones, the birthday ones, the seasonal
ones, the weekly or Sunday ones, the ones that center around the dinner table – whatever
they have been, capture them in writing and give a copy to your departed children.
Make an effort to keep those traditions alive, even if you have to do them
separately or save them up for times when you are together.
8. Family History and Roots
Questions: Why does it matter that kids know something about their grandparents,
great-grandparents, and ancestors? Why might this be especially important to
children who are now living away from home?
Ideas: We adamantly believe that you don’t know who you are until you know
where you came from. The older we get, the more we see traits of our parents
and grandparents in our children (including a lot of ours – the bad along with
the good). Kids can see part of their own dreams, desires, and gifts as they
study the lives of those who preceded them on the family tree. Write down any
interesting stories you know about any of your ancestors – particularly incidents
that illustrate their character or personality – and send these to your live-away
children. If you don’t already have a pedigree chart, make one. Develop and
communicate an interest in the cultures and places where your family has originated.
Talk and write about the self-identity we can gain from our roots. Do genealogy
together and go to the temple for your own ancestors. Celebrate ancestors’ birthdays,
complete with cake, birthday song, and stories that have been passed down.
Often working together on the roots is the best way to strengthen the branches.
Consider a summer family vacation to the land of your ancestors. Go to
the actual places they were born and lived. If your children are not all
with you,
write descriptive and imaginative accounts of what you learn about your ancestors’ origins
and circumstances.
9. Understanding of and Healthy Skepticism for Larger Institutions
Questions: If we think of the family as the smallest and most basic institution,
where our deepest loyalties should lie, what are the larger institutions that
compete for that loyalty and that can undermine the principles and priorities
we’ve learned in our families? Which larger institutions are particular threats
to children as they leave home for the first time?
Ideas: Have some adult conversations with your departed (or soon-to-depart)
children about the “mixed blessing” of today’s large institutions, which on
the one hand help us and provide valuable services, but which can also deceive
and damage us. (Big financial institutions encourage debt; big merchandising
and advertising foster materialism and greed; big media promote violence and
recreational sex; big data and information [computer and Internet] can waste
time and give access to pornography; big government can over-regulate and overtax;
and so on). Help your children become good “critics,” with an attitude of healthy
skepticism toward the forces of the world – looking for and appreciating the
good but also being aware of and cautious about the dangers.
10. Principles
Questions: Do moral and gospel principles become more or less important
as children leave? How does Joseph Smith’s statement, “I teach them correct principles
and they govern themselves” apply? How and when should children live less on “borrowed
light” and rely more on their own convictions and testimonies?
Ideas: Continue to talk about gospel principles. Hold at least occasional “family
home evenings,” even if it has to be by conference call of Internet chat room.
At family reunions, have each family member prepare and present a talk on a
gospel principle that is important to him or her. Have scripture-reading schedules
that you all try to follow as a family. Pray specifically for each other and
let each other know the things you’d like to have your family pray about for
you. Ask missionaries to send home names and details about investigators and
members they are working to reactivate so you can pray for them specifically
and by name.
11. Values
Questions: In connection with the thoughts just mentioned, how could the
values you’ve tried to teach your children be undermined as they move out
on their own? How will they develop their own personal set of values?
How can those values be kept prominent despite countering influences of
media and peer group? Away from your home and your influence, won’t it
be substantially harder for your children to live within those values?
Ideas: Agree together to a list of values and to focus on one of those
values each month wherever you are and wherever your children are. Devote
one letter
or e-mail per month to the “value of the month.” Focus on and discuss how values
connect to happiness. Make service to others the paramount value of your family
and look for chances to serve together in various capacities.
Conclusion:
Do the eleven essential elements still apply to grown-up, empty-nest families?
Of course they do. In fact, the eleven elements can be used as an effective
checklist to evaluate and measure how well you are doing with your empty-nest
parenting. If you sense slippage on any of the eleven, it may mean that your
family is, at least to some small degree, weakening. As if you were mending
a fence, prop up and rebuild any of the eleven sections that are sagging a
bit. Be aware of the condition of each element and make repairs and improvements
consistently. In so doing, that fence will stay strong enough to protect your
family from outside elements that would undermine and destroy, and it will
also hold in a concentration of unity and joy that will make the rest of life
worth living!
Good
luck! And join us next column for more empty nest parenting
ideas. In the meantime, answer the following three questions
and e-mail your answers to us at eyres1@comcast.net. We will tabulate the
results and give you feedback in a later column.
* * *
1. What
has been your hardest adjustment as your child (children) grew
up and left home?
2. What's
the best idea you've had for communicating effectively with
a child who has left home?
3. What
questions or concerns would you like to see addressed by other
empty nest parents?
Submit
to: eyres1@comcast.net
Contact
Information (so we can send you additional results and information)
Name:
Email:
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