The traditional family

Don’t want anyone to be confused, but this is a post about one of the silent victims of the last recession. And actually their world was deteriorating long before the recession began.

I am talking about what is happening to children in our world. With parents being forced to be more and more preoccupied with their jobs, time is being taken away from parents being able to be the more important factor in their children’s lives. The recession just made the situation that has been developing over the last couple of generations worse.

And I am not talking about parents that really are not concerned with making their children their number one priority. This is probably a lost battle. Parents that are possessed with their careers and having everything are not going to make the sacrifices that many families make to give their children the most of themselves they can. And when I refer to sacrifices I am not necessarily talking financial sacrifices, I am talking about the time sacrifice to raise children in a value conscious world and spend the time to make them appreciate and learn to respect themselves. This seems to be a dying aspect of the so called modern family.

At one point we had one parent working and the other staying home and basically it was Dad at work and Mom at home. And we all know the 1950’s American Dream that was basically a false reality. Yet the idea of one being home and the other working actually could be the best benefit for children.

To start it seems for so many families, parents are trying to over compensate by spending activity time with their children. There is this obsession with sports or dance or some other competition that requires endless amount of practice time and competition time and going to events every weekend. We fill up this time to replace the actual quality time of spending with our children and really getting to know them.

And on top of all this even if you are not trying to have a super career even the most average job is requiring extra time at home. People spend hours in the evening catching up or keeping up with so much extraordinarily unnecessary hyperbole because someone is obsessed somewhere with trying to be number one. And half the time the extra work is just people spinning their wheels doing routine tasks, but someone wants to prove that they are so much better than everyone else they create a false sense of accomplishment that has to be matched. Yet if someone does not answer the email at ten at night or stay up all night creating the fanciest power point presentation our work culture is set up to make them look less than others. Realistically though they are not being more productive they are just stuck in a maddening world of over achievers achieving nothing.

Now do not get me completely wrong. There will be times where we do have to work extra to get ahead, or something happens that we cannot control that requires busting back ends to repair or improve and most of us are very willing to work hard when needed. Or we will work hard when we can truly benefit from our efforts or it creates true achievement at work. It is the totally over reaching requirements of keeping up with people that do not accomplish anything, but give off the appearance of working hard. And there are way too many people like this in the workplace. Or the unreasonable demands that some businesses or people within the business create that may get them ahead a bit more than others, but the amount of work by others to get there is not worth the effort even for the company’s bottom line. There are true successful people who work hard and we should respect. For this discussion’s sake I am not talking people dedicating them self to a goal, but people who overrun the larger organizations and the effect of the work they create is not that productive.

So take into account just these two factors, the unnecessary (and I hope you recognize what I mean by unnecessary) work load and the overcompensation of trying to spend time with our children, but never really connecting with them and then add on the extra pressure of what happened to many of our families in the last recession and this has created a vacuum of a family in which our children are growing up. There is a shell that exists, but internally we have lost touch with ourselves. And of course this is not all families, but if you spend enough time observing you can see what is happening.

And this phenomenon is not new and over the last couple of decades there have been some articles, reports etc. that discuss the decline of the family. And these articles discuss some causes and possible solutions. Many deal with how we can better interact with our children. Yet as the generations go by, it becomes harder and harder to interact with your children if you were not raised in an environment that did not have strong bonds and a good foundation. And many of these families were not bad families, just lost touch with the most basic of fundamental interactions that parents and children should have.

Add on the current trend to towards technology, isolation, peer pressure amongst both adults and children to be seen as successful, and a host of other social factors and how do children learn what is a family and how to be part of one.

We are losing one of the most valuable commodities the human race has and that is parents raising and being a positive influence in their children’s lives. And the good news is, many families want to have some type of relationship. They want to create the environment that does create strong, self-respecting children that are able to interact with the world in a positive way. This is why they over compensate with the activities or work the extra hours trying to get extra money to spend or save for college etc. or working to get ahead to have a better life for their children.

Do we go back to the 1950’s ideal of having one parent working and one at home? And I am trying to be a bit modern by not defining these roles by male at work and female at home. There are some males that could be good stay at home parents and some females may want super careers. And if you look at wanting to have your children in a wide range of activities, just for planning and logistic purposes it would help to have one parent being a full time parent. The other should be involved, but having the dedicated person at home does give the children a foundation and needed stability. The benefits are enormous. Benefits such as values, security, and sense of self-worth that children need to develop in their formative years come from a parent being there as they grow up. And this is especially true if the parent grew up in a positive environment.

And if this is reinforced from generation to generation, the strength of our country actually grows. And this is not a pipe dream, however, to achieve this goal we do need to redirect some of the thinking in our society.

So this is actually the first of a few posts I am going to write off and on for the next week or so to hopefully create a sense of possibility and offer some practical ideas to recreate or reenergize the desire to rebuild the importance and the structure of family. Most will attempt to be practical ideas to build a society that allows for the family to come back into prominence and importance in our country. To me this is one of the building blocks of a great culture and country. I may throw in a post or so of other items as I go along, but overall I plan on dedicating some time to adding a positive direction to the discussion of family in general.