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Family Time Here's to a new war on poverty—a poverty of time within families. By Gary Legwold Renee Parsons was driving home to Minnesota from a wedding in Iowa. It had been a wonderful weekend full of family connections. Her four daughters were in the back of the van, pooped out from all the partying. Daylight was dwindling but the wide midwestern sky was putting on a wow show. The setting sun was spraying crimson, soaking clouds and trees and hillsides in every shade of red imaginable. Jim Parsons, Renee's husband, happened to look over at Renee at that moment. Tears were streaming down her face. "What's going on, hon?" he asked. What was going on was joy, a kind of seventh heaven about family. She had married into this close family, which typically gathers in back-slapping packs at such places at Lake Powell in southern Utah, taking over two house boats for a reunion. Renee's family has been troubled and divided since her parents divorced when she was 16. "The first time I went to Jim's family reunion," she says, "I immediately noticed people were genuinely happy and treated each other with respect. I lost it in front of some in-laws. They asked what was wrong. I told them it was overwhelming to be with a family that was nice." Unfortunately, such family times are becoming fewer and farther between. You'll never convince the Parsons of that, but social scientists, looking across America, see several diverse factors that are weakening the family. According to University of Minnesota professor William J. Doherty, Ph.D., such factors include: the conflicting needs and schedules of dual working parents; the ongoing fragmentation of our civic, cultural, and religious communities; the prevalence of divorce and remarriage; and the mushrooming number of electronic distractions like video games, computers, and televisions. "What was once a strong, cohesive unit has become, in many cases, no more than a loose grouping of individuals with individual timetables and agendas," writes Doherty in his book, The Intentional Family: Simple Rituals to Strengthen Family Ties. Ain't Got Time to Bond In a word, it seems many families have no time for family. Findings from national time diary surveys conducted in 1981 and 1997 by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan show the following:
Others support these findings. In 1995, Harvard University's Robert Putnam published a short article describing how league bowling had declined and proposed that this seemingly minor phenomenon symbolized a much broader and significant social change. Five years later, he wrote Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. The book represents Putnam's analysis of the Roper Reports and the DDB Needham Life Style survey. These archives provide data on the personal, social, and political behavior of Americans over the last quarter century. Together, they contain the results of nearly 500,000 detailed interviews. In the book, Putnam states there has been a 33% decrease over three decades in families who say they have dinner regularly. Doherty agrees, citing a 1995 national poll showing that only one-third of U.S. families said they "usually have their evening meal together on a daily basis." About 58% have the TV on during dinner. According to Putnam, the number of families taking a vacation has decreased 28% over two decades. We spend about 35% less time visiting with friends than we did thirty years ago. In 1975, the average American entertained friends at home 15 times per year; the equivalent figure is now barely half that. Back then, the average American played cards about 16 times yearly, twice the current average. "Sending greeting cards," writes Putnam, "has declined by about 15-20 percent among both married and single people over the last decade or two." Why the change? People are moving more, says Putnam. Other possible factors include: suburbanization and sprawl; time pressure, especially on two-career families; disruption of marriage and family ties; and television, the electronic revolution, and other technological changes. The verdict on the Internet is still out. Putnam ponders whether its primary effect will be to reinforce existing social networks, as the telephone has done, or become a substitute for them. ‘Dogged Pursuit of More' Another reason we are bonding less inside and outside of families is something called "affluenza." John De Graaf, author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, defines this as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursue of more." De Graaf, a TV producer in Seattle and National Coordinator for Take Back Your Time Day (scheduled for October 24, 2003), says, "Time is a family value. We as Americans talk an awful lot about family values, but our actions show that we believe in one value, which is basically producing and consuming. And all the other values that are important—health, families, communities, a good environment, time for the spirit, time to participate in civic and political life—all these values are given short shrift by our obsession with production and consumption." De Graaf says there are two primary threats to family time. One is overwork. He says the average American family works 388 hours per year longer on the job than in 1969. The other threat is over scheduling—ourselves and our children. "Kids are keeping appointment calendars and running schedules with something to do here and a class to do there and an event to do here and a sport to do there—schedules that once were reserved for CEOs. Every prominent child psychologist I've talked to says this is not healthy." De Graaf says we are pressured to buy, buy, buy. "We have been convinced that the good life is the goods life. And in responding to the barrage of advertising, we are getting ourselves deeper in debt. For the last six years, more Americans have declared personal bankruptcy each year than have graduated from college. We are trapped in a work-and-spend cycle that also traps us in these longer and longer work hours." Our policies about vacation time contribute to affluenza. In other modern industrial countries, people are guaranteed a minimum of four weeks paid vacation. In the US, says De Graaf, there is no guaranteed vacation and most people only take two weeks. This year in Texas, only 46 percent of workers plan on taking any vacation. "We also have by far the most miserly family leave policies," says De Graaf. "It's 12 weeks without pay. Most modern countries have six months to a year with some sort of pay. They have shorter workweeks. They have laws that restrict the amount of overtime that you can force people to work." In the US, with the exception of California (with a limit of 72 hours a week), there are no such laws. Canada's limit is 44 to 48 hours, he says, and in the European Union, the limit is 48 hours per week. What to do? De Graaf says legislation is being drafted in Congress to create minimum paid leave for people and to limit mandatory overtime. He also hopes such initiatives as Take Back Your Time Day will further a national dialogue about affluenza and begin to convince employers to do more job sharing and give more vacation time. On a personal level, Doherty and Barbara Z. Carlson have created Putting Family First, an organization based in Wayzata, Minnesota, aimed at building a community where family life is an honored and celebrated priority. They have written Putting Family First: Successful Strategies for Reclaiming Family Life in a Hurry-Up World. The book has oodles of innovative ways to set priorities, avoid scheduling conflicts, and create family rituals. A few examples: Family Meals:
Conversation starters for meals:
Bedtime rituals:
Just hanging out:
Getting out and going away:
Time to Paddle It's common for people to say family and friends are important. Ask them why and they say … well, they just are. Then they usually fumble around for some cliché about love, security, and happiness. While the words aren't that important, the feeling is. And to have that fundamental feel-good fervor about loved ones, there is no way around it—you have to make time for them. In summing this up, Doherty is fond of saying getting married and having family and friends "is like launching a canoe in the Mississippi River at St. Paul, Minnesota. If you don't paddle, you go south." Less TV, More Life (sidebar) Ben, my son, came home from school one day with troubling news. His seventh-grade English teacher gave him this assignment: Turn off your TV for a week and write about the experience. Great, I thought—until I remembered this was during NBA playoffs. Ben and I love the NBA. This homework really hit home. We managed to leave the tube off for one week—and actually enjoy it. Instead of watching the games on TV, we saw the home games live. With no TV to tie us down, we went to movies, visited friends, and lingered over meals and piano lessons. It seemed that we had a lot more time and that the day flowed evenly, not chopped up by half-hour mind-to-mush TV shows. In order to gain family time by stopping or reducing your TV time, here are tips from TV-Turnoff Network.
The Bonding Bonus (sidebar) In Good things happen to those who bond. Just ask Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam. He writes in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community that:
Why does social cohesion matter to health? Putnam suggests that social networks furnish tangible assistance, such as money and transportation, thus reducing stress. Social networks also reinforce healthy habits; socially isolated people are more likely to smoke and engage in unhealthy habits. Finally, social bonding might stimulate the immune system to fight disease and stress. The effects of social bonding have been dramatic in Roseto, Pennsylvania, a small Italian-American community that researchers have studied since the 1950s. Compared with residents of neighboring towns, Rosetans had an age-adjusted heart attack rate that was less than half that of their neighbors; over a seven-year span not one Rosetan under age 47 had died of a heart attack. Researchers studied diet, exercise, weight, smoking, and genetic disposition looking for an explanation. None of these explanations held the answer. Turns out this was a tight-knit community with strong social bonding. Leaders had created a mutual aid society, churches, sports clubs, a labor union, a newspaper, Scout troupes, and a park and athletic field. Family values and good behaviors were reinforced, and residents clustered on front porches and at social clubs for emotional and financial support. Then a socially mobile generation of young people began rejecting the ways of the close community, and by the 1980s, writes Putnam, "Roseto's new generation of adults had a heart attack rate above that of their neighbors in a nearby and demographically similar town." It's the Little Things (sidebar) It's my birthday and there's a message waiting on the answering machine. A gravelly tenor voice manages to sing "Happy Birthday," ending it (mercifully) with the kicker, "You o-old faaart." It's Earl, of course. That would be Earl Hipp, fellow Minneapolis writer and friend who always remembers my birthday. And I can count on Earl to call every Thanksgiving with a heartfelt expression of gratitude for being in his life. I can also count on Earl to remember such anniversaries as the deaths of my mom and dad. I ask him why he remembers all these dates. "Because remembering details is the glue that holds together relationships," he says. "I'm just investing in people I care about. And I get a kick out of hearing their surprise and gratitude that I remembered." Hipp admits to using a software program to help him remember dates and details about his friends and family. He also enters names and phone numbers in his cell phone and daily scrolls through the directory to determine whom he will contact that day. "Connectivity is a priority," he says. "Isolation I've done. I was human tumbleweed for years, and I learned the cost of feeling alone, being estranged, and having no community. Being connected takes time and effort, but it's a price I'm willing to pay in order not to feel left out of the human experience." I'm intrigued by this idea of getting a kick out of giving remembrance calls and cards to loved ones. I've been bad at such things, but hearing Hipp talk gets me thinking. So I call three people in my extended family, all who are good at developing and maintaining ties with loved ones. I ask why and how they do it. "It's those little things, those random acts of kindness that make all the difference," says Linda Bengtson of Northfield, Minnesota. She is always scouring gift shops for cards, and has a box of maybe 300 cards for any occasion. Rather than dreading, as I do, the time lost and the dreadful drug-store decisions (this card or that?) each time a birthday or wedding rolls around, she is looking for any occasion to move cards and give joy—to others and herself—in the process. Wendy Bengtson of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, says maintaining ties is a matter of pace and priorities. "If you slow down, the little things become important," she says. "And the more you slow down, the more you realize how important they are. I had a good friend here in town that took the time to care, to remember birthdays and such. She died and 1,500 people came to her wake—all because she took the time to care." Nancy Parker Hokonson of Hudson, Wisconsin, sent me a birthday card she made. She makes this kind of effort all the time, knowing that some folks won't notice he homemade art or reciprocate in kind. "That doesn't matter," she says. "I just take joy in the process. Even though I don't hear from some people, I know I'm connecting. And I need to stay connected to feel good about myself." Hokonson stays connected with friends through her involvement in four support or prayer groups. But she says she especially needs to stay connected with family. Every day she talks with Aunt Trudy, who comes over on Sundays to make greeting cards. She keeps a diary for each grandchild, which she will give to the child one day. She and husband Steve Hokonson wrote a book for each grandchild on his or her first birthday. She baby sits her grandkids, of course, and attends church with one daughter, Kim Venuta. Nancy will also spend a weekend with daughter Tami Pletan, doing scrapbooks, watching old movies, and talking. "I need to stay connected with family, and it's more important as I get older," she says. "They represent part of my history I don't ever want to forget. I feel more whole when family is here. I love it when I can go to sleep knowing my kids are OK—and are downstairs." Resources Books: · The Intentional Family: Simple Rituals to Strengthen Family Ties, by William J. Doherty, Ph.D. Avon Books, New York, 1997. Paperback, 221 pages, $12.50.
Web sites: www.familylife1st.org Site of Putting Family First, a group of citizens building a community where family life is an honored and celebrated priority. www.tvturnoff.org Site of TV-Turnoff Network, formerly TV-Free America, a nonprofit organization that encourages children and adults to watch much less television in order to promote healthier lives and communities. www.newdream.org Site for the Center for a New American Dream, an organization dedicated to caring for our world, our families, and ourselves. www.simpleliving.net Site is full of tools, examples, and contacts for conscious, simple, healthy, and restorative living.
© Copyright 2004 Gary Legwold and Conrad Henry Press. All rights reserved. |
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