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Making family time a high priority

by Lionel Wijesiri

The ever-increasing erosion of our family values and family relationships is becoming a source of deep concern. Today, our family interaction has become rare. In a typical week, hectic individual schedules mean that the whole family is seldom together. Years ago after-dinner chats used to be a "natural" for family interaction. Seldom does a family now meet after dinner - or for that matter, after any meal. Occasionally when it does happen, Television replaces talking. In many families, disagreements replaced communication, and verbal abusiveness replaced disagreements.

A stable family life serves as a "buffer" to help shield children from the forces (biological or social) that contribute to violent behaviour. A child's family is in many ways his first and last "line of defence," especially in the socially toxic environment that infuses youth culture.

Most experts agree that what has been the advantage of the traditional two-parent home can be summed up in one word: Adequate time with parents is critical for the development of every child, especially for self-esteem and confidence. The amount of conversation and the level of interaction between parents and children have an enormous impact on the child's development. It is proven beyond doubt that the more time parents and the child can spend together, the more influence the parents have in shaping the child's values and behaviour. Child psychologists argue that this attachment is absolutely vital in a child's healthy psychological and social development.

The child psychology points to a fundamental fact - that human development proceeds from attachment in the first year of life. By just nine months of age, babies have formed a specific attachment to one or more caregivers. Studies show that a child, who does not experience this attachment process, is at great risk of experiencing difficulty connecting with other people. According to psychologists, the majority of violent juveniles share this early childhood problem. The first few years of their lives are marked with inconsistent care, abandonment and parental absence.

In general, parents who are responsive and gentle in their interaction with their baby end up with a child who is securely attached and studies show that securely attached infants are more likely to become competent and well-adjusted children.

The number of families in Sri Lanka where both parents work has risen dramatically over the past 10 to 20 years, as more women have entered the work force. With more and more parents spending less time with their children, the greater the chances are for attachment problems to occur at early ages, for supervision problems to occur later in life, and for a "toxic" culture to have increased influence on a young person's development.

In each stage of a child's life, parental involvement is highly important. Even beyond the early "attachment" years, through adolescence and into adulthood, children need parents to help them make their way through a myriad of changes that will shape their character and establish their values. If parents do not spend time with their children, their values will be shaped largely by their peers and by popular culture.

Personal choice

Many of us worry about the erosion of family, about our inadequacies as parents, about the difficulty of sustaining genuine friendships with our children, about the brittleness of our communities, and about the challenge of keeping intact our integrity.

Our work is demanding more of our time and emotional energy. And this feverish pace does not even include the time taken up with the ever more intrusions into our personal lives - telephones, faxes, beepers, e-mail and business trips. Nor does it account for the preoccupations, exhilarations, and anxieties that overflow our work and flood the rest of our waking lives - sometimes even our sleep.

Is this the choice we have made? Is this the future of success?

Of course, the choice is up to you. No one is requiring you to work so hard at your work or to dedicate so much emotional energy to it. You could choose, if you wished, to work less, and have more time left over for yourself, family, friends and community. You could decide to have more children and not subcontract their care. You could choose to live in a poorer community than the best you can afford to buy into.

On one level, these are all personal choices. But on another level, they are not really personal choices at all. The advantages of working harder and the disadvantages of not doing so are larger today than they used to be. You may not have to scale the wall, but the consequences of not doing so are harsher, and the rewards for doing so are sweeter than ever before. And both the harshness and the sweetness are intensifying.

We stand on a precipice. The economic and technological forces that have been building for more than two decades are cresting. They will change our lives even more profoundly than they have been affected so far. There is no turning back to old values and old securities, to old families and old communities.

So where do we turn? We delight in the terrific deals of the new economy. We are in awe of its prowess. We are dazzled by the instant opportunities it presents. Yet where is the moral anchor? To what do we attach our loyalties, our passions and ourselves? Where do our friends, families, and communities come in? In what do we invest our integrity? How, in the end, shall we measure success - our own, as well as our family?

The answer cannot be (and must not be) solely an economic one. It is more fundamentally a moral one. We are not mere instruments of the new economy. We are not slaves to its technological trends. And we should not misdirect the blame for its less desirable and more worrisome consequences.

As citizens, we have the power to arrange the new economy to suit our needs. In doing so, we will determine the shape of our emerging new culture. Every society has the capacity - indeed, the obligation - to make these choices. Families and communities function according to them. Individuals balance their lives within them. It is through such decisions a society defines itself.

The choices will be made, somehow. They cannot be avoided. The question is whether we make the most important of these together, in the open, or grapple with them alone and in the dark.

Movement

What we need today is a grass roots movement of citizens building a community where family time and family activities have high priority in a world that pulls families apart.

Why do we need such a movement

Many families complain of over scheduled, frantic lives that lack family time for rituals such as dinners, weekend outings, vacations, and just hanging out together. In the pursuit of more opportunities for children in sports and other worthwhile activities, many parents have surrendered their family schedules to the escalating demands of outside activities. There is a widespread sense among families that they have lost their balance. Ironically, it appears that families with more means to provide for their children are at greatest risk. More outside choices, without a conscious focus on maintaining internal bonds, leads to hyperactive, emotionally depleted families.

We need a community movement because it is difficult for individual parents to take back family life in a culture that defines good parenting as providing more and doing more for one's children. Parents feel increasing pressure to involve their children at ever-younger ages in activities that consume more and more family time as the years go by. Seasons get longer, practices and games more frequent, fine arts programs more intense, religious youth programs more consuming. Parents face the choice of not involving their child in these enriching activities, or else surrendering their family time and losing their family rituals. Change must occur in communities and in individual families.

Spiritual emptiness, a toxic culture and family instability are all coming together to create a lethal prescription that, as the news stories sadly remind us, is amassing a growing list of victims. Our society's vacuum of inspirational themes and meaningful existence is being filled by a brutally violent ethic. This toxic combination, coupled with parental absence, has created what many young people have decided is an "intolerable world." Unable to cope with the pressures that such a world presents on a young mind, some have acted out with shocking, violent behaviour.

These are the root causes of juvenile violence. Until we as parents and as a society address these issues, we will continue to read headlines that shock and disturb us, but we should not be surprised. Our children need the hope that is found in religious faith; their innocence needs to be protected from a poisonous culture; and they need a mother and a father who, as a local child development expert has said" are crazy about them". 

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