But through counseling they were able to make some changes that created a dramatic difference in their lives. They began by setting aside Sunday nights to spend with their family and paying attention to each other—giving back rubs and expressing words of affection. The husband told his employers he would no longer be able to work on Saturdays. The wife eventually quit her job and stayed home with the boys. They asked her mother to move in with them, pooling their financial resources and providing a built-in storyteller for the boys. They cut back in many areas. The husband carpooled to work. They quit buying things except for essentials. They stopped eating out.
As Mary Pipher said, “The family had made some hard choices. They had realized that they could have more time or more money but not both. They had chosen time.”3 And that choice made a profound difference in the quality of their personal and family lives. They were happier, more fulfilled, less stressful, and more in love.
Of course, this may not be the solution for every family that’s feeling hassled and out of sync. But the point is that there are options, there are choices. You can consider cutting back, simplifying your lifestyle, changing jobs, shifting from full- to part-time work, cutting commuting time by having fewer, longer workdays or working closer to home, participating in job sharing, or creating a virtual office in your home. The bottom line is that there is no need to be held hostage by these lies if family is really your top priority. And making the family priority will push you into creative exploration of possible alternatives.
Parenthood: A Unique Role
There’s no question that more money can mean a better lifestyle not only for yourself but for your kids. They may be able to go to a finer school, have educational computer software, and even better health care. And recent studies also confirm that a child whose father or mother stays home and resents it is worse off than if the parents go to work.
But there’s also no question that the role of parents is a unique one, a sacred stewardship in life. It has to do with nurturing the potential of a special human being entrusted to their care. Is there really anything on any list of values that would outweigh the importance of fulfilling that stewardship well—socially, mentally, and spiritually, as well as economically?
There is no substitute for the special relationship between a parent and a child. There are times when we would like to believe there is. When we choose to put a child in day care, for example, we want to believe it’s good, and so we do. If someone seems to have a positive attitude and a caring disposition, we easily believe they have both the character and the competence to help raise our child. But that which we desire most earnestly, we believe most easily. This is all part of the rationalization process. The reality is that most day care is inadequate. To paraphrase child development expert Urie Bronfenbrenner, “You can’t pay someone to do for a child what a parent will do for free.”4 Even excellent child care can never do what a good parent can do.
So parents need to make their commitment to their children—to their family—before they make their commitment to work. And if they do need day care assistance, they need to shop for that care far more carefully than they ever would for a house or a car. They need to examine the track record of the person being considered to ensure that both character and competence are present and the person can pass the “smell test”—the sense of intuition and inspiration that parents can get regarding caregiving for their children. They need to build a relationship with the caregiver so that correct expectations and accountability are established.
Good faith is absolutely insufficient. Good intentions will never replace bad judgment. Parents need to give trust, but they also need to verify competence. Many people are trustworthy in terms of character, but they are simply not competent—they lack knowledge and skill, and often are absolutely unaware of their incompetence. Others may be very competent but lack the character—the maturity and integrity, sincere caring, and the ability to be both kind and courageous.
And even with good care, the question each parent has to ask is “How often is such proxy caregiving right in my situation?” Sandra and I have some friends who have said that when their children were little, they felt they had all kinds of options and freedoms to do whatever they wanted. Their children were subject to them and dependent on them, and essentially they could have surrogate parenting in the form of day care and sitters whenever they wanted. So both parents became very involved in other things. But now, as their children are getting older, they are beginning to reap the whirlwind. They have no relationship. The children are getting into destructive lifestyles, and the parents have become greatly alarmed. “If we had it to do over,” they’ve said, “we would put a higher priority on our family, on these children—particularly when they were little. We would have made a greater investment.”
As John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”5
On the other hand, we have another friend who said, “I’ve learned that for these years when I am raising these children, my other interests—professional interests, development interests, social interests—are to become secondary. My most important focus is to be there for my children, to invest myself in them at this critical stage.” She went on to say that this is difficult for her because she has so many interests and capabilities, but she is committed to it because she knows how vitally important it is.
What is the difference in these two situations? Priority and commitment—a clear sense of vision and the commitment to live with integrity to it. So if we’re not really prioritizing the family in daily life, the first place to look for answers is back in Habit 2: Is the mission statement really deep enough?
“When the Infrastructure Shifts, Everything Rumbles”
Assuming that we do have our Habit 2 work done, the next place we need to look is at the turbulent environment we’re trying to navigate through.
We took a brief look at a few major trends in Chapter 1. But now let’s take a closer look at the society we’re living in. Let’s examine a few of the changes over the past forty to fifty years in four dimensions—culture, laws, economy, and technology—and see how these changes impact you and your family. These facts I’m going to share come from surveys done in the United States, but they reflect growing trends worldwide.
Popular Culture
In the 1950s in the United States, the average child watched little or no TV, and what he saw on television was stable, two-parent families who generally interacted with respect. Today, the average child watches seven hours of television per day. By the end of grade school he’s seen over eight thousand murders and one hundred thousand acts of violence.6 During this time he’s spent an average of five minutes a day with his father and twenty minutes with his mother, and most of that time was spent either eating or watching TV!7
Just think about it: seven hours of TV a day and five minutes with Dad. Unbelievable!
He also has increasing access to videos and music that portray pornography, illicit sex, and violence. As we noted in Chapter 1, he goes to schools where the major concerns have shifted from chewing gum and running in the halls to drug abuse, teen pregnancy, suicide, rape, and assault.
In addition to these influences, many homes have actually begun to take on the tone of the business world. In her ground-breaking analysis The Time Bind, sociologist Arlie Hochschild points out how, for many people, home and office have changed places. Home has become a frantic exercise in “beat the clock,” with family members having fifteen minutes to eat before rushing off to a soccer game, and trying to bond in the half hour before bed so they don’t waste time. At work, on the other hand, you can socialize and relax on a break. By comparison, work seems like a refuge—a haven of grown-up sociability, competence, and relative freedom. And as a result, some people even allow their workday to lengthen because they enjoy work more than home. Hochschild writes, “In this new model of family-and-work life, a tired parent flees a world of unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony, and managed cheer of work.”8
And it’s not just the changing tone of the home environment. There is enormous affirmation on the job. There are many extrinsic rewards—including recognition, compensation, and promotion—that feed our sense of self-worth, exhilarate us, and exert a powerful pull away from family and home. They create a seductive vision of a different destination, an idyllic, warm-climated Utopia that combines the satisfaction of hard work with the apparent justification—in the “busy-ness” of meeting the unbelievable schedules and demands—for neglecting what really matters most.