But above all—above legislation, above every effort to influence popular culture—strengthen the home. As Henry David Thoreau put it, “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.” The home and family are the root. This is where the moral armament is developed in people to deal with these pernicious influences that technology has made available and to turn the technology into something that enables and facilitates good virtues and values and standards to be maintained throughout society.
For laws to be effective there has to be a social will (a set of mores) to enforce those laws. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim said, “When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.” Without social will, there will always be legal loopholes and ways to break the law. And children can quickly lose their innocence and become callous and eroded inside—sarcastic and cynical and far more vulnerable as prey to violent gang behavior, to adoption into a new “family” that gives acceptance and social approbation. So the key is to nurture the four gifts inside each child and to build relationships of trust and unconditional love so that you can teach and influence the members of your family in principle-centered ways.
Interestingly, one other significant outcome of the conference was the change in the very culture and feeling among the leaders of the various faiths. In just two days it moved from courteous respect and exchange of pleasantries to genuine love, profound unity, and open, authentic communication because of a common, transcendent mission. As the leaders discovered, in these perilous times we must focus on what unites us, not on what divides us!
Who’s Going to Raise Our Children?
In the absence of an inner connection with the four human gifts and a strong family influence, what impact is the kind of culture we’ve described in this chapter— power boosted by technology—going to have on a child’s thinking? Is it realistic to think that children are going to be impervious to the murder and killing and cruelty they watch seven hours a day on TV? Can we really believe the TV program directors who claim there is no hard scientific evidence to show a correlation between violence and immorality in our society and the graphic scenes they choose to show on the television screen—and then quote hard scientific evidence to show how much a twenty-second advertisement will impact the behavior of the viewers?20 Is it reasonable to think that young adults exposed to a visual and emotional TV diet of sexual pleasuring can grow up with anywhere near a realistic or holistic sense of the principles that create good, enduring relationships and a happy life?
In such a turbulent environment, how can we possibly think that we can continue with “business as usual” inside our families? If we don’t build better homes, we’ll have to build more prisons because surrogate parenting will nurture gangs. Then the social code will surround drugs, crime, and violence. Jails and courts will become even more overcrowded. “Catch and release” will become the order of the day. And emotionally starved children will turn into angry adults, plowing through life for love, respect, and “things.”
In an epic historical study, one of the world’s greatest historians, Edward Gibbon, identified five main causes of the decline and fall of Roman civilization:
the breakdown of the family structure
the weakening of a sense of individual responsibility
excessive taxes and government control and intervention
seeking pleasures that became increasingly hedonistic, violent, and immoral
the decline of religion.21
His conclusions provide a stimulating and instructive perspective through which we might well look at the culture of today. And this brings us to the pivotal question on which our future and the future of our children depends:
Who’s going to raise my children—today’s alarmingly destructive culture or me?
As I said in Habit 2, if we don’t take charge of the first creation, someone or something else will. And that “something” is a powerful, turbulent, amoral, family-unfriendly environment.
This is what will shape your family if you do not.
“Outside in” No Longer Works
As I said in Chapter 1, forty years ago you could successfully raise a family “outside-in.” But outside-in no longer works. We cannot rely on societal support of our families as we used to. Success today can only come from the inside out. We can and we must be the agent of change and stability in creating the supporting structures for our families. We must be highly proactive. We must create. We must reinvent. We can no longer depend on society or most of its institutions. We must develop a new flight plan. We must rise above the turbulence and chart a “true north” path.
Just consider the effects of these changes in the culture of the home and the environment as represented in the chart on these pages. Think about the impact these changes are having on your own family. The point of comparing today to the past is not to suggest that we return to some idealized notion of the 40s and 50s. It is to recognize that because things have changed so much, and because the impact on the family is so staggering, we must respond in a way that is equal to the challenge.
History clearly affirms that family is the foundation of society. It is the building block of every nation. It is the headwaters of the stream of civilization. It is the glue by which everything is held together. And family itself is a principle built deeply into every person.
But the traditional family situation and the old family challenge are gone. We must understand that, more than at any other time in history, the role of parenting is absolutely vital and irreplaceable. We can no longer depend on role models in society to teach our children the true north principles that govern in all of life. We are grateful if they do, but we cannot depend on it. We must provide leadership in our families. Our children desperately need us. They need our support and advice. They need our judgment and experience, our strength and decisiveness. More than ever before they need us to provide family leadership.
So how do we do it? How do we prioritize and lead our families in significant, productive ways?
Creating Structure in the Family
Think once again about the words of Stanley M. Davis: “When the infrastructure shifts, everything else rumbles.”
The profound technological and other changes we’ve talked about have impacted organizations of all kinds in our society. Most organizations and professions are being reinvented and restructured to accommodate this new reality. But this same kind of restructuring has not happened in the family. Despite the fact that outside-in no longer works, and despite the astounding report that today only 4 to 6 percent of American households are made up of the “traditional” working husband, wife at home, and no history of divorce for either partner,22 most families are not effectively restructuring themselves. They’re either trying to carry on in the old way—the way that worked with the challenges of the past—or they’re trying to reinvent in ways that are not in harmony with the principles that create happiness and enduring family relationships. As a whole, families are not rising to the level of response the challenge demands.
So we must reinvent. The only truly successful response to structural change is structure.
When you consider the word “structure,” think carefully about your response to it. As you do, be aware that you are trying to navigate through an environment where the popular culture rejects the idea of structure as being limiting, confining.
But consult your own inner compass. Think about the words of Winston Churchill: “For the first twenty-five years of my life I wanted freedom. For the next twenty-five years of my life I wanted order. For the next twenty-five years of my life I realized that order is freedom.” It is the very structure of marriage and family that gives stability to society. The father in a popular family television show during the outside-in era said this: “Some men see the rules of marriage as a prison; others—the happy ones—see them as boundary lines that enclose all the things they hold dear.” It is the commitment to structure that builds trust in relationships.
Think about it: When your life is a mess, what do you say? “I have to get organized. I have to put things in order!” This means creating both structure and priority or sequencing. If your room is a mess, what do you do? You organize your things in closets and dresser drawers. You organize within structure. When we say about someone, “He has his head screwed on straight,” what do we mean? We basically mean that his priorities are in order. He’s living by what’s important. When we say to a person with a terminal disease, “Get your affairs in order,” what do we mean? We mean, “Make sure your finances, insurance, relationships, and so forth, are attended to.”