In their new book The Happy Family, NY Times #1 bestselling authors Linda and Richard Eyre argue that the social problems that are ravishing America--family breakups, escalating substance abuse, teen pregnancy--are the unfortunate result of hearts and minds turned away from the essentials of parenting, marriage and families. In this landmark work, the Eyres help parents to understand what is happening to their families and why parenting is so difficult today.
The eyres present powerful, practical parenting practices, including how to:
* Make a conscious recommitment to return your heart to the priority of marriage and family
* Teach understanding and discretionary use of the culture at large
* Reinvent time management with an emphasis on family
* Make communication your constant goal
* Create identity, security and motivation for children through family traditions and responsibilities
* Use "values therapy" in which the focus shifts away from wrong to the rewards and fulfillment of right.
In their new book The Happy Family, NY Times #1 bestselling authors Linda and Richard Eyre argue that the social problems that are ravishing America--family breakups, escalating substance abuse, teen pregnancy--are the unfortunate result of hearts and minds turned away from the essentials of parenting, marriage and families. In this landmark work, the Eyres help parents to understand what is happening to their families and why parenting is so difficult today.
The eyres present powerful, practical parenting practices, including how to:
* Make a conscious recommitment to return your heart to the priority of marriage and family
* Teach understanding and discretionary use of the culture at large
* Reinvent time management with an emphasis on family
* Make communication your constant goal
* Create identity, security and motivation for children through family traditions and responsibilities
* Use "values therapy" in which the focus shifts away from wrong to the rewards and fulfillment of right.
The Happy Family: What's Happening to Families ... and How to Save Yours!
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The Happy Family: What's Happening to Families ... and How to Save Yours!
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Overview
In their new book The Happy Family, NY Times #1 bestselling authors Linda and Richard Eyre argue that the social problems that are ravishing America--family breakups, escalating substance abuse, teen pregnancy--are the unfortunate result of hearts and minds turned away from the essentials of parenting, marriage and families. In this landmark work, the Eyres help parents to understand what is happening to their families and why parenting is so difficult today.
The eyres present powerful, practical parenting practices, including how to:
* Make a conscious recommitment to return your heart to the priority of marriage and family
* Teach understanding and discretionary use of the culture at large
* Reinvent time management with an emphasis on family
* Make communication your constant goal
* Create identity, security and motivation for children through family traditions and responsibilities
* Use "values therapy" in which the focus shifts away from wrong to the rewards and fulfillment of right.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429973649 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/18/2002 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 444 KB |
About the Author
Linda and Richard Eyre are the co-authors of seven bestselling books and were the co-hosts of the national weekly cable television show "Families are Forever." They live with their family in Salt Lake City, UT and McLean, VA, and lecture throughout the world on family, balance and values.
Linda and Richard Eyre live with their family in Washington, D.C.; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The mission statement of their nonprofit foundation EYREALM is "Popularize Parenting, Validate Values, and Bolster Balance." Their books include The Happy Family and How to Talk to Your Child About Sex.
Sir Richard Eyre was the Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre for ten years. He has directed numerous classic and new plays and films - most recently Iris - and is the author of Utopia and Other Places, and co-author of Changing Stages and of Iris: A Screenplay.
Read an Excerpt
The Happy Family
Restoring the 11 Essential Elements that Make Families Work
By Linda Eyre, Richard Eyre
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Linda and Richard EyreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7364-9
CHAPTER 1
PART I
Looking Out at the Problems
Why raising children today is dramatically different and more difficult-three powerful, family-destroying factors that no other generation of parents has faced
Family Decline and "Social Problems"
It is as though the world, particularly during the last part of the twentieth century, evolved in a way designed to threaten and weaken families. In fact, it sometimes seems like some force took a look at the eleven essential elements of happy families and came up with a plan to make every one of them more difficult to establish and maintain. That family-destructive three-part plan would have looked something like this:
1. Suck people into such busy, materialistic, work-oriented, and competitive lifestyles that their priorities, commitments, and time for communication shift away from the family. This undermines the first four essential elements.
2. Make the family, with its traditions, rules, and motivations, redundant and unnecessary by replacing it with other, larger institutions that perform the family's functions and lure away people's loyalties. This eliminates the next three common elements.
3. Promote false paradigms and antivalues to replace time-honored religious values and basic moral principles and ethics-and to get people so selfishly wrapped up in themselves that they lose interest in the needs and perspectives of their families. This wipess out the final four essentia elements.
If there ever was such a plan, it is working. Families are slipping badly, and as families go down, they pull society with them.
Too many kids today can rap but can't read. Too many know everything about drugs but can't pass chemistry. Too many have sex but have no love.
In America today, more teenage boys go to jail than join the Boy Scouts.
A generation ago a survey revealed that the seven biggest problems in one high school were: (1) talking out of turn; (2) chewing gum; (3) being disruptive, making noise; (4) cutting in line; (5) running in the halls; (6) dresscode violations; (7) littering. A survey taken recently at the same school provides a stark contrast. Today the seven biggest problems are: (1) alcohol abuse; (2) drug abuse; (3) robbery; (4) teen pregnancy; (5) assault; (6) rape; (7) suicide.
We call these crises social problems, but this is far too tame an appellation-too academic, too theoretical, too political. What we need is a word that suggests how dramatic and deep the dangers are. And maybe we already have the right word. Perhaps the word was presented in scriptural prophecy as the final verse of the Old Testament, where we are told that unless the hearts of parents are turned to their children (and vice versa), the whole earth will be cursed.
Burgeoning social problems are cursing America, and the breakdown of the family is precipitating the curse. The vacuum created by disappearing families sucks in everything from gangs to excess government. The public and private sectors — which should be supporting, supplementing, and protecting families — instead seem to be trying to substitute for them or to undermine them. Our newest, largest institutions — from giant corporations to information and entertainment systems — are creating misplaced loyalties and false paradigms that are destroying the oldest, smallest institution of family. And parents, hot in pursuit of professional and financial success, can find neither the time nor the inclination to put family first.
Social problems today threaten our future as much as economic problems threaten the former Soviet Union. So great are these curses, and so turned away are our hearts, that as we enter the new millennium there is serious doubt whether America as we know it will survive. Rebuilding, reprioritizing, and revaluing our families are the only alternatives to this country's demise.
Survive. Demise. These are extreme and desperate words — words we don't use much when talking about America. Especially since bomb shelters and the cold war have slipped away. But Tocqueville predicted our destruction from within. Illness rather than injury. Not threats moving in, but rot spreading out. Subtle rather than sudden.
The sickness we benignly and academically call social problems is so malignant that fathers rape daughters, so violent that children kill children, so epidemic that no one escapes. The shiny surface of America is pockmarked by poverty, riddled by racism, gouged by gangs and guns. The greatest, richest land paradoxically contains the most dangerous and terrifying places on the planet, places where life is cheaper and joy scarcer than in any third or fourth world.
And more subtle but just as sure, the sickness spreads through suburb and supposed stability, incredibly expensive, seemingly incurable, unfixable by courts or welfare — expanding, spreading. Preventable and curable only at the earliest stage in the smallest organization: the family.
Individual lives can teeter for quite a while on the edge, bereft of the ties of family and the anchor of faith and values. A whole society can do the same thing. "Re-valu-ing" has a triple meaning: (1) once again recognizing the transcending societal value of families; (2) personal reprioritizing of our families; (3) putting values back into our families.
But before parents can be fully effective in working on the micro, we must try to better understand the macro we work within. There are three categories of problems:
PROBLEM ONE: Overcommitted, materialistic lifestyles and wrong-turned hearts
PROBLEM TWO: Large new institutions that weaken and undermine the most basic institution
PROBLEM THREE: Proliferating false paradigms and antivalues
Problem One
Overcommitted Materialistic Lifestyles and Wrong-Turned Hearts
Everything Relates to Family
We all entered life through family. And family will surround our exit. In between, family provides us with our greatest joys and deepest sorrows. Family has always been our main reference point and the basis for much of our terminology and metaphors.
• In theology, God is father and we are children.
• In history, the past is best understood and connected through extended families.
• In economics, markets and enterprise are driven by family needs, attitudes, and perceptions.
• In education, parents are the most influential teachers, and home environment is the most powerful factor in school success.
• In sociology and anthropology we conclude that society doesn't form families; families form society.
• In politics, all issues reduce down to how public policy affects private family.
• In public opinion polls, we reveal that family commitments exceed all other commitments. Seventy-five percent of us say our family defines who we really are (only 17 percent say our work defines us), and if we had an extra three hours in a day, 65 percent of us would spend it with family (only 7 percent would spend it at work).
• In ethics or morality, family commitments teach the highest forms of selfless and empathic values. Lack of those commitments promotes selfish and antisocial behavior.
• In media, the things that touch us most deeply or offend us most dramatically generally involve family.
In nature, everything that grows is in a family, and people living closest to nature talk of mother earth and father sky.
Our similes, our semantics, our symbols — indeed, our whole frame of reference — is family. Yet as we move into the third millennium, the family is our most threatened institution.
Extravagant Lives
Despite the prominence of families in our heritage and mindset, there is less and less time and effort being spent on them. "We live extravagant lives" is how this is put in the Elton John/Tim Rice hit song from the pop musical Aïda. Indeed we do, especially if we define extravagant as complex, overcommitted, complex, fragmented, competitive, busy and rushed, and often excessively materialistic.
Most of us think that we have our priorities straight and that our hearts are in the right place. On public opinion surveys, nearly 90 percent of us say that commitments to family are "very important," and 82 percent say they admire someone who puts family ahead of work (while only 16 percent admire someone who will do whatever it takes for a promotion at work). On the open-ended question "What matters most?," 63 percent of Americans say family — far ahead of health or finances, which come in second and third with 19 percent and 18 percent, respectively. And by a 63 percent to 29 percent margin, Americans believe that life with children is richer than life without them.
But compare the claims we make with how we actually live. Parents spend less time with children and more time with work than ever before. Divorce rates shock us, and an increasing number of people (including couples, married and otherwise) don't seem to want to have children at all, let alone devote significant time and effort to them.
Why is this? Could one credible explanation be as simple as the principle of dilution? When we try to do so much — to spread ourselves over so many activities, ambitions, interests, and demands — we dilute and divide ourselves, leaving lower concentrations of ourselves for each thing, including the most important thing, our families. How can it be otherwise when a parent is trying to keep track of 2 jobs, 500 TV channels, 30 favorite Internet sites, 4 favorite sports teams, 5 lessons or sports leagues, 11 friends with cell phones or e-mail addresses, 6 alternatives for next summer's vacation, and 3 mutual funds? It's not just the 2, 500, 30, 4, 5, 11, 6, or 3 that does it to us. It's the combination, the fact that the twenty-four hours in a day have not increased, while the number of things we try to stuff into them has — dramatically.
Sometimes it's hard for us even to imagine how much simpler life used to be ... until we go somewhere where it still is. We serve on the board of a humanitarian group that sends "expeditions" to underdeveloped areas. When we're in a remote outpost in the jungles of Kenya, we're reminded of how basic, and in some ways how beautiful, life can be. Absent the attractions and distractions of the "modern world," families spend most of their time together and rely on one another and on other villagers and their extended family for their entertainment and amusement as well as for their livelihood. Days are long, time seems plentiful, and relationships matter more than achievements. Even as you pity people for their lack of health care or balanced nutrition or education or technology, you find yourself admiring them for the relative simplicity and tranquillity of their lifestyles.
I [Linda] found myself sitting under a mango tree one day in the village of Muambalasie, Kenya, watching a family in the dusty little yard outside their mud-and-stick house. The father and two small daughters were laughing as they cooked lunch over a fire, while an older boy was helping his mother crush grain into meal with a long stout stick. No one was in a hurry, no one wore a watch, no TV or video games or cell phones were blaring or ringing. I was aware, of course, of poverty, health limitations, and the lack of options inherent in the dearth of basic technology. But as I sat there, I was genuinely unsure of who has the best side of the trade-offs. They lack the technology but have time to think and talk, a beautiful nature-oriented environment, and a lifestyle almost completely oriented to family and friends. We have the technology but lack the rest. (Read that last word with a double meaning.)
What we didn't mention in the above reflection, of course, is that while African villagers have no choice concerning their lifestyle, we twenty-first-century Americans have multiple choices — more options than any other people of any other time. But family- and relationship-oriented lifestyle choices involve far more than an answer on a public opinion survey. They involve a reassessment of our situation and a recommitment in terms of how we will spend our physical and mental energy, of how we will allocate our set, finite amount of time across the frustrating and seemingly infinite number of needs, demands, and wants constantly spread in front of us.
New Windows
We used the metaphor earlier of looking out through windows at the problems and family-negative elements of the world. Think about it now with a new twist: Our parents, their parents, and their parents looked out at the world through rectangular glass windows and saw their next-door neighbors. Like them, we look out at our world through rectangular glass windows, but we turn ours on with a switch and they are hooked up to a Pentium computer or to the cable. In these windows we see everything from the latest Web site to a sitcom to an interactive game to another ad designed to make us think we need what we actually only want.
How much effect do our windows have on our lifestyles? How great an impact does what we see have on how we live? It has been said that there is no such thing as a truly independent mind. As much as we'd like to think that we are our own persons, that we take our own counsel, that we establish our own lifestyles and set our own priorities, independent of what we see and hear around us, it just doesn't work that way. We are all to some extent "programmable," and it is what enters us — through our senses, from those around us and more and more from electronic sources — that programs us. Advertising programs us to want more and different things from those we have. Movies and music and other media program us toward violence and irresponsible sex, and our whole materialistic, work-oriented culture programs us to compete economically and to set a high priority on money and power.
And if they program us, what do they do to our children? Children are incredibly impressionable. They suck in whatever values and behavior norms surround them. If we as parents do not make clear and concerted efforts to teach them values, they will absorb the values of their peer group and will set their priorities and learn their lifestyles from the media and the Internet. Forty-eight percent of American teens use a computer daily, and 21 percent admit that they have looked at something on the Internet that they wouldn't want their parents to know about.
We can't just close our windows and isolate ourselves from the influences that counter our values or that carry to us the stress of materialistic competition. The electronic signals are in the air; they surround us and penetrate us hundreds of times a day with advertising impressions or impulses to do one more thing. The solution is not to block or stop what is entering our heads or our kids' heads, it is to start putting in what we want to be there — from values to the conscious kind of life we expressly choose for ourselves. Telling the mind what not to think doesn't work, anyway. If we say to you, "Don't think about an elephant," you find yourself thinking of one immediately. If we say to our children, "Don't go on the Net," or "Don't watch that program," they will do both at a friend's house. If, instead, we operate in the positive and say, to ourselves and to our children, "Think about these values and live a life motivated by family and relationships," then we control the direction we take.
In other words, we need an offense and a strategy.
Confused Means and Ends
What is the purpose of money? Ultimately, money has only one purpose — to buy things. It can buy necessities and luxury. It can buy comfort and education (or at least pay the tuition). It can buy vacations and second homes. Theoretically, it can buy time and freedom and security. But no matter what it can buy or what we choose to buy with it, money is a means to other ends. Money is useful only in light of what it will buy. Money is not an end in itself. Those who pursue money as such will lose the very ends that they subconsciously thought that money might give them.
At the risk of creating the impression that our heroes are all simple people from primitive societies, let us tell another personal story:
At one time in my [Richard's] life (fortunately a brief time), windsurfing was my passion. I even found myself thinking how great it would be if I could just retire and go live near some beach with my young family. Of course my time and my life were consumed with more serious things. I'd just become a full partner in a management consulting company, and my Harvard MBA mentality drove me to twelve-hour workdays; my windsurfing was confined to vacation time and an occasional weekend.
I had a client in Puerto Rico, and I found myself in San Juan one day, between meetings, walking along the beach. I watched a windsurfer for a while, riding and jumping the waves, and when he came in, we struck up a brief conversation, limited by his marginal English and even more by my nearly nonexistent Spanish. What I gleaned was that he was a Puerto Rican about my age, that he had a wife and three children, and that he and his brother were fishermen. They went out in the morning, netted what they could, and sold their fish to the market merchants each day by noon. He then windsurfed until his children got out of school. They played and ate together as a family. He and his wife helped his kids with their school lessons, tucked them into bed, and had the neighbor lady listen for them while they went out for the evening.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Happy Family by Linda Eyre, Richard Eyre. Copyright © 2001 Linda and Richard Eyre. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Epigraph,Title Page,
Preface,
PART I - Looking Out at the Problems,
Family Decline and "Social Problems",
Problem One - Overcommitted Materialistic Lifestyles and Wrong-Turned Hearts,
Problem Two - Large New Institutions That Weaken and Undermine the Most Basic Institution,
Problem Three - Proliferating False Paradigms and Antivalues,
PART II - Looking In at the Solutions,
Looking In,
Solution One - Create a More Family-Oriented Lifestyle and a Planning System That Puts a High Priority on the Family,
Solution Two - Create a Solid, Lasting Family Institution That Preempts and Supersedes Other Institutions,
Solution Three - Create a Pattern for Teaching Correct Principles and Basic Values,
OPENING - ABC Parenting Case Studies,
ALSO BY THE AUTHORS,
CLOSING - Society, Support Groups, and the Twelfth Element,
Notes,
ABOUT THE AUTHORS,
Notes,
Copyright Page,