Column Putting family life first
By KRIS BERGGREN
William Doherty is a family
therapist and professor of family social science at the University of
Minnesota, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist church. He was raised in
a tight-knit, Philadelphia Irish Catholic family and studied at a Paulist
seminary during the1960s.
Doherty has translated his childhood formation as well as his
professional experience dealing with many a family in crisis into a plan to
reclaim family life for todays stressed-out, hard-working,
calendar-clutching families.
Doherty is working toward a vision of community life -- with a
prominent role for faith communities -- that embraces and prioritizes family
life and family relationships as the basis of a healthy society. Together with
a suburban Minneapolis community, he is developing a pilot Family Life
First Seal of Approval. An organization earning this designation will
signal to parents that it honors the importance of family time and refuses to
overschedule childrens lives.
Doherty describes his childhood as having a strong sense of
family as the mainstay of your life, just in the warp and woof of living,
though he is reluctant to attribute this solely to his familys religion.
Id be hard-pressed to say that it was different from any other
childhood, he cautioned in an interview near his office on the St. Paul
campus of the University of Minnesota.
Yet some of the deep-rooted Catholic values absorbed in his
upbringing seem to inform his current views on family life and family
dynamics.
Doherty cites as an example the churchs stance against
divorce that -- while flawed in some respects, he believes -- promoted the idea
that a marriage is forever, and that family life was highly valued. There
was a kind of pride, he said, in that sense that when you marry,
you dont look back.
Dohertys views on parenting and families are also heavily
influenced by the communitarian movement and the public work model
of activated citizenry promoted by the University of Minnesotas Center
for Democracy and Citizenship. The communitarian philosophy holds that citizens
have rights and responsibilities that are closely intertwined.
The model of government as provider isnt quite adequate, and
individual citizens must accept their civic responsibilities -- to vote, to
exercise their voice on public matters, to be involved in community. Yet
citizens should expect to enjoy certain basic rights that government can
provide -- education, health care, decent housing and such. Individuals have a
responsibility to participate in community life, and they have the right to
expect community support.
These ideas, coincidentally or not, are quite
consistent with Catholic social teaching, such as the principle of
subsidiarity, Doherty said.
I have recently reconnected with the power of Catholic
social teaching through the influence of Don Browning, a university of Chicago
religion professor, Doherty explained. He says that Catholic social
teaching is the most sophisticated stuff that Christianity has produced, partly
because it has a dual language: civil language for a pluralistic society,
combined with theological language.
Doherty said he believes that todays family needs the
community ties and rituals that a faith community can offer, though he decries
the idea of worship as a spectator sport or a form of entertainment.
If family religious participation is important to the
parents, Doherty said, I support them in requiring their children
to attend services. Parents get paralyzed on this when they view the service as
a performance that kids should enjoy. If the kids complain they dont
enjoy it, then parents feel impotent to encourage them to go.
Churches today arent facing the reality of ministry to
families, Doherty believes, especially given the reality of the changing
portrait of the family. There are not enough resources for two-parent
married families, let alone single-parent and stepfamilies, he said. And
churches can do a lot more to involve whole families in intergenerational
activities, which are widely cited by youth experts as a factor in helping
young people to be well-adjusted, productive citizens.
Traditionally, churches tend to reward people for involvement as
individuals, he observed. But creating opportunities for family volunteering
and socializing can encourage parents and children to invest in the wider
community without draining precious family time.
Creating intentional families by honoring a familys rituals,
he said, is an antidote to entropy, which he defines as the wolf at the
door of all families. An entropic family need not be a contentious one,
but more sadly, it is likely to be a family that fails to engender intimacy and
drifts apart.
Families today are influenced by a frenetic culture that tends to
prioritize experiences, events and entertainment over intimacy, conversation
and family ritual.
Sometimes even churches are part of the problem, stretching
families too thin. When a family with kids gets involved in sports, church
activities, school functions and other extracurricular commitments, the family
may find itself fragmented. Worse yet, sponsoring organizations may pressure
families to declare their loyalty. For example, the hockey coach may want a
player to prioritize hockey at the expense of being an altar server, performing
in the school play or even taking a family vacation -- and penalize the kid for
making another choice by denying the child playing time or demoting him or her
to the B team.
Doherty is facilitating a group of parents, coaches, educators,
pastors and other community leaders in Wayzata, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb, in
a community-wide effort to tame the beast of busyness. Starting this month, the
group is accepting applications from community organizations to be approved for
the Family First seal of approval.
Doherty and his collaborators hope they are starting a nationwide
trend to rein in childrens schedules, giving more families in more
communities across the country a sense of hope and a starting point for
reclaiming the sanctity of family time.
National Catholic Reporter, May 5,
2000
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