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A Stealth Crisis in Families

Organized sports and other organized activities for children have been good for them in many ways and in doing so have helped their families.  Few would dispute this.  But with the huge increase in these activities over the last thirty or so years what has been so beneficial has also taken on a dark side.

Organized activities, principally organized sports, have strangely enough become an enemy of the already beleaguered American family.  There is nothing at all inherently bad about these activities, but with them we have created a serious degree of immoderation.

In our commendable zeal to do our best for our children, we have gone overboard.  We have given them so much in the way of organized activities that many of them have schedules every bit as booked up as their over-busy parents.  While these activities have the substantial advantage of keeping children "off the streets", they also keep them away from home. 

Organized sports, of necessity, segregates youngsters by age.  This has had the unintended consequence of also segregating the family.  It is not unusual for each child to practice and play at a different location than his or her siblings and often at the same time.  Today’s typical parents have become part-time taxi drivers.  On top of that, when there are games, they get to decide, sometimes agonize over, which of their children they will go and watch.  Weekend tournaments are often away from home and can present the same tough choices as regular games.  A serious aggravating factor is that many of us parents are away from home outside of normal work hours for our own reasons far more than previous generations of American parents were.  Coordinating the busy schedules of family members has become a job for someone with a degree in logistics.  It is no small achievement that modern parents, usually mothers, have succeeded at this to the extent they have. 

In a family with three children involved in organized sports or dance lessons, for instance, it is likely that the family rarely eats meals together and has very little time to "be family."  Television and video games tend to "degrade" the time they are home together.  Spending time together as a family has lost the high priority it had in previous generations. 

The distinguished French sociologist, Emil Durkheim, studied groups of various types, including families.  When he looked at the role of tradition in these groups he found:

  • tradition increases social solidarity

  • tradition increases the commitment of the individual to the group

  • tradition creates a sense of emotional wellbeing

  • tradition is the "ultimate" educator: values are passed on from generation to generation in proportion to the presence of traditions in the life of the family.

Family traditions - meals together, bedtime stories, Sunday dinner at Grandma's, and any other routine family activities - are at risk of extinction in the American family.  Without family traditions and with precious little other time to "be family," too many of us are granting television and other suspect influences on our children a tremendous advantage.  And these influences have been more than up to the task.

We parents have hard questions to face.  Among them, how do we pass on our values to our children?  What kind of values do television, video games, and their peers, instill in them?   I think the answer to the latter is beginning to be obvious in our schools and on our streets.

Several generations back, during the transition from the extended family to the nuclear family as the typical mode of family in America, family traditions were still part of the social fabric.  They were part of the everyday mundane reality of life.  Parents and children spent a lot of time together and had most of their meals that way.  These things did not have to be planned or "given enough priority"; they were just how things were done.

In pursuit of the American Dream -- as we packaged it and sold it to ourselves -- we have lost the gift of the almost-automatic nature of these things.  To recover the benefits that result from this gift will take some soul searching, a lot of courage, and much effort.

First, we have to come to terms with what it means to give our children the best that we can.  We have to decide if solidarity, commitment, and a sense of emotional wellbeing are important to our family and if it is important that our children share our values.  I do not suggest that we give up everything else; just that we recognize what is most important, assign realistic priorities, and realize that there is a limit to how many things our family members can be involved in and still remain a viable family.  Keep sports and other extracurricular activities in the mix but do not let them trump being family in the most important ways. 

Establish rules about which meals are mandatory family meals.  Dinner every evening is a good minimum.  Bedtime tends to be an insecure time for younger children.  Rituals such as reading or telling a story every night at bedtime create a sense of comfort, safety, and wellbeing and also tend to encourage a healthy interest in reading.  Sunday nights as game night -- games involving the parents, but of the children's choosing – are excellent opportunities for parents to relate to their children on the children’s level.  They are also very good at warding off the night-before-having-to-go-back-to-school blues.  Many other possibilities exist.  Some of the best can come from “institutionalizing” something your family already enjoys but does not (yet) do regularly.

This will not be easy for most families.  It will be much harder for those with children old enough to already be plugged into the system.  Still, I firmly believe that it is well worth the sometime Herculean effort that it will take.  Many of the children growing up today are being “raised by television” as much or more so than by their parents.  This is a profoundly disturbing trend.  The stakes could hardly be higher -- for our families, for our communities, for our country.