Richard Ruach
October 4, 2009

Readings:

From William J. Doherty and Barbara Z. Carlson, Putting Family First (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).  William Doherty, a UU who has been active with the UU churches in the twin cities of Minnesota for decades, is director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota.

We wrote this book for two reasons: because we are alarmed about how the frantic pace of contemporary American family life is eroding family closeness and depriving our children of their childhood, and because we know something about how to take back family time and make good use of it. Today’s families, we believe, are sorely lacking time for spontaneous fun and enjoyment, for talking over the day’s events and experiences, for unhurried meals, for quiet bedtime talks, for working together on projects, for teaching and learning life skills such as cooking and gardening, for visiting extended family and friends, for attending religious services together, for participating together in community projects, and for exploring the beauty of nature. Not enough time, that is, to be a family with a rich internal and external life. [p. xiii]

The effects of overbusy family life on child development are just beginning to be studied by academic researchers. But studies have shown the importance of regular family dinners, one of the chief casualties of hyperscheduling. A large national study of American teenagers found a strong link between regular family meals and a wide range of positive outcomes: academic success, psychological adjustment, and lower rates of alcohol use, drug use, early sexual behavior, and suicidal risk. On the flip side, not having regular family meals was associated with higher risks in all of those areas.  [p. 5]

This study defined a family meal as one in which the teenager ate with at least one parent. Given the documented decline in family dinners, it is not surprising that a national poll of teenagers, funded by the White House in spring 2000 [Clinton administration] found that over one-fifth of American teens rated ‘not having enough time with parents’ as their top concern, a percentage that tied for first (along with education) on their list of worries. [p. 5]

The Question!

How can liberal and progressive churches, such as First Unitarian Universalist Church,  help families and relationships to flourish?  The conservatives have their version, which really doesn’t work for us.

Is this a question we want to engage?  Do we want to be a place where we support, encourage – teach, even – families how to flourish, and help relationships to flourish. I think it’s a great question. I think you can make a good case that that’s something we would like to do.  It would involve somewhat of a culture change, however.  It’s interesting, if you look at the seven Principles and Purposes of the UUA, they all talk about individual development and growth and rights, and then jump right away to the community level and doing social justice and doing good things in the larger world. It’s surprising, but if you notice what’s missing – it’s hard to notice what’s missing sometimes – is the primary relationships – families.  Individual, and jump to larger group.  And if you look at our congregation’s vision statement, mission statement, covenant, and strategic plan strategy five points, all four of those documents are similar to the UUA Principles and Purposes: they go from individual development right away to community and the larger world. Now the levels that we do work with are good – they’re great! Our strengths are our commitment to individual development and to social justice in the larger world.  But, I think a major piece is missing, and I think it’s missing systemically, since it’s missing in all those documents. In the twenty-some years that I’ve been directly involved with Unitarian Universalist churches, we tend to focus our programs and our sermons on the individual and then we go to the community and the larger world.  What we do is good, but I’m going to argue that there’s a missing piece that we need to do as well.  And we need to do it well.

Not a Family Friendly Culture

I think families are in crisis, on average, in our culture. We do not have a family-friendly culture. And it’s especially not family-friendly for liberal and progressive elements in society. We’re busy with other things. Many of these things are good things that we’re busy with.  Women are working outside the home as much as men and have careers that are very engaging. This is a good thing. Then there’s the attraction of the leisure time that we do sometimes have.  There are so many activities that are fun.

We also have some things such as the attractions of consumerism and the debt that that piles up. So much stuff we seem to want! The media piles tens of thousands of advertisements into our consciousness every year if we’re looking at much media at all.  They spend zillions of dollars to craft these little messages to form our brains and to change our behavior, so we will buy more services and more stuff. And if we think that we can watch those advertisements and not be programmed by them, I think that’s hubris. The media are tremendously attractive.

We have positive opportunities. There are so many opportunities for self-development, for individual development. And there are so many opportunities to get involved in social justice activities and in the community. And for work in the church.  Those are all good, and there’re very tempting. But, what happens to the family, when everybody is running in a different direction? I do think that William Doherty has quite a point in the reading.  When family dinners fall apart, that’s like the canary in coal mine, it’s a sign that the family hasn’t got enough time to be together and is going off in all directions.  Guess what—everybody goes off in all directions – relationships deteriorate and sometimes turn angry and hostile, and disappear.  I think we’ve got a problem, and I think we can be part of the solution to that, as a congregation, and maybe in the UUA as well.

My dream is that when persons come to this congregation as members or friends, or new members join, that they will have a justifiable hope that being part of this community will strengthen their family and relational life, will help them have better relationships with their kids, their teenagers, with their partners.  I have a dream that one day we will put out on our sign outside, as well as such wonderful things as “Welcoming Congregation,”  that we put out on the sign some kind  of wording to the effect :”A Flourishing Families and Relationships Congregation.”  I talked with the Church Council at one point and they said that we can’t put that up there until we can do it. That’s right, we shouldn’t do false advertising.

How Can Change Occur?

Now, how can change occur?  How can our congregation change, if you agree with the case that society as a whole is not giving much help at all. One of the ways that change occurs is that you get to the point where you say, “Enough is enough!” “I’ve had it!” “I’m not going to  take it any more!”  “This has got to change!”  And as I’ve seen teenagers have terrific difficulties, and little kids have trouble, and relationships break up, I’ve gotten to the point, not that we can solve everything, but I’ve gotten to the point where I really want us as a congregation to make as one of our priorities to really help families and children to flourish.  And there is hope! I think one of the key things in the Doherty reading, he said that something needs to be done, and we know some things that will help!

There are a number of things that will help, both principles that can be taught – insights, that’s our thing as UUs, principles – about how we can flourish as families and in our relationships.  So I’m going to mention a few of those right now, a few specific insights which I think are quite helpful. You can actually summarize all these by slightly altering the famous Beatles song, “All we are saying is, give love a chance.” With all these centrifugal forces driving us apart, what can we do to give love a chance?

Family Dinners

Here are some things.  One, is of course, family dinners.  Doherty has made the case for that.  But it takes quite a bit of planning to do that. The kids and we have lots of activities, maybe you’ll have to limit some of those. And decide, O.K., we might need to move dinner to 8:00 at night sometimes. Or maybe for you, dinner is impossible, but some reason everybody in the family is a morning person. Well, you can have family breakfasts! It wouldn’t work in our family, but in some families it would work great! At least one family meal together, where you can make those connections.

It turns out that for the family meal to have a good effect, the family meal needs to be pleasant. It’s not a time to do discipline, not a time to solve problems in a direct way.  It’s time to have a pleasant time together, to catch up with each other, to check in, to tell jokes, to just have a fun time, to enjoy the meal and to enjoy each other’s company.

Five to One Ratio for Pleasant to Unpleasant Interactions

One of the things another premier researcher found was that in relationships that flourished, the ratio of positive to negative interaction needs to be about 5 to one. If it’s one to one, you don’t have the foundation of good feelings to deal with the inevitable problems and issues of living together. With decades of research they came up with this number, a ratio of positive to negative of 5:1.  I think it’s fascinating that the “1” is there. I was talking to someone whose relationship had broken up and mentioning this statistic, and the person said, “Our relationship was five to zero. We didn’t deal with the difficult stuff. We didn’t bring it up.”  The “one” is important, also! If you’ve got this foundation of the “five” then you can bring up the “one” and have a chance to be heard and a chance to work with it. That’s a guideline.  You can just look at the time you spend with your loved ones and see if there enough positive experiences going on.  And if not, how can we add some really positive parts to  our interaction? Be intentional about that! And you can also be intentional about the “one.”  If we don’t bring up some of these issues, things will just fester, and the whole relationship can drop to a very low level, or even end.

Unilateral Positive Change

Another finding is that one of the ways to really make change in a family is to unilaterally make a change yourself. You know, most of us think that things would be better if our partner would just change. But for some reason they’re resistant to that, and particularly resistant to changing the way we think they should, at least some of the time. And so we feel powerless. I think one of the very best books out there – it’s an old book, been around for twenty years – called Divorce Busting. Michelle Weiner-Davis has the insight that I think is brilliant, is that one way to improve a relationship is for you to start doing some new positive things yourself. Don’t wait for a quid pro quo, just do it, because it’s the right thing to do. It turns out that trying to negotiate quid pro quos is a sign of a troubled relationship, and is not a good strategy. They taught that as the way to go 30 years ago and it turns out that is a bad idea. A good idea is unilateral change by me to make things better. That gives you a shot to  change the family system. I’ve been studying family systems, natural family systems, for over twenty years. It’s one version of our Unitarian Universalist “interdependent web of all existence.” Families are interdependent webs of a profound sort, which means if anybody changes something in the system, the other people in the system, after trying to push back a bit – and not succeeding, if you can stay your own course of change – they  will have to change and adjust.  Which means that anybody who can make a positive change, can take a unilateral action for the better, can bring about change. It’s not magic, and sometimes you can’t predict what the changes will be. But change will occur, and probably for the better.

Speak and Listen with Respect

Another principle I’ll lay out, and there are many of them, but this is maybe as good as any of them, is: speak to each other with respect. I was meeting with the high school youth, and discussing “Respect your father and mother,” the fifth commandment in the Jewish and Christian traditions, and they actually heard that as a principle, and we discussed whether it made sense, and they thought it did. The most productive thing you can do as a teenager is to build a respectful relationship with your parents.  This in not necessarily love, certainly not agreement, but a respectful relationship. That works with the whole family system. You can make a change and speak to each other respectfully, and listen respectfully.

If you want to ask what do our UU Principles have to say about family life – what do they imply about family life because they don’t address it directly.  I actually rewrote the principles and put the world family in every place it made sense. So you get “The inherent worth and dignity of every member of our family.”  “The interdependent web of our family.”  It turns out the Principles are directly applicable to our families.  The high school class did a covenant for how they wanted to be in their class, and they had about seven different things they listed.  Most of the items was a version of Respect. So anyone in a family that can change the family’s interaction toward more respect has really done a good thing.

Hope

Well, there’s so much more to say. I’m hopeful that we can put that missing piece of helping families and relationships to flourish as a priority into our congregational life at FUUN and even into the UUA and other liberal churches. We don’t have to worry about Beacon Street or anyone else – we can take unilateral action as a congregation!  So that at one point, we can put up out there on our sign something like “A liberal congregation that supports families and relationships,” or “A Flourishing Families and Relationships Congregation.”  Some things are already happening: parents groups have formed and more are organizing, children’s and adult religious education programming is incorporating  more family and relationship topics, and parents are in the classes. The Youth Adult Council is gearing up for a larger role. Flourishing family issues are beginning to be widely discussed in Board, Council, and Strategic Planning.

We have created a logo for the Flourishing Families and Relationships Team, that on the web page has a flaming chalice, a big rainbow, and all kinds of little people figures representing all different kinds of families. The rainbow symbolizes first, embracing diversity of families.  And the rainbow also symbolizes hope.  I am very hopeful that we are becoming a place where a diversity of  families and relationships will genuinely flourish!