1 Making time for family

Lifted from an article by Scott Taylor in the February 21 issue of the Church News, entitled "Family time, meals are positive factors"

Eating meals together as a family is one of the single most effective things parents can do for their children. "It's good to spend time together as a family, and it's good to eat together," said Dr. William J. Doherty, a family therapist, educator, and researcher, in an address on "Parenting in a Too-Much-of-Everything World" at Brigham Young University on February 12.

"Researchers are showing that this kind of 'older wisdom' is really quite important—and young parents raising children believe it, but it's hard to practice. When you lose your family meals, it's hard to get them back," Dr. Doherty affirmed.

Numerous national and multi-national studies show that family meal time is a strong predictor of academic and psychological adjustment in children and teens—even better than time in school, sports, or cultural arts. Regularly eating together as a family also decreases future involvement in alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, depression, and eating disorders.

He showed a video segment that followed a family around for a weekday afternoon and evening. Within five hours, the three children had managed to squeeze in eight after-school activities as well as snacks, separate dinners, homework, and getting shuttled from practice to lesson to home.

While studies have shown that extra-curricular activities have some positive impact on the academic, social, and psychological development of a child, other studies say that an overload of such activities has a much greater negative impact.

Children don't have opportunities to play. Children and teens are failing to benefit from social skills often developed in unstructured, unsupervised, unofficiated experiences with their brothers, sisters, and friends. "We used to call it 'going out to play,'" Dr. Doherty said. It is where a child has to find someone to play with, convince them to play, negotiate what to play, teach others how to play, help enforce the rules, and decide when to stop.

"There's so much to offer our children," added Dr. Doherty, "that wisdom and balance is difficult . . . and in the process, children grow up too fast."

Parents work to limit scheduling and eliminate overloads, training and teaching children with an end result in mind. Making changes to emphasize family time together and family meals is difficult but doable. He said, "I think we as parents should determine our success [when they are] at age 25, not by how much the like us along the way."

"Be willing to set a course in a consumer culture that says, 'We have a value-based family, a family with vision, and we're setting that course,'" he said, adding that "it takes courage, it takes vision, it takes values, and it takes being a part of a community the has vision and values and courage to parent wisely in a too-much-of-everything world."