When I met Joel Salatin in January, we spent some time talking about the books he had written and the books that he planned to write. He mentioned that he had been disappointed by the response to Family Friendly Farming, in which he lays out his vision of small-scale farms (and possibly other home-based businesses) as vehicles for a multi-generational family life, where a legacy is built, enjoyed by children and parents and grandparents, and passed on to succeeding generations. He had expected it to be embraced by homeschoolers in particular, who he thought were looking for just such a life. I told him that I could think of one very good reason why his message wasn’t catching on with them—he is very emphatic about the importance of staying home. He thought about it for a minute, and then said that it could be true, since none of the homeschoolers he knew seemed to be any better about staying home than the average family.
Early on in our marriage, Debbie and I bought a beautiful victorian house on 100 acres in the Texas hill country, about an hour from Austin and a half-hour from a town of any size. Chris was eighteen months old when we moved there, and Maggie was born a year later. Four years later we decided that country life wasn’t for us, at least at that time, and we moved to a nice surburban house Austin.
I had moved us to the country for a number of wrong reasons—because I loved the house, because I thought it would be cool to own acreage, because I liked the idea of keeping neighbors at a distance, and mostly because I could, i.e. we had the money to do it and I had a job that allowed me to work at home. But not because I wanted us to live our life as part of a rural community.
And definitely not because I wanted us to forego access to urban services. Quite the opposite. Far too often towards the end of the day I would suggest that we “run some errands,” i.e. drive the hour into town, eat at a restaurant, do some shopping, visit a bookstore, then drive the hour back to the house, an excursion that could easily eat up five hours. And of course the purpose wasn’t to run errands, but to eat up those five hours in an entertaining and diverting way. The kids would be asleep by the time we arrived home, we’d stay up a little longer reading or talking or watching television, and then the evening would be done with.
Fortunately, we didn’t have the stamina or the funds to spend every evening that way, and so there were many evenings spent at home, capping off an entire day spent at home. We spent a lot of time together at home as a family. And we slowly learned to enjoy it, eventually to prefer it.
Although we weren’t always good at the “at home” part, we became very good at the “as a family” part. We couldn’t imagine wanting to go somewhere in order to leave the kids behind; wherever we went, we went together. Vacations were spent doing something the entire family would enjoy—which often required that Debbie and I learn to enjoy new things. My folks griped about never having a chance to watch their grandkids while we went out. Our friends got used to us never accepting an invitation to an activity where our kids couldn’t come along.
Family-centeredness changed the way we lived our lives. It was part of the motivation for throwing out our television set, and it eased the pain of doing it—we were glad for the extra time together. It led us to start homeschooling, when we realized that it wasn’t right to take a boy who had always been with us and sending him away for seven long hours a day. And it gave us the strength to detach ourselves from external involvements when we thought it was necessary.
Eventually, family-centeredness helped us to get better at the “stay home” part. Even with easy urban access to oodles of options for distracting ourselves, we preferred to spend our time enjoying one another’s company; no need to go out for that. And after making a few stabs at child enrichment activities—ballet, martial arts, music lessons—we gave up on them because it wasn’t possible for the entire family to enjoy them.
After five years of living in the city, our home-centeredness was tested again when we moved to twenty acres in an isolated part of Colorado, about an hour from Colorado Springs and a half-hour from a town of any size. We didn’t ace the test, but we earned a solid B. The kids enriched themselves by spending time with us and each other, exploring the acreage, building imaginary structures, climbing the large rock outcropping behind the house, reading, singing. It was helpful that there was a decent supermarket and a pizza parlor thirty minutes away, and we would make a trip to the city every week or so, but for the most part we stayed home and enjoyed it.
Why was this simpler? Because the family obligations we had decided to center on are always there, whether you treat them that way or not. The other things that we were able to involve ourselves with were not alternatives, but only things to do in addition. We simplified our lives by jettisoning as many external involvements as we could without adversely affecting our obligations to God and the community. There were lots of involvements to cut off and lots more opportunities for involvement to resist. The result was lots of time and energy to spend on the family obligations that remained.
To make it all possible, there was one bit of thinking we had to put aside: the idea that family life constituted a zero-sum game, that a family member’s benefit was some other family member’s loss. Fortunately I had run across an anecdote that spoke straight to the heart of such misguided thinking. A well-known Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, was visited by a former pupil who had recently married and had a child. The monk asked him how he was enjoying married life. The pupil answered with words to this effect: “At first I didn’t enjoy it at all. I thought that the demands on my time were impossible. After I spent time being a husband to my wife, and being a father to my child, there was no time left over for me, and I was very resentful about it. But suddenly it occurred to me—the time I spent being a husband to my wife was my time, as was the time I spent with my child, as was the time we spent together as a family. Suddenly, it was all my time.”
If you believe like I do that the purpose of life is to marry a godly spouse and raise godly children, then you’ll agree with me that there is no more satisfying way to spend your time than with your family. Learning to enjoy it will give you the strength to eliminate old entanglements and resist new entanglements that detract from fulfilling your purpose.
Note: if you found any of these observations irritating, please read this post before your blood pressure goes up any further.
“Because the family obligations we had decided to center on are always there, whether you treat them that way or not. The other things that we were able to involve ourselves with were not alternatives, but only things to do in addition.”
I think this is a very interesting point. I do have a question, however. When do you know when your obligations are fulfilled? Are there some concrete guidelines? I’m not looking for an excuse to say they are fulfilled; if anything, I may be looking for the opposite. When you have a young teen, you start to hear a lot of people talking about how much they need their independence. While I like the idea of a teen being responsible, I don’t think that that necessarily goes in hand with independence.
As our own children get older, I think it is not that my obligations to them are gradually fulfilled, but that my authority over them gradually diminishes. And I use the word “authority” deliberately; as defined at dictionary.com, it means “the power to determine, adjudicate, or otherwise settle issues or disputes; jurisdiction; the right to control, command, or determine.”
With the older children, it is increasingly less appropriate for us to exercise parental authority as such. we have to rely instead on the relationship we’ve established with them over the years, which is based on a promise we’ve made through both words and actions: we’ll always have your best interests at heart.
Our instructions are turning from commands into requests/suggestions, not so much in the way we phrase them but in the way the kids take them. They know that as they grow older there is much less “because I said so” behind what we tell them. The responsibility for acting is shifting from us to them. There is much more room for them to proceed in ways other than what we think woud be best; at the same time, we’re responsible for not putting them to unneeded tests by telling them to do things against their better judgment—a judgment we’ve worked for years to form in them.
This is an aspect of family life we are only just beginning to experience, so I’m afraid my answers are pretty vague and half-baked at this point. I’ll definitely be thinking deeply about this as our first two continue their transition to early adulthood.
Hmm, I was thinking about my question from a different angle, but I liked what you said (particularly the part about not putting them to unneeded tests) and can see how you got that from the fact that I juxtaposed my question with a comment about teens.
I think that at 12/13, we’re only at the very beginning of this stage where responsibility shifts. We certainly do much more talking and appealing to the heart this year than before, but we also have to lay down some pretty clear consequences now and then.
What I was thinking about, rather than at what *age* of child/young adult are your obligations fulfilled, is at what *level of outside involvement* can you tell that you’re not fulfilling those obligations and need to jettison some? This is a question that I don’t often hear addressed.
Probably, I think the family should cut back on some activities if any if its members is exhibiting the sort of grumpiness that comes from lack of stability and calm routine. (The trick is distinguishing that from plain old selfishness, which may be mixed in.) And certainly it would be in order if it caused marital problems, debt, or ill-health. But if you have that flexible, easy-going, sociable sort of family, and a job that encourages social involvement, I can see how a parent might never get to the point where he realized he was overcommitted. Most people would say, “It depends,” and perhaps it does. But elsewhere you said that you didn’t like to give that answer, so I wondered if you had another.
Also, I realized after I posted this that there was another one of the short articles that may address this issue more directly, but since I haven’t memorized which article contains which topics yet, I don’t remember which it was right now!
Oops, obviously by “jettison some,” I meant the outside involvements, not the family obligations! I’m not doing very well with antecedents this morning.