So Why Don't We Put First Things First?

Most people clearly feel that family is top priority. Most would even put family above their own health, if it came to it. They would put family ahead of their own life. They would even die for their family. But when you ask them to really look at their lifestyle and where they give their time and their primary attention and focus, you almost always find that family gets subordinated to other values-work, friends, private hobbies.

In our surveys of over a quarter of a million people, Habit 3 is, of all the habits, the one where people consistently give themselves the lowest marks. Most people feel there's a real gap between what really matters most to them-including family-and the way they live their daily lives.

Why is this happening? What is the reason for the gap?

After one of my presentations I was visiting with a gentleman who said, "Stephen, I really don't know if I'm happy with what I've done in my life. I don't know if the price I've paid to get where I am has been worth it. I'm in line now for the presidency of my company, and I'm not sure I even want it. I'm in my late fifties, and could easily be the president for several years, but it would consume me. I know what it takes.

"What I missed most was the childhood of my kids. I just wasn't there for them, and even when I was there, I wasn't really 'there.' My mind and my heart were focused on other things. I tried to give quality time because I knew I didn't have quantity, but often it was disorienting and confusing. I even tried to buy my kids off by giving them things and providing exciting experiences, but the real bonding never took place.

"And my kids feel the enormous loss themselves. It's just as you talk about, Stephen-I have climbed the ladder of success, and as I'm getting near the top rung, I realize that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. I just don't have this feeling in our family-this beautiful family culture you've been talking about. But I feel as if that's where the riches are. It's not in money; it's not in positions. It's in this family relationship."

Then he began to open his briefcase. "Let me show you something," he said as he pulled out a large piece of paper. "This is what excites me!" he exclaimed, spreading it out between us. It was a blueprint of a home he was building. He called it his "three-generation home." It was designed to be a place where children and grandchildren could come and have fun and enjoy interacting with their cousins and other relatives. He was building it in Savannah, Georgia, right on the beach. As he went over the plans with me, he said, "What excites me most about this is the way it excites my kids. They also feel as though they lost their childhood with me. They miss that feeling, and they want and need it.

"In this three-generation home, we have a common project to work on together. And as we work on this project, we think about their children-my grandchildren. In a sense I am reaching my children through their children, and they love it. My children want my involvement with their children."

As he rolled the paper up and put it back into his briefcase, he said, "This is so important to me, Stephen! If accepting this position means that we have to move or that I won't have the time to really invest in my children and grandchildren, I've decided I'm not going to take it."

Notice how, for many years, "family" was not this man's most important priority. And he and his family lost many years of precious family experience because of it. But at this time in his life he had come to realize the importance of the family. In fact, family had become so important to him that it eclipsed even the presidency of a major international firm-the last rung on the ladder of "success."

Clearly, putting family first doesn't necessarily mean that you have to buy a new home or give up your job. But it does mean that you "walk your talk"-that your life really reflects and nurtures the supreme value of family.

In the midst of pressures-particularly regarding work and career-many people are blind to the real priority of family. But think about it: Your professional role is temporary. When you retire from being a salesman, banker, or designer, you will be replaced. The company will go on. And your life will change significantly as you move out of that culture and lose the immediate affirmation of your work and your talent.

But your role in the family will never end. You will never be replaced. Your influence and the need for your influence never ends. Even after you are gone, your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will still look to you as their parent or grandparent. Family is one of the few permanent roles in life, perhaps the only truly permanent role.

So if you're living your life around a temporary role and allowing your treasure chest to remain barren in terms of your only real permanent role, then you're letting yourself be seduced by the culture and robbed of the true richness of your life-the deep and lasting satisfaction that only comes through family relationships.

In the end, life teaches us what is important, and that is family. Often for people on their deathbed, things not done in the family are a source of greatest regret. And hospice volunteers report that in many cases unresolved issues-particularly with family members-seem to keep people holding on, clinging to life until there is a resolution-an acknowledging, an apologizing, a forgiving-that brings peace and release.

So why don't we get the message of the priority of family when we're first attracted to someone, when our marriage is new, when our children are small? And why don't we remember it when the inevitable challenges come?

For many of us, life is well described by Rabindranath Tagore when he said, "The song that I came to sing remains unsung. I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instrument."1 We're busy-incredibly busy. We're going through the motions. But we never seem to reach the level of life where the music happens.

The Family: Sideshow or Main Tent?

The first reason we don't put family first goes back to Habit 2. We're not really connected to our deepest priorities. Remember the story about the businessmen and -women and their spouses in Habit 2 who had difficulty creating their family mission statements? Remember how they were unable to achieve the victory they wanted in their families until they really, deeply prioritized "family" in their own hearts and minds-inside out?

Many people have the feeling that family should be first. They may really want to put family first. But until that deep priority connection is there-and a commitment is made to it that is stronger than all the other forces that play on our everyday lives-we will not have what it takes to prioritize the family. Instead, we will be driven or enticed or derailed by other things.

In April 1997, U.S. News & World Report published a hard-hitting article entitled "Lies Parents Tell Themselves About Why They Work" that really challenged parents to do some serious soul searching and conscience work in this area. Authors Shannon Brownlee and Matthew Miller claim that few topics are as important-and involve as much self-deception and dishonesty-as finding the proper balance between child-rearing and work. They list five lies that parents tell themselves to rationalize (create rational lies) around their work-preference decisions. In summary, their findings were as follows: Lie #1: We need the extra money. (But research shows that better-off Americans are nearly as likely to say they work for basic necessities as those who live near the poverty line.) Lie #2: Day care is perfectly good. ("The most recent comprehensive study conducted by researchers at four universities found that while 15 percent of day care facilities were excellent, 70 percent were 'barely adequate,' and 15 percent were abysmal. Children in that vast middle category were physically safe but received scant or inconsistent emotional support and little intellectual stimulation.") Lie #3: Inflexible companies are the key problem. (The truth is that family-friendly policies now in place are usually ignored. Many people want to spend more time at the office. "Home life has become more like an efficiently run but joyless workplace, while the actual workplace, with its new emphasis on empowerment and teamwork, is more like a family.") Lie #4: Dads would gladly stay home if their wives earned more money. (In reality, few men ever seriously contemplate such a thing. "Men and women define 'masculinity' not in terms of athletic or sexual prowess but by the ability to be a 'good provider' for their families.") Lie #5: High taxes force both of us to work. (Even recent tax cuts have sent well-off spouses rushing into the job market.) It's easy to get addicted to the stimulation of the work environment and a certain standard of living, and to make all other lifestyle decisions based on the assumption that both parents have to work full-time. As a result, parents are held hostage by these lies-violating their conscience but feeling that they really have no choice.

The place to start is not with the assumption that work is non-negotiable; it's with the assumption that family is non-negotiable. That one shift of mind-set opens the door to all kinds of creative possibilities.

In her bestselling book The Shelter of Each Other, psychologist Mary Pipher shares the story of a couple who were caught up in a hectic lifestyle.2 Both husband and wife worked long hours, trying to make ends meet. They felt they had no time for personal interests, for each other, or for their three-year-old twins. They anguished over the fact that it was day care providers who had seen their boys' first steps and heard their first words, and that they were now reporting problems in behavior. This couple felt they had essentially fallen out of love, and the wife also felt torn apart by her unfulfilled desire to help her mother who was ill with cancer. They seemed trapped in what appeared to them to be an impossible situation.

But through counseling they were able to make some changes that created a dramatic difference in their lives. They began by setting aside Sunday nights to spend with their family and paying attention to each other-giving back rubs and expressing words of affection. The husband told his employers he would no longer be able to work on Saturdays. The wife eventually quit her job and stayed home with the boys. They asked her mother to move in with them, pooling their financial resources and providing a built-in storyteller for the boys. They cut back in many areas. The husband carpooled to work. They quit buying things except for essentials. They stopped eating out.

As Mary Pipher said, "The family had made some hard choices. They had realized that they could have more time or more money but not both. They had chosen time."3 And that choice made a profound difference in the quality of their personal and family lives. They were happier, more fulfilled, less stressful, and more in love.

Of course, this may not be the solution for every family that's feeling hassled and out of sync. But the point is that there are options, there are choices. You can consider cutting back, simplifying your lifestyle, changing jobs, shifting from full- to part-time work, cutting commuting time by having fewer, longer workdays or working closer to home, participating in job sharing, or creating a virtual office in your home. The bottom line is that there is no need to be held hostage by these lies if family is really your top priority. And making the family priority will push you into creative exploration of possible alternatives.

Parenthood: A Unique Role

There's no question that more money can mean a better lifestyle not only for yourself but for your kids. They may be able to go to a finer school, have educational computer software, and even better health care. And recent studies also confirm that a child whose father or mother stays home and resents it is worse off than if the parents go to work.

But there's also no question that the role of parents is a unique one, a sacred stewardship in life. It has to do with nurturing the potential of a special human being entrusted to their care. Is there really anything on any list of values that would outweigh the importance of fulfilling that stewardship well-socially, mentally, and spiritually, as well as economically?

There is no substitute for the special relationship between a parent and a child. There are times when we would like to believe there is. When we choose to put a child in day care, for example, we want to believe it's good, and so we do. If someone seems to have a positive attitude and a caring disposition, we easily believe they have both the character and the competence to help raise our child. But that which we desire most earnestly, we believe most easily. This is all part of the rationalization process. The reality is that most day care is inadequate. To paraphrase child development expert Urie Bronfenbrenner, "You can't pay someone to do for a child what a parent will do for free."4 Even excellent child care can never do what a good parent can do.

So parents need to make their commitment to their children-to their family-before they make their commitment to work. And if they do need day care assistance, they need to shop for that care far more carefully than they ever would for a house or a car. They need to examine the track record of the person being considered to ensure that both character and competence are present and the person can pass the "smell test"-the sense of intuition and inspiration that parents can get regarding caregiving for their children. They need to build a relationship with the caregiver so that correct expectations and accountability are established.

Good faith is absolutely insufficient. Good intentions will never replace bad judgment. Parents need to give trust, but they also need to verify competence. Many people are trustworthy in terms of character, but they are simply not competent-they lack knowledge and skill, and often are absolutely unaware of their incompetence. Others may be very competent but lack the character-the maturity and integrity, sincere caring, and the ability to be both kind and courageous.

And even with good care, the question each parent has to ask is "How often is such proxy caregiving right in my situation?" Sandra and I have some friends who have said that when their children were little, they felt they had all kinds of options and freedoms to do whatever they wanted. Their children were subject to them and dependent on them, and essentially they could have surrogate parenting in the form of day care and sitters whenever they wanted. So both parents became very involved in other things. But now, as their children are getting older, they are beginning to reap the whirlwind. They have no relationship. The children are getting into destructive lifestyles, and the parents have become greatly alarmed. "If we had it to do over," they've said, "we would put a higher priority on our family, on these children-particularly when they were little. We would have made a greater investment."

As John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"5 On the other hand, we have another friend who said, "I've learned that for these years when I am raising these children, my other interests-professional interests, development interests, social interests-are to become secondary. My most important focus is to be there for my children, to invest myself in them at this critical stage." She went on to say that this is difficult for her because she has so many interests and capabilities, but she is committed to it because she knows how vitally important it is.

What is the difference in these two situations? Priority and commitment-a clear sense of vision and the commitment to live with integrity to it. So if we're not really prioritizing the family in daily life, the first place to look for answers is back in Habit 2: Is the mission statement really deep enough?

"When the Infrastructure Shifts, Everything Rumbles"

Assuming that we do have our Habit 2 work done, the next place we need to look is at the turbulent environment we're trying to navigate through.

We took a brief look at a few major trends in Chapter 1. But now let's take a closer look at the society we're living in. Let's examine a few of the changes over the past forty to fifty years in four dimensions-culture, laws, economy, and technology-and see how these changes impact you and your family. These facts I'm going to share come from surveys done in the United States, but they reflect growing trends worldwide.

Popular Culture

In the 1950s in the United States, the average child watched little or no TV, and what he saw on television was stable, two-parent families who generally interacted with respect. Today, the average child watches seven hours of television per day. By the end of grade school he's seen over eight thousand murders and one hundred thousand acts of violence.6 During this time he's spent an average of five minutes a day with his father and twenty minutes with his mother, and most of that time was spent either eating or watching TV!7 Just think about it: seven hours of TV a day and five minutes with Dad. Unbelievable!

He also has increasing access to videos and music that portray pornography, illicit sex, and violence. As we noted in Chapter 1, he goes to schools where the major concerns have shifted from chewing gum and running in the halls to drug abuse, teen pregnancy, suicide, rape, and assault.

In addition to these influences, many homes have actually begun to take on the tone of the business world. In her ground-breaking analysis The Time Bind, sociologist Arlie Hochschild points out how, for many people, home and office have changed places. Home has become a frantic exercise in "beat the clock," with family members having fifteen minutes to eat before rushing off to a soccer game, and trying to bond in the half hour before bed so they don't waste time. At work, on the other hand, you can socialize and relax on a break. By comparison, work seems like a refuge-a haven of grown-up sociability, competence, and relative freedom. And as a result, some people even allow their workday to lengthen because they enjoy work more than home. Hochschild writes, "In this new model of family-and-work life, a tired parent flees a world of unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony, and managed cheer of work."8 And it's not just the changing tone of the home environment. There is enormous affirmation on the job. There are many extrinsic rewards-including recognition, compensation, and promotion-that feed our sense of self-worth, exhilarate us, and exert a powerful pull away from family and home. They create a seductive vision of a different destination, an idyllic, warm-climated Utopia that combines the satisfaction of hard work with the apparent justification-in the "busy-ness" of meeting the unbelievable schedules and demands-for neglecting what really matters most.

The rewards of home and family, on the other hand, are almost all intrinsic. In today's world society is not on the sidelines giving praise and affirmation in your role as a father or mother. You're not paid to do it. You don't get prestige out of doing it. No one cheers you on in the role. As a parent your compensation is the satisfaction that comes from playing a significant role in influencing a life for good that no one else can fill. It's a proactive choice that can only come out of your own heart.

Laws

These changes in the popular culture have driven profound changes in the political will and in resulting law. For example, throughout time, "marriage" has been recognized as the foundation of a stable society. Years ago the U.S. Supreme Court called it "the foundation of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress."9 It was a commitment, a covenant among three parties-a man, a woman, and society. And for many it included a fourth: God.

Author and teacher Wendell Berry has said: If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and on its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could ever join them. Lovers, then, "die" into their union with one another as a soul "dies" into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing. . . .

The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.10 But today, marriage is often no longer a covenant or a commitment. It's simply a contract between consenting adults-a contract that's sometimes considered unnecessary, is easily broken when no longer seen as convenient, and is sometimes even set up with the anticipation of possible failure through a prenuptial agreement. Society and God are often no longer even part of it. The legal system no longer supports it; in some instances, in fact, it discourages it by penalizing responsible fatherhood and encouraging mothers on welfare not to marry.

As a result, according to noted Princeton University family historian Lawrence Stone, "The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of, and seems unique. . . . There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer." And in the words of Wendell Berry, "If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness."11

Economy

Since 1950 the median income in the United States has increased by ten times, but the cost of the average home has increased by fifteen times and inflation has risen by 600 percent. These changes alone are forcing more and more parents out of the home just to make ends meet. In a critical review of The Time Bind (referred to above), Betsy Morris takes exception to Hochschild's view that parents spend more time at work because they find it more pleasant than dealing with the challenges of home life. "More likely," she says, "is that parents are killing themselves because they have to keep their jobs."12 To make ends meet and for other reasons-including the desire to maintain a certain lifestyle-the percentage of families where there is one parent working and one at home with the children has dropped from 66.7 percent in 1940 to 16.9 percent in 1994. And today some 14.6 million children live in poverty-90 percent of whom live in one-parent homes.13 There is simply much less parental involvement with children, and the reality is that for many, family gets "second shift."

The very structure of the economic world in which we live has been redefined. When the government took over the responsibility of caring for the aged and destitute in response to the Great Depression, the economic link between family generations was broken. And this has had a reverberating effect on every other link of the family. Economics define survival, and when this economic sense of responsibility between generations is broken, it begins to cut into the other tendons and sinews that hold the generations together, including the social and the spiritual. As a result, the short-term solution has become the long-range problem. In most cases "family" is no longer seen as an intergenerational and extended family unit that cares for itself. It has become reduced to the nuclear family of parents and children at home, and even that is being threatened. The government is seen as the first resource rather than last.

We now live in a world that values personal freedom and independence more than responsibility and interdependence-in a world with tremendous mobility in which creature comforts (especially television) enable social isolation and independent entertainment. Social life is being fractured. Families and individuals are becoming increasingly isolated. Escape from responsibility and accountability is available everywhere.

Technology

Changes in technology have accelerated the impact of changes in every other dimension. In addition to global communication and instant access to vast sources of valuable information, today's technology also provides immediate, graphic, and often unfiltered access to a full spectrum of highly impactful visual images-including pornography and vivid scenes of bloodshed and violence. Supported by and saturated with advertising, technology puts us into materialistic overload. It has caused a revolution in expectations. Certainly it increases our ability to reach out to others, including family members, and establish connections to people around the globe. But it also diverts us and keeps us from interacting with and relating in meaningful ways to members of our family in our own home.

We can look to research for these answers, but there may be an even better source. What does your own heart tell you about the effects of television on you and your children? Does watching television make you kinder? More thoughtful? More loving? Does it help you build strong relationships in your home? Or does it make you feel numb? Tired? Lonely? Confused? Mean? Cynical?

When we think about the effects of the media on our families, we must realize that the media can literally drive the culture in the home. In order to take seriously what is going on in the media (unlikely romance, promiscuity, battling robots, cynical relationships, fighting, and violent brutality), we must be willing to engage in a "suspension of disbelief." We must be willing to suspend our disbelief in actions we know as adults are not real-to desensitize our adult wisdom-and for thirty or sixty minutes allow ourselves to be taken on a journey to see how we like it.

What happens to us? We begin to believe that even TV news is normal life! Children especially believe. For example, one mother told me that after watching the six o'clock news on TV, her six-year-old said to her, "Mommy, why is everybody killing everybody?" This child believed what she was seeing was normal life!

It is true that there is so much good on TV-good information and enjoyable, uplifting entertainment. But for most of us and for our families, the reality is more like digging a lovely tossed salad out of the garbage dump. There may be some great salad there, but it's pretty hard to separate out the trash, the dirt, and the flies.

Low-grade, gradual pollution can desensitize us not only to how awful the pollution but also to what we are trading off for it. It would take an enormous amount of benefit from television to trade off the time that could be spent with family members learning, loving, working, and sharing together!

A recent U.S. News & World Report poll reported that 90 percent of those polled felt that the nation is slipping deeper into moral decline. That same poll found that 62 percent felt TV was hostile toward their moral and spiritual values.14 So why are so many watching so much TV?

As the societal indicators of crime, drug use, sexual pleasuring, and violence go on their upward climb with few plateaus, we should not forget that the most important indicator in any society is the commitment to loving, nurturing, and guiding the most important people in our lives-our children. Children learn the most important lessons not from Power Rangers or even Big Bird but from a loving family who reads with them, talks to them, works with them, listens to them, and spends happy time with them. When children feel loved, really loved, they thrive!

Reflect for one moment: What were the most memorable family times in your own life? Suppose you were on your deathbed. Would you really wish you'd spent more time watching TV?

In their book Time for Life, sociologists John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey reported that on the average, Americans spend fifteen of their forty hours of free time every week watching television. They suggest that maybe we are not as "busy" as we seem to be.15 As Marilyn Ferguson said in her landmark book The Aquarian Conspiracy, "Before we choose our tools and technology, we must choose our dreams and values, for some technologies serve them, while others make them unobtainable."16 It becomes increasingly apparent that the shifts in these meta-structures are dislocating everything. Almost all businesses are being reinvented and restructured to make them more competitive. Globalization of technology and markets is threatening the very survival not only of businesses but of governments, hospitals, health care, and educational systems as well. Every institution-including the family-is being impacted today as never before.

These changes represent a profound shift in the infrastructure, the underlying framework of our society. As Stanley M. Davis, a friend and colleague in various leadership development conferences, has said, "When the infrastructure shifts, everything else rumbles."17 These meta-structure shifts represent the turning of a major gear, which in turn turns a smaller gear and then a smaller one, and eventually the tiny ones at the other end are whizzing. Every organization is being affected-including the family.

As we're moving from the industrial to the informational infrastructure, everything is being dislocated and must find its bearing again. And yet many people are completely unaware of all this happening. Even though they see it and it creates anxiety, they don't know what is happening or why, or what they can do about it.

A High Trapeze Act . . . with No Safety Net!