Family Relationships Are Works In Progress
My wife and I take a very
academic approach to family and relationships. So we
decided to research every article on family relationships we could find
before we had kids. We both came from fairly dysfunctional
families, and we wanted to avoid the pitfalls in our own lives.
Learning how to establish healthy family relationship is not
something that is easy to do on your own. Either you are raised
with it, or you are often doomed to follow the same cycles that
your parents did. Breaking out of it was a major project for
both of us, and something that we were unable to succeed at
completely at first.
For the first several years, our relationships with family were
very good. We learned a lot about child rearing before we
undertook it ourselves – something that I think every parent
should be required to do. After awhile, however, we succumbed to
one of the most common problems in any serious undertaking –
flagging interest. It is hard to admit, but even a noble project
like raising healthy, happy kids becomes less interesting over
time. At first we dived into the research, but after we had
learned everything we thought we needed to, we simply grew bored
of it. Once our attention towards family relationships started
to flag, our parenting abilities also started to give way. Soon,
we were no better than your average parent.
We were both very loving parents, both to each other and to our
kids, but everything about our lives seemed to be kind of stale
and dried out. We knew that we needed some help with family
relationships. We were not very interested in going to a
psychoanalyst or family therapist. We were all pretty busy with
our lives, and anyway we didn't believe in that type of
protracted, excessively verbal cure. Instead, we decided to go
to a family relationship retreat – one custom tailored to help
families increase their communications with each other. Let me
tell you, it worked wonders.
Family relationships are like any other projects. The more
consistently attentive you are to them, the more successful they
will be. If your attention flags, you will start running into
trouble. If, however, you are diligent in your dedication to
your family, you can keep loving, positive relationships
throughout your entire life. It is just a matter of putting in
the work.
