This is a continuation of my last post, “Who’s Job Is It To Find You A Wife?”,
To properly set the stage for how parents can help their kids get married, I want to recycle two business school analogies. For those of you who don’t know my story, I unfortunately have an MBA.
I first came down with an MBA about 14 years ago, but with the help of family and friends, I have since mostly recovered. However one of the lasting effects of an MBA is a brain stuffed with case studies and business analogies. The best doctors in the world have heretofore found no cure for this.
But perhaps in this case, my ailment will be to your benefit.
The Innovator’s Dilemma
In the famous business book by the late Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma says that large, successful companies with proven and fat profit margins struggle to innovate because the smart business thing to do is to keep managing those proven profit margins. Whereas the new businesses in the market will pursue unproven, riskier and less profitable innovations. These can grow and potentially threaten or destroy the larger business over time.
A famous and recent example of this is Blockbuster. In the early to mid 90s. Blockbuster owned the VHS rental market. Over the next 10 years though, newer companies without a VHS rental business to protect were willing to bet it all on the latest unproven tech. From their golden throne, Blockbuster could never fully convince itself to do the same. To do so would be to undercut their own very profitable stores. What kind of dummy does that?
And so they did nothing for just long enough to go out of business. The innovator’s dilemma is thinking you have a choice between change and keeping the status quo, when your real choice is between change and dying out.
Survivorship Bias
An oft-cited example of survivorship bias comes from World War II. In 1942-43, the Allies were losing large numbers of men and planes in bombing raids over Germany, which naturally led them to study how they could make their planes stronger. Initially they looked at the hits suffered by the returning planes, thinking the giant holes in these planes indicated the weakest spots in need of reinforcement.
But they soon realized the opposite was more likely to be true: the weakest parts of the plane were those spots where the surviving planes had no damage at all. For example, if every returning plane suffered no engine hits, that probably means every plane that took hits to its engines was destroyed; damage there was not survivable. It doesn’t matter what damage the surviving planes took, it matters what damage they didn’t take.
Survivorship bias is making decisions based only on the survivors of a process and not ever considering all the people, businesses (or planes) which didn’t make it through.
Accepting the Need For Change
What does any of this have to do with parents helping their kids get married? It’s about approaching this subject with the right mindset.
It’s easy to bemoan the issues surrounding dating and marriage yet much harder to do anything about it. So the first instinct many of us have is to wish we could “go back” to some time when things were better. But going back is quite impossible. And so, we switch to our second instinct, which is even less helpful: criticize potential solutions as unrealistic or unnecessary:
“I didn’t do any of this and I turned out fine.” Lots of young people get married without any community support at all.” (survivorship bias) Going forward, we can’t make judgments based only off the survivors of our current courtship and marriage scene. Indeed no matter the conditions, a good portion of our youth will marry, have children and succeed. But we need to take into account the growing number of bodies strewn across the relationship battlefield. Why didn’t they make it?
“We don’t need to change, we need to stick with what has worked.These recommendations are too hard, costly or risky.” (innovator’s dilemma). Going forward, the choice that parents have is not between changing how we prep our kids for courtship and keeping the status quo. The true choice is between changing how we prep our kids for courtship and the end of our family trees. We aren’t Blockbuster in 1995. We’re Blockbuster in 2005.
We must open our minds to the need to change, to think differently about our situation. The goal of this article is not to invite quibbling over minor details but to inspire further thought and action; to push those who care about this subject toward creative solutions.
Being conservative in values is good; but being conservative in action, temperament and imagination in today’s world will lead us all to ruin, and indeed already has.
The Parent As Matchmaker?
In the last post, I made the case that young people are hardly to be blamed for the dating predicament they face. But perhaps I was a tad too harsh on the parents, at whose feet I laid the bulk of the blame. In fairness, no one told us it was our job either. In fact, if parents of the last 50 years have received any message it was decidedly that it was NOT our job to interfere and that our kids need to be empowered to do whatever they want; their romantic life being theirs alone.
But this is enemy propaganda; the equivalent of Netflix telling Blockbuster all is well.
Now parents face a double dilemma of having to lead the next generation down a path they’ve never trod. How do you train your kids to do something no one trained you to do? How do you train your kids to do something the culture will actively fight you on?
Have no fear, I am here to help you make this concept make sense and in true MBA form, give you an actionable framework as a tool you can refer back to.
First, we must dismiss the simplistic notion that there are only two roles parents can play: either the absentee approver “whatever makes you happy” or the meddlesome matchmaker “you will marry this person I’ve chosen for you”.
Instead this framework asks the parent to play the role of a coordinator on behalf of his or her children.
The Coordinating Parent Framework
The Coordinating Parent must help their children through each of these questions:
With Who?
Doing What?
Where Will It Happen?
How Will Youth Succeed?
And the answers to these questions change along the axis of When, i.e., the age and maturity of the child. What a parent needs to coordinate for their child at 14 is very different from what the parent does at 17 or 20 and so the parental coordinating role changes at each stage of 1) younger adolescent, 2) older adolescent and 3) young adult.
I am very sorry to do this, but my MBA is coming back again and I made this framework into a Powerpoint visual aide:
There’s a lot here and I’ll go into more detail on each part of this framework below.