“That hallowed unit – mum, dad, kids – is no longer part of a wider whole. It is a social quark, a subatomic particle that manifests in courtship, whizzes through marriage and child-rearing, and dissolves in divorce or old age. It comes together, divides, and vanishes.”
-Michael Schluter, British Social Entrepreneur in “The R Factor”
Any parent will tell you that their kids grow up too fast.
Older parents will tell younger parents some variation of “Enjoy the diapers, the mess, the sleepless nights, the cuddles, the playtime, because before you know it, it’s all gone.”
This is more than just nostalgia for the unique joys that little children can bring into your life. It’s an actual mourning of a family life and a family culture which, as Michael Schluter says above, lasted for a little while but has dissolved and vanished.
Never to be seen or experienced again.
This is for the most part, a modern phenomenon. And as I wrote on recently, the result is that each generation of a family can very easily become estranged from the ones who came before. Now we have Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, Gen Z, etc. within the same family because while they pass on DNA, they each experience and inhabit a radically different culture.
In the not too distant past, family culture and family experience went beyond “mum, dad, kids” and encompassed kin, clans or extended family connections. These larger family networks didn’t vanish after a single generation of children; successful ones had the ability to project family culture and identity into the future.
What is Family Culture?
Family culture is what a family says, does, and believes. (And these are not always the same). Your family culture is the identity that your family’s life produces.
For a famous example, if you are a member of the Manning family, there is a consistency what your family life produces: men playing quarterback at a high level, being a meticulous planner and being a Christian of some kind. This is who the Mannings are, at least from the outside.
This doesn’t happen by accident. Each Manning male isn’t just born with the ability to do these things. Sending multiple generations of your family to the NFL and instilling a deep belief in God is something that an intentional family culture produces.
If you’re not sure what your family culture is, a good place to start is to ask what kind of person your family produces.
But I should quickly add, the answers to this question can be a little misleading.
On the Receiving End of Culture
The answers can be misleading, because most modern families do not have a coherent and complete culture of their own. Hence, they as a family, are not intentionally producing the outcomes they’re getting. And they may even be producing the opposite of what they want.
Instead, most families are given and happily receive a mass media and consumer culture which they can customize to fit their preferences. It feels like it belongs to us, but we don’t own it.
And because we don’t own it, it can change on us in the blink of an eye or very quickly turn one generation against another. It make the old seem irrelevant, or the new ridiculous. It can make a parent’s job infinitely harder and self-defeating because all the cultural, technological and social tools you use with your kids can and often are working against you.
An example of that is the public school system which is the acceptable and predominant way to raise and educate our children. But with every passing year, more parents are turning to alternatives because they realize this cultural tool, which has been handed to them as a solution, is destroying rather than building the family culture they want.
Many things are like this. The twin boogeymen of the internet: social media and smartphones; we can point to popular music or other media, we can point to the college to cube farm career path, or we can point to a thousand other things as see this trend. But as I’ve pointed out before, it doesn’t matter if the popular things are socially acceptable or Rated R or appropriate for kids or new or fashionable or traditional. All that matters is:
Do I own it? And can I use it to get the family culture I want?
If the answer is no, nothing else matters.
Imagine
An intentionally built family culture sounds like a fantasy but it was reality for most of human history and is still reality for many today who spend the time and exercise the discipline to create it.
Imagine a family where there was no arguing about chores, where each member of the family wanted to help and knew how.
Imagine a family with little to no yelling and screaming, where parents and children alike understood how to manage the inevitable conflict that comes from being a family.
Imagine a family where the boys were not drowning in video games, doom scrolling or porn, and where they were surrounded by aspirational models of manhood.
Imagine a family where the girls were not so susceptible to social media trends but were surrounded by calming and influential models of womanhood.
Imagine a family where the young adults understood how to cultivate romantic relationships and communicate with the opposite sex.
Imagine a family where proper technology use was the norm.
Imagine a family that knew its own history and could tell its own heroic and adventure-filled tales.
Imagine a family that was not a “subatomic particle”, vanishing the moment the youngest moves out, but was a link in a great chain, passing wisdom, story, knowledge and greatness down the line, the greatest kind of inheritance.
Family culture is about transmitting your values, beliefs and principles to the next generation and the next.
Kids will get someone’s values instilled in them. They may as well be yours.
Preview
Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing more on family culture and how to design your own. We’ll use the following framework I developed for those posts:
Passage & Commitment: Building An Identity
One thing I’m interested in is whether you plan on encouraging your children to restrict their pool of potential marriage partners to people with similar culture. That used to be the norm, but I am not sure if, for example, the Mannings are doing it.