6. Good families prize their rituals. Nothing welds a family more than these. Rituals are vital for a family without histories because they evoke a past, imply a future and hint a continuity. Rituals are performances of our lives.
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7. Good families are affectionate. This is of course a matter of style. A handshake or a hug is sign of affection for each other. Regardless of age, everyone needs to be hugged and comforted in a brotherly or sisterly way now and then. Preferably now.
KEYS
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Group discussion Work in small groups to discuss these questions in order to prepare for your research. 1. What akes someone in the family a chief, or a heroine? 2. Why is the role of a switchboard operator assumed
3. Good families are much to all their members, but everything to none. Good families are fortresses with many windows and doors to the outer world. … Parents are devoted to what they do outside as they are to each other and their children. Their curiosity and passion are contagious. Everybody, where they live, is busy. Paint is spattered on eyeglasses. Mud lurks under fingernails. Person-to-person calls come in the middle of the night from Tokyo and Brussels. Catcher’s mitts, ballet slippers, overdue library books, and other signs of extra-familial concerns are everywhere.
Study Task Design a research project to find out the major characteristics
of a happy family in your culture. Before you start to design, read and discuss the Howard’s theory about the characteristics of a good family in small groups.
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Group discussion Suggested points 3. Each member in the family is actively engaged in his/her own
pursuit. In the meanwhile, he/she also keeps an eye on what others are doing by caring about them. Thus members will influence each other by what they are doing. So one is both alone and in a group, living in a whirl of busy activities, engaged by different members, but cared about by all. 4. A good family should also have good hospitality. When entertaining one’s guests, one is actually developing and consolidating friendship for all family members. A good family is always warm-hearted to their friends.
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2. Good families have a switchboard operator – someone who cannot help but keep track of what all the others are up to. And this role is assumed rather than assigned.
Research Project
In Search of The Good Family68
You’ve read and heard a lot about issues centering on the family. What is your idea of a happy family? Is there such a thing as the Good Family? Does there exist a universal pattern?
Do different cultures have different understandings of a happy family?
Leo Tolstoy said all happy families are alike. But in what sense are they alike?
8. Good families have a sense of place, which in these days is not achieved easily.
9. Good families, not just the blood kind, find some way to connect with posterity. What we are doing should be done with children in our view, even though they are not ours.
needs a host? 5. Why should we take the givens as blessings rather than as curses?
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Group discussion Work in small groups to discuss these questions in order to prepare for your research. 6. What are the rituals in your family that function as a binding force? 7. How do your family show affection to each other? 8. How does your family extend love beyond blood ties? 9. Does your family have a sense of place? Where is it? 10. How do your family honor elders, yours or someone else’s?
1. Good families have a chief, or a heroine, or a founder – someone around whom others cluster, whose achievements, and whose examples spur them on to like eats.
5. Good families deal squarely with direness. Family life is a set of givens, and it takes courage to see certain givens as blessings rather than as curses. Contradictions and inconsistencies are givens, too. It is a battle against the caprices of our fate.
10. Good families also honor their elders. The wider the age range, the stronger the family ties. Grandparents are remarkably important for the early lives of our children.
To find answers to these questions, you need to investigate this issue by carrying out a small piece of research.
The American writer Jane Howard writes an article in which she fantasizes about the characteristics of the good family. Here is a brief summary. Use her fantasies as guiding principles to find out how your friends or classmates think of the criteria of a good family.