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Happy Families Know Their History
Bruce Feiler’s new book, The Secret of Happy Families, has a lot of useful advice for anyone who finds himself in one. A lot of it isn’t revolutionary — communication, simple checklists, that sort of thing — but one secret he stresses took me by surprise.
Happy families, Feiler writes, know their family history:
Marshall and Robyn asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and also taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests and reached some overwhelming conclusions. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem, and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.
It also helps, I imagine, that these were families with “dinner table conversations” to be taped in the first place. We already know that families that eat a regular dinner together tend to be happier and more stable.
But I don’t think I would have guessed, without prompting, the value of knowing your family history — who came before you, who got married to whom, who arrived in this country when, how we got to where we live, who we look like — but when I wrote it all out just now, it seems elemental. How can you really be a happy and functioning member of a family if you don’t know who you are or who you’ve been?
I wonder, though, if it’s the act of telling the stories — passing down the legends and the half-true tales — that’s more important than the actual historical record.
Image Credit: Flickr user Lars Plougmann.
Published in General
I love getting together with my extended family and telling and hearing the family stories. It’s so important to me that when I acquired 4 step children whose mother had died, I began to ask her family members and friends to share their memories of her (what she was like, what she had done) with her children whenever they had a chance.
Record those stories. You will never regret doing so.
Seawriter
I liked the empty seat with the uneaten steak placed before it.
I suppose that’s probably the photographer’s spot at the table, but I prefer to imagine that the house is haunted!!! OOOOOHHHHOHHOJHHHHHH!!!!!
I’m sure part of it is knowing family history, but I wonder if an even more important part is knowing your family at all. I was lucky enough to grow up in a small town where both sets of grandparents lived, and where aunts, uncles, and cousins who didn’t live there were constantly visiting anyway. I was therefore able to grow up knowing my extended family (on both sides) very well, and feel extremely blessed and fortunate for this experience.
I remember throwing up in my mouth a little bit a number of years ago when I stumbled across a NYT wedding notice for Feiler and a particularly self-regarding Harvard ’90 classmate of mine — although on later reflection I realized that it was better for us Jews in particular and global society in general if they inflicted themselves on one another, instead of making partners with actual menschlichkeit miserable.
Feiler in particular is oh-so-wrong across oh-so-many books that it becomes weirdly impressive how he can secure the prior financing for these projects from book to book.
“Learning To Bow” was, for instance, a colossal cream-puff requiring — as it turned out — no real Japanese-language or Japanese-cultural-comprehension skills on the author’s part.
I myself wasn’t ever planning to make a book pitch about my own Japan experiences at the time of LTB’s publication, but I can imagine that Feiler’s book essentially shut the market at that time to any entries from any genuine, substantively skilled Japan-hands.
“Walking the Bible” is sort of in the same category, but fortunately only one entry in a huge field with actual heavyweights.
I, suppose I agree with the gist of this article, even though I suspect there is much to “the family that eats dinner together stays together” way of thinking. I have two thoughts:
1) Much like DrewInWisconsin, I grew up in a small town surrounded by relatives as did almost everybody else. In that kind of atmosphere it can be extremely hard to break out of the family stereotype (strait-jacket?). I heard my mother once comment at a piano recital that the little girl playing seemed to have exactly the same haughty attitude as her grandfather. Ouch! Also, teachers “knew” what to expect from the most kids, for good or bad, based on their family name. Lots of kids either worked very hard to live up to expectations or left town at the earliest convenience.
2) I’m ambivalent about adopted kids and family tree assignments. If I am my adopted kid’s mother, then my family tree is hers. Why would a family tree assignment cause hand-wringing about her “real” family? Although I understand the circumstances surrounding each adoption would make a lot of difference.
Regarding the picture – Is that a plate of ring bologna?
Yabbut. Look at that steak. What red meat eating man lets his steak remain in that position?
Claire, I, too, was puzzled by the photo.
I’m pretty much convinced that it’s the conversation, the time taken to talk with the kids and share stories (probably any kind) that’s the bonding factor here. Our kids are from a foreign country very far from here (okay…half in Europe and half in Asia…hint hint). My husband and I are from very small families, and what our ancestors did really doesn’t mean that much to our kids. Our rapport seems to have a different foundation.
funny, i didn’t even notice the photo. I saw the word happy families, and decided to read the post. :)
I get the Happy Family every time I’m at a Chinese buffet.
And then there’s all the food on the table that doesn’t seem to be getting eaten. Everybody’s got steak on their plates, but they’re letting the corn-on-the-cob and all those lovely sausages go uneaten!
WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS?!?!
Knowing your family history helps you understand that you are playing a part in history. Something bigger than yourself. You belong, because you belong. Good, bad or indifferent you are one of us (Great uncle Joe who was hung for cattle rustling…) Being connected to a larger whole is what we are made for. Having meaning in life is what we are made for. Love is what we are made for.
Richard O’Shea
Another branch is part Shawnee Indian – but I found out too late to apply for minority scholarships for our kids.
Hmmm! I’m 3/64 Native American (not kidding). That’s more than Elizabeth Warren.
Is that the photographer’s plate and steak in the foreground? And bottle of wine?
Re: family history and adoption: My brother is adopted. He looks nothing like the rest of us. Many family conversations involve who looks like who, or the way so-and-so talks that reminds everyone of Grampa, or whatever.
It can be either empowering or disorienting to help a child learn the history of two families, but it does not ignore the reality that the child’s origins are different than everyone else’s in the family, and that is neither good or bad but just the facts.
If one child was born in a taxi or something, that would be part of family lore. So if one child was born to other people, it can be ok to consider that a normal part of history.
And talking about what we think of the picture instead of the post,…
I feel like I know that woman on the left in the front of the photo illustration… she just loooks familiar. Is it just that type of face or have I met her before? sigh… The women look like sisters?