Family Values

Family Time

“If you are too busy to spend time with your children, then you are busier than God intended you to be.”

Rabbi Mendel Epstein

I heard an interview last week with a woman who reached the pentacle of her career when she was recruited by the State Department. She loved the job, but it required her to work sixty to eighty hours per week, and to be away from her family most of the time. The job was so stressful and demanding that even when she was at home, she was working. She quit after two years because she and her teenaged children were suffering. She concluded that women still cannot have it all. It begs the question, 'why would you think women (or men for that matter) ever could?' If you're going to have children, then someone has to raise them. Having a Nanny is great, but it doesn't make up for absentee parents.

I'm not sure how we got to this state of stressful excess. We claim to be a country where family is first and foremost, but when parents work insane hours just to pay the bills, there is no time for family. It seems to me that we should rethink the way we live in America on so many different levels. We should get over the notion, for instance, that living well means living large. Living in a house that requires one person's entire salary to pay for does not make for a happier life. Driving an sixty thousand dollar car and wearing designer clothes will not make children happy. And pressuring kids to excel above and beyond their capacity, academically, athletically and socially, does not make for healthy children.

Staying in touch with kids; listening to them, sharing their achievements and disappointments, letting them know how much you care by being present in their lives is the 'family way'. Nothing takes the place of that. Modeling time management and a healthy, responsible lifestyle is more important than all the gadgets and goodies that money can buy. Love requires a time commitment.

In the spirit,

Jane