Building Family Relationships

As university professors and dedicated parents, my wife and I both took a very academic approach to family and relationship. Basically, we researched every article on family relationships we could find before we had kids.

As university professors and dedicated parents, my wife and I both took a very academic approach to family and relationship. Basically, we researched every article on family relationships we could find before we had kids. We both came from fairly dysfunctional families, and we wanted to avoid the pitfalls in our own lives. Learning how to establish healthy family relationship is not something that is easy to do on your own. Either you are raised with it, or you are often doomed to follow the same cycles that your parents did. Breaking out of it was a major project for both of us, and something that we were unable to succeed at completely at first.

For the first several years, our relationships with family were very good. We learned a lot about child rearing before we undertook it ourselves something that I think every parent should be required to do. After awhile, however, we succumbed to one of the most common problems in any serious undertaking flagging interest. It is hard to admit, but even a noble project like raising healthy, happy kids becomes less interesting over time. At first we dived into the research, but after we had learned everything we thought we needed to, we simply grew bored of it. Once our attention towards family relationships started to flag, our parenting abilities also started to give way. Soon, we were no better than your average parent.

We were both very loving parents, both to each other and to our kids, but everything about our lives seemed to be kind of stale and dried out. We knew that we needed some help with family relationships. We were not very interested in going to a psychoanalyst or family therapist. We were all pretty busy with our lives, and anyway we didn't believe in that type of protracted, excessively verbal cure. Instead, we decided to go to a family relationship retreat one custom tailored to help families increase their communications with each other. Let me tell you, it worked wonders.

Family relationships are like any other projects. The more consistently attentive you are to them, the more successful they will be. If your attention flags, you will start running into trouble. If, however, you are diligent in your dedication to your family, you can keep loving, positive relationships throughout your entire life. It is just a matter of putting in the work.