In our new home in Detroit, there is an awful lot of work to do. Yesterday, while using Google maps to get to an interview, I found myself driving a solid two and a half miles down a main city road, lined with restaurants and barber shops and boutiques that were all completely deserted, boarded up or surrounded with broken windows and graffiti. A few stoned old men stumbled across alleys.
Perhaps you think that we need to boost industry by creating local investment opportunities.
Perhaps you think, Guiliani-style, that we need to focus on reducing crime, by spending money cleaning the graffiti and broken glass and increasing the police presence.
Maybe your answer is drug prevention - improving D.A.R.E. programs, building better rehab centers, and instituting better regulations on alcohol and drugs.
Maybe your inclination is education - let's learn from Teach for America and focus on better teachers, and more money in the schools. Then kids would achieve more and improve their own communities.
Maybe you gravitate toward community building through better public facilities and extra-curricular activities. In this spirit, Detroit boasts an abundance of YMCAs, after-school programs, corporate-sponsored sport facilities and dance camps and jazz festivals.
Maybe your answer is to address the race problem. Maybe it's gun control. Maybe it's healthcare.
Maybe it's better government assistance to the poor. We could probably keep going down this road for quite awhile - many people have. Whatever you see as the root of the problem is likely to be where you put your efforts to solving it. However, like a fire out of control, we won't solve the problem if we end up shooting water at the ominous, billowing smoke. We need to identify the causes within causes - the rootiest of the roots - in order to aim our efforts at the fire destroying society.
There are many examples of well-intentioned, smoke-drenched attempts to solve social problems. A friend from Uganda came to visit us a few weeks ago. He commented that, while half of the world's NGOs are in Africa (by one count there are 1,902 separate NGOs in Uganda alone), it is hard for the Africans to see that things are getting much better. That was discouraging to hear, as a former volunteer with such an organization, but I saw his point. Even while we were there, the problems seemed so overwhelming and so daunting. As happens in Detroit, each charitable organization in Africa picks a specific problem to attack - AIDS prevention, digging wells, teaching business skills, working in orphanages - but after all the money spent and interventions made, there seems to be so little of a dent made in the overall poverty and well-being of the African people. This may be, as the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala argues, because so many NGOs are "fragmented, project‑oriented, donor‑driven, urban‑based and sometimes, poorly managed."
So again...what is to be done? How can we get to the root of social problems, so that our interventions can be effective? The solution surprised me....
In recent years, Mormon women have been encouraged to study the history of the Relief Society (the women's organization in the church), and that led to the publication of a book called Daughters in My Kingdom, a history of the Relief Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In it, prophets and former Relief Society presidents teach the sisters of the church that their duty is to relieve the suffering of the poor and strengthen families. All of a sudden, reading that I had a revelation. Our duty is to relieve the suffering of the poor by strengthening families. That is our solution!
Why is that such a revelation? Families are as much a part of our lives as the air we breathe, so we may take it for granted that such a universal institution could be a powerful tool for social change. Church leaders have made it clear that families are not just a nice thing to have. Families are in fact God's secret weapon. What I realized in that moment was that families ARE the solution to social change. It is not only the most best way to raise children, it is the best way to save societies.
Instead of focusing on helping individuals, our focus should be on fixing the machine that creates happy and healthy individuals, which are happy and healthy families. When individual spouses and parents are able to do their job well - in a healthy, loving environment - they teach their children to do the same. They create a rock of support for the community around them. They create interconnected relationships of support with other families. Recall a time before health insurance - when your entire family and community WAS your insurance policy, and you were theirs. When we support families, families will do their job for individuals. So, in every aspect of individual and social struggles, whether solving poverty, or crime, or illiteracy, or health crises -- our question should always be, what can we do to help families?
As Elder Eyring said in 2012, "Bishops and Relief Society presidents always invite family members to help each other when there is a need. There are many reasons for that principle. Foremost is to provide to more people the blessing of increased love that comes from serving each other...That is why the Lord has created societies of caregivers."
There are many ways to help build our struggling communities, including many of the approaches listed above. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is involved with a number of initiatives including clean water projects, neonatal resuscitation training, vision care, wheelchairs, immunizations and food production. In my husband's discipline, lobbyists and politicians create legislation that changes aid programs, zoning laws, access to public transportation and more. I'm proud of the accomplishments that we've made in helping the poor.
But like Africa, Detroit will likely continue to struggle if the interventions are aimed at individuals and not done in the context of helping families. How can we help family members spend more quality time together? How can we help families understand and teach the importance of literacy and good citizenship? How can we reduce divorce and out-of-wedlock births? How can we encourage fidelity and commitment to family relationships? How can we make pro-marriage welfare policies? How can we help fathers be better role models? How can we provide relief for working mothers? How can we strengthen ties to extended family? How can we improve communication and cooperation and commitment within the home? Like a jammed printer, if we focus on removing the obstacles in their way, families are a machine that will naturally support healthy and happy families. And healthy families, automatically, do most of the things that are needed to strengthen individuals internally, and communities externally.
Family processes are already understood as an effective and efficient social machine - we gradually migrated from orphanages to foster homes in the 1950's as we discovered that not only is a family setting cheaper, but children tend to do better when they are raised in a family instead of an institution, especially if the family is at least distantly related to them.
Our church focuses on the family so much, not only because it is in the family that we can find the greatest individual happiness, but also because it is the key to our success in the world today.
Neal A. Maxwell said:
Isn't it ironical that in an age when we are learning almost feverishly about what is most ecologically sound, what are the most efficient and economic ways to produce energy or protein in order to help other human beings, that we should be so incredibly blind--because like ancient Judah, we are "looking beyond the mark"--when it comes to pursuing those processes which are best for the production of good human beings? [As with the relative inefficiency of the amount of grain needed to raise cattle versus chickens,] The social and spiritual sum of our political, educational, ad economic institutions is usually not sufficient to offset the deficits in the home.
Analogously, we have far too many lonely humans foraging on deficient "homesteads" and too many governmental programs which attempt abortively to substitute a less efficient system of helping humans than the home; it is the home that we must rescue, repair, and sustain. Only when homes are full of truth, warmth, and trust, can our other institutions perform their tasks...If we are really concerned about the most economical way of achieving happiness for ourselves and/or our fellowmen and about those skills that are needed in successful human enterprises, then we should seek these gains through the family. (The Inexhaustible Gospel, pg 3)
Perhaps we have gone "beyond the mark" with regards to the family because of our almost unconscious culture of individualism. Perhaps we look past the family because our own personal experiences with family have been negative (if 60% of the baby boomers are divorced, then that means approximately 60% of their children--adults my age--are victims of divorce and either terrified or apathetic toward the idea of finding happiness in a family setting). Perhaps we undervalue the family as an institution because we don't really agree what a functional family looks like, or whether we should even define it.
While the argument about the defining a functional family may be full of controversy and potential stigma, what is the alternative? We can either use the overwhelming statistics to define what healthy looks like (including factors such as having a father and mother who are married and committed to each other), and strive for it, knowing that we may fail in our endeavor, or we can say nothing out of fear and allow society to risk duplicating negative family patterns that children grow up believing to be normal and good.
We can and should still love and support those whose lives do not turn out ideally. Most lives don't. Divorce, unwanted pregnancy, infidelity, and single parenthood are realities for many many people. But while avoiding generalizations may soothe feelings, it may destroy futures. After struggling with the decision personally, I have decided that I care more about helping the child of a single mother see the importance of fatherhood and encourage the desire to have a loyal partner in raising children than to coddle their upbringing as "good enough" and thereby risk them becoming a single mother as well. We admire the strong, courageous women who parent alone, but those single mothers would never wish such a life on their children and neither should we.
So that aside, assuming that I have already offended whoever is going to be offended by the idea of defining what makes a strong, functional family.... what should that definition be?
Unlike many others, I have a few advantages in this field. First and most importantly, because I belong to a church with modern day prophets, I have clear and specific guidance about what a strong family should look like. Second, I know the research, and third, my childhood in a family community in Saudi Arabia afforded me a unique vantage point to view strong, functional families from around the world. With these in mind, I have distilled the following characteristics:
#1 - Marriage. That is, a family is headed by a couple that is permanently, legally, spiritually, physically, emotionally committed to each other.
#2 - Gender (of parents and children) is acknowledged and respected and honored as an asset.
#3 - Fidelity. Couples keep sexual relations only with each other, and in the protective bonds of marriage. "Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity"
#4 - Mothers and fathers both take responsibility to rear, protect, and teach their children to become good members of society.
#5 - Positive principles are observed in the home, including faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and positive recreation.
#6 - Division of labor occurs according to the situation and strengths and preferences of each parent, ensuring that top priorities are providing for and protecting the home, and nurturing children.
#7 - Equality. However specific tasks are divided, couples should be committed to helping each other as equals (without keeping track).
#8 - Relationships with extended family are maintained and strengthened.
These eight points allow for a wide variety of adaptations for personal and cultural differences. Positive recreation may be mountain biking or karaoke. Honoring gender may be recognizing the beauty of one's artistic talents or one's dedicated service in the community. Marriage may happen in a chapel or on a beach. Division of labor may translate to one person doing the dishes, taking turns, or making the kids do them. A relationship with extended family may be grandma living with you, or remembering to send your cousins birthday cards.
Note that none of these eight points put any kind of requirement on children. That's because they're children! Any resilience or competence we observe in children should be applauded but not expected; A strong society can never be built on such an unstable foundation. And yet - how often are governmental programs and resources directed toward building this resilience in children, as though their parents were already a lost cause?
As a final thought - I volunteered at a youth detention facility years ago and spent time talking with the delinquents who managed to put themselves behind bars before getting to their 18th birthday. The overwhelming number of those children from distressed families was too obvious to think their behavior was unrelated. Interventions include detention, mentorship programs, medication, therapy, boot camps, behaviorists (like me). I've seen just about everything. And while I don't have the solution for most of these problems, I do know this - fixing a bad kid and then putting him back in a bad family is just as ineffective as the efforts of the NGOs my Ugandan friend lamented. Fix the family. It doesn't matter that it's more complex or expensive. Fix the family and the kids will follow. Fix the family and society will follow too.
