Family Strengths
The key to a healthy successful family is having family strength. Having good family strength makes a happy home. In an article titled Family Strengths: Time together, I learned what makes a strong family. Love, family quality time, and one-on-one quality time between parents and children, and between parents, strengthens a families bond. Most strong families consist of happiness and love. But to achieve happiness and love in a strong family the family has to meet the needs of one another.
In this article titled Family Strengths: Time Together, authors Stephen F. Duncan and Kristi McLane connect family strength to time spent together with the family. Fifteen hundred students participating in a national study named spending time together as what they thought made a happy family. “The family: A Proclamation to the World declares the importance of wholesome reaction as an important element of successful marriages and families. Two national studies back up this idea by linking family activities and outings with fewer problem behaviors in both children and young adults”. In a study they compared how a father felt after spending a day doing an activity with his son and how the son felt after spending a day doing an activity with his father.
Although both felt different, in the end the child enjoyed himself and that is what was really important. Parent time together away from the children was an important part of building family strength. This article also provided creative ideas for families to spend time together. Things the article listen that families can do together are eat together, dedicate an extra five hours to each other, spend one-on-one time together, have alone time without the children, do something together as a family including extended family and friends, create a fun family restaurant at home, and assign household chores in pairs.
Before reading this article, I always thought family strengths were just being a happy family. And a family who loved each other. I never thought of what things involved making the family happy. Or what made people in a family feel loved. After reading this article I see that having family strength is more than just black and white. It is more than just being happy and having love in the family. I can agree that good family strengths can be achieved by spending quality time together, one-on-one time between parent and child, and one-on-one time between parents.
Many of the creative ideas the authors listened to strengthen families are effective activities especially for younger children and parents. I don’t think the activities would work as well on teenagers or continue to work once children become teenagers. Most teenagers want more time with friends rather than parents and younger siblings. I think there should have been more ideas on how to practice family strengths when you are working with older children.
This article titled Family Strengths: Time Together, has taught me a lot more about family strengths. I learned what makes a happy loving family a strong family. But most importantly, I read ideas on how to practice family strengths that I can use in my own family and teach others also. Having family strengths is not just about being happy and having love for one another. It is about what makes the people in a family happy and how that makes them love one another.