School Starts - You Can Go - But Come Back Soon

I teach a college class focused on family studies and parent involvement. I have thirty students who are eager to learn about family function and community connections. Early in the course, I talk about family systems and the early learning that occurs in the home. Parents too often miss opportunities unknowingly. Life lessons are taught in subtle ways.

I ask my students to create a mosaic illustrating their homes, their relationships and their roles within the family system. One student’s story is particularly prophetic. She drew a picture making sure to leave room between each member of her family as they all lead very separate lives. She and her sister and parents were drawn within a television. When she was growing up, there was a TV in every room. There was even a small one in the kitchen. When she got home from school she did her homework in front of the television. The family ate dinner together with the television on. Immediately after dinner, everyone disappeared into his or her own room. She wrote, “There was no communication in our house.” My student, now in her early 20’s, still doesn’t know how to talk about important things with her parents. She told me she had never learned how. Parents are life teachers. What is your curriculum?

September brings busy classrooms, parents watching little ones climb on large yellow buses and home schedules altered to include school ritual and routine. Coming and going from home to school and back home again impacts everyone in the family. Parents always tell me how busy they are. Children too have busy school days with special classes, music lessons and sports events carefully scheduled. Kierkegaard wrote about the “Idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions.” Are we so busy being busy that we are not taking a careful look at the significant comings and goings of our everyday? Parents take years to teach children to swim, play hockey, or to read. Why not be as dedicated to teaching one another how to talk, listen, and share conversations? A thoughtful look at one’s reality might result in some changes in behavior. I know the days go slowly but the years fly by.

On my block, a father was helping his son learn to ride a bike. I laughed realizing too soon he would want the keys to a car. This year, we attended the State and Renaissance Fairs with our daughters, Heather and Elizabeth and their children. I think it was only yesterday our children were in strollers visiting the baby animals and gasping as the man juggled hoops on a rope high off the ground. I watched my grandsons, Jack and Charlie, get on the school bus this morning. I remember the day each of them was born. “You can go, but come back soon.”

Don’t be too busy and too distracted to celebrate the coming back soon. Relationships with televisions are tenuous at best. Television relationships have left my college students bereft and isolated. Returning to adults who listen and are interested matters.


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