Features: What are Family Values Anyway?
With every politician in America now embracing 'family values,' an MSU expert explains what the term really means. Politicians, preachers, and pundits often promised to support 'family values' during the last election. Usually they didn't define 'family values.' Generally we were left guessing their meaning based on what we knew of the speaker's group. What are family values? Are they of universal interest? Can government improve our values? Would we like it if all our values were alike? Let's think about values together.
How Are Values Defined?
Values are defined as concepts of the desirable, according to professionals who study them. Values refer to those ideas and ideals we hold deeply. They guide our decisions and actions. Values are learned from all our experience from birth on and are part of human life everywhere. They come from our parents, our siblings, and our community's schooling and religious experiences.
Some say, 'Values are caught, not taught.' We display our values through actions we perform from moment-to-moment and day-to-day. Usually the application of a value occurs with little perceptible thought or anguish. At a yellow light for instance, we stop--we value being law abiding. Conflicting values are with us constantly and we have to decide which internal message to follow. Guilt may follow not adhering to a value espoused by one's parents, even years after you've left home and are on your own.
Values are learned by individuals in different ways, thus each family member uniquely develops and applies values, even when we grow up with the same home, school, and religious experience. Our education and experience after leaving home may change some of our values--perhaps radically.
Values: Part of the Curriculum
At Michigan State University our Human Ecology undergraduate and graduate students have studied values long before values were the grist for the politician's mill. Students discuss family values in preparation for their professional careers of working with families whose values will differ from theirs. The late MSU Professor, Dr. Beatrice Paolucci, was well known internationally in the field of family values and many of her graduate students focused on values in their research. In fact, the whole decision to become the College of Human Ecology in 1970 (changing from Home Economics) grew out of in-depth discussions about family values and our graduates professional service to families in the world of the future.
Values can be expected to differ among families. You've had the experience of offering solutions to a friend's problem only to have her say, 'That would NEVER work in my family because my husband (or wife, or parent) believes . . .' Even among your closest relatives I'm sure you've noted differences in values. A family's historical time frame makes a difference in the intensity of many values people hold. For example, if you are parents with many generations of Americans in your history, you've grown up in this free open society. You may take certain freedoms for granted and likely don't work hard telling your children they have rights of free speech, for example. Yet, in another family, perhaps more recently arrived from a tyrannical society, freedom to say what one thinks may be a value to be worked for, implemented deliberately, and appreciated daily. Our U.S. Constitution sets parameters for many values we hold.
How Do You Recognize a Person's Values?
Hearing the admonition, 'You ought to . . .' is a way to recognize parental values as you see parents discipline, guide, and teach their children. Whether it is brushing their teeth, eating a nutritious meal, or doing their homework, the parent is stating a value he or she feels is important. At times, you may see parents argue with their child over seemingly trivial values. You'd like to advise them, 'Don't sweat the small stuff.' In the larger scheme of things it may all be small stuff!
A frustration that parents of adolescents often feel is that, on the one hand parents want the teen to take responsibility for individual decision making--an important value and skill to learn in a democratic society. Yet, if the teen seems to veer off the course of parental family values, the parents wish to pull that teen back with whatever leverage they have. Thus, typical disagreements in family life occur.
Multi-faceted Decision Making
Decision making is multi-faceted and seldom simple. Changing to the broad concept of human ecology helped MSU students grasp the broad environments that affect family decision making. No decision is unilateral. The physical, social, economic, and cultural environments make differences in what values families will emphasize. How to respect those individual family differences is the requirement of any professional, and especially the professional human ecologists--whether they are nutritionists, household financial management advisors, consumer specialists, interior decorators, or counselors or educators of children, youth, or parents. Thus, it is very unwise to offer one-dimensional solutions--either to family or individual problems. Exploring values needs to come first. Thinking of families world-wide, all families are affected by the larger world which has became our graduates' arena.
Parenting: A Cooperative Effort
Parenting is a term that writers began using in the U.S. in the late 1960s. It grew partially out of the preparation for and actual participation in the 1970 'White House Conference on Children' when research reports showed that children with positive male role models showed more positive outcomes than others. Prior to the late 1960s mothers were the assumed nurturers of children, both in research and in community program planning. Fathers were the assumed family breadwinners, and were believed to do little child caregiving. The word 'mothering' had a nurturing connotation and that meaning also applied to a teacher or social worker working with children. In contrast, the term 'fathering' tended to have primarily a biological connotation, i.e., there was little doubt what was meant by, 'He fathered the child.' Saying 'fathering' didn't bring visions of nurturing or loving a child. The nation-wide White House Conference emphasized more male participation in child rearing.
The word 'parenting' came into use as a gender-free word to cover the nurturing role of any person who guides children. Authors of books and articles for parents began trying to be inclusive and make men feel they have a place in caring for their own children, and likewise in professions working with children. Helping women include men as nurturers required some re-education. The home was the female's domain. Some mothers, grandmothers, and teachers were hostile to men's help or were critical or impatient with men's initial efforts. Such attitudes caused some men to back away. Americans have been overcoming these drawbacks.
Today, in many foreign countries, programs are still addressed exclusively to the 'moms,' because in reality few fathers participate in childrearing. Some MSU foreign student fathers who become involved with their children while in the U.S. vow to make changes when they return home. Many participate in the MSU Spartan Cooperative Nursery School, for example, that helps all fathers enjoy their roles with young children.