Fisher - Amish values for your family: what we can learn from the simple life

The Disappearing Childhood

The kind of ancestors you have is not as important as the ones your children have.

Amish Proverb

N ot long ago, I was asked to speak to a young mothers group. The topic focused on incorporating some Amish child-rearing values into todays modern families without going Amish. Later, a woman approached me to share a story. Attached like Velcro to her knee was a two-year-old girl, her curly-haired daughter. Just last week, this woman said, a friend told me that I really need to have more scheduled activities for my little girl. We do attend a Gymboree class once a week, but thats not enough, this friend said. She thinks I should sign my daughter up for soccer.

Soccer? For two-year-olds ? They havent even learned to count yet. How do they even keep score?

On the drive home, I mulled over the conversation with that young moma window into the kind of stress families are facing. Over-the-top pressure to be a success! This mom had been a college soccer player, so there was a part of her that wondered if her daughter might have a better shot at an athletic scholarship someday if she started now. But theres a cost to that logica disappearing childhood.

Studies are finding some alarming trends in modern American families. In the past twenty years:

• childrens free time has declined by twelve hours a week;
• time spent on structured sports activities has doubled;
• family dinners are down by a third; and
• the number of families taking vacations together has decreased by 28 percent.

Additionally, parents now spend 40 percent less time with their kids than they did thirty years ago (that statistic includes driving in the car), and a 2009 study by the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California found that the higher the income, the less time an American family spends together.

The decline in family time, this study found, coincided with a rise in internet use and the popularity of social networks. Whether its around the dinner table or just in front of the TV, American families are spending less time together.

Lets contrast those alarming trends to the Amish, who maintain one of the strongest and most stable family systems in America. New studies are finding that major depression occurs only one-fifth to one-tenth as often among Amish as it does among the rest of the US population. The Amish have close to a zero percent divorce rate. Harvard School of Medicine recently found that Amish people have a much lower rate of heart disease than do average Americans. Another new study found that they have lower rates of cancer.

Few people are aware that the Amish are the fastest-growing population in the United States. In 1900, there were five thousand Old Order Amish in America. Sociologists assumed they would assimilate into the wider culture. Yet by 2008, according to Donald B. Kraybill, Senior Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, there were over 233,000 Old Order Amish. And half the population is under eighteen. The growth is coming from large families, with an 85 to 90 percent retention rate as children become baptized into the church as young adults.

The Amish seem to be doing something right.

So should we all go Amish? Of course not! However, there is much we can learn from these gentle people about raising our families well: to help prioritize whats truly important, to simplify decision making, to slow down as a family, to safeguard time together, and when age-appropriate, to let go. Amish Values for Your Family invites you into Amish farmhouses for a hearty meal, to explore the topic of rearing children who are in the world but not of it.

So grab a cup of hot coffee, put up your feet, and come inside the Amish world with me.