Tim Muldoon - Reclaiming Family Time: A Guide to Slowing Down and Savoring the Gift of One Another

reclaiming family time

A GUIDE TO
SLOWING DOWN AND SAVORING THE GIFT OF ONE ANOTHER

reclaiming family time

A GUIDE TO
SLOWING DOWN AND SAVORING THE GIFT OF ONE ANOTHER

TIM AND SUE MULDOON

Copyright 2017 Tim and Sue Muldoon

All rights reserved.

Published by The Word Among Us Press

7115 Guilford Drive, Suite 100

Frederick, Maryland 21704

wau.org

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ISBN: 978-1-59325-313-4

eISBN: 978-1-59325-495-7

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America, Second Edition, copyright 1997, by the United States Catholic ConferenceLibreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with permission.

Cover design by Faceout Studios

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the author and publisher.

Made and printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946606

Love needs time and space; everything else is secondary. Time is needed to talk things over, to embrace leisurely, to share plans, to listen to one other and gaze in each others eyes, to appreciate one another and to build a stronger relationship. Sometimes the frenetic pace of our society and the pressures of the workplace create problems. At other times, the problem is the lack of quality time together, sharing the same room without one even noticing the other.

Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Losing Family Time

I f you are a parentand we suspect you are, if youve picked up this bookthen you probably are like us, in the sense of constantly asking how to reclaim family time. First of all, congrats on carving out some time to give that question some thought. We are convinced that it is an important part of relishing our busy lives with children.

You probably intuit on some level that the deck is stacked against us, that something in our modern culture tends to make family life extraordinarily difficult, even compared to the modern culture from which we are removed by less than a generation. You sense that there are social forces that tend to pull us away from each other and demand of us more running around just to keep up. You find yourself stressed and low on sleep. You crave some down time. You worry about whether you have the right priorities. You are concerned about how all this busyness affects your children and long for an opportunity to (a) make it stop and (b) not have your kids freak out.

This book asks some big questions and offers you the chance to reflect on how you choose to answer them. It will not provide easy answers, because we are convinced that parents are the only ones who can understand the specific challenges that face their families. It will point to factors in our culture that compromise family time in ways that are unprecedented and that thus put parents in the position of having to choose how much to go along and how much to hold back, even in the face of their childrens complaints.

We see clues to these cultural factors whenever we slow down long enough to talk about the family calendar for the coming month. We are the parents of three teens: two girls and a boy, all socially active young people. Our oldest is, at this writing, on the verge of getting a drivers license, but for now that observation implies that we are still responsible for getting her and her siblings everywhere they need to go. We must plan work schedules, school schedules, after-school sports and activities, weekend sports and activities, time out with friends, andoh yes, because of reasons well explain latertime to get to church.

What weve observed in our fast-paced, high-octane world is a tendency to take on too much, both for ourselves and our families.

Our family life is centripetal, to use an image from a high school physics class; it is constantly spinning, throwing each of its members out into the world like a blender that has lost its lid. There is, of course, a strong temptation to hit the off button, and occasionally we doon holidays, for example. But we find that too much control over our kids time can cause resentment, an attitude that can be corrosive for family life. So we often wonder how we might walk the fine line between positive social engagement, on the one hand, and a strong family life, on the other.

In the process of sorting this out, we have taken a close look at what has become the new normal for planning kids activities. Recently we were on the soccer field after one of our children had finished up a game. We were chatting with another parent who, at ten in the morning, was already looking exhausted. What are you all up to this weekend? Sue asked. The woman sighed and talked about how many activities were still planned for the day. Ben has two baseball games and a lacrosse game; Julia has a soccer game and then her chorus concert. Our friend had something of a disbelieving look on her own face as she said these things, wondering (we thought) why in the world she had ever packed her average weekend schedule so tightly.

That conversation, and many others like it (often on the sidelines of one of our kids sporting events), has led us to think about the ways we schedule our time and budget our money. We too feel harried; we too sometimes spend hours on the road, schlepping from school to friends houses to various activities to work and so on. We too have missed dinners as a family, done work late into the night, spent long holiday weekends at soccer or basketball tournaments, and found ourselves losing sleep at night. Eventually, we asked a simple question: why?

Time Crunch

What weve observed in our fast-paced, high-octane world is a tendency to take on too much, both for ourselves and our families. We see it in our own tendencies sometimes, and well talk about some of our own challenges in this book. But we also see it in our professional lives. We see young people who have high levels of stress and who, studies show, are more likely to exhibit anxiety than in prior generations. We see parents who have no lives for themselves and no time to spend on building their marriages because they are constantly getting their kids to their activities. We see families who prioritize their kids social lives, especially through sports, to the extent that they have no time for fun, no time for sabbath rest, no time to pray. We see parents who take vacations with their families but come back exhausted because they need vacations even from their vacations. What is going on here?

When we first mentioned to Sues mom that we were writing a book on reclaiming family life from overscheduling, she stifled a laugh. God love her, she didnt say it out loudbut she was thinking, Who are you people to be writing about overscheduling? She sees our busy lives on a daily basis. For the past twelve years, most of our older childrens lives, weve lived in a town outside of Boston where it seems all parents expect their children to be academic, athletic, and artistic all-stars. Shuttling kids to activities is part of parents routines, both moms and dads. Conversations on the sidelines or during stage prep are about which kid is doing what activity next season, what camps kids are signed up for, and my, how busy we all are!