Learning Life Lessons as a Family

Teach Your Children Well

There’s a trend in my field that I’m noticing around the idea of learning, where the concept of having a “learning family” seems to be in vogue.

I think that families that can get all the way there will be well served by this type of thinking, and yet I know most families will never get there, and the majority of those are simply not realistic candidates for it in the first place.

I have some friends and colleagues who label themselves as “fractional chief learning officers” for families and I wish them well because that sounds like a very rewarding career.

My work is typically done “upstream”, as in, way before a family can even begin to consider themselves a learning family.

But the idea of having the family learn together is usually not far from the work I do.

Section 01

Left to Themselves, What Do Families Do?

As someone who plies his trade as a resource to families, I often find myself talking about what happens to families who choose not to engage an independent outsider like me to support them.

When families are left to themselves, lots of things that need to be done don’t even get put on the to-do list.

Okay, this was supposed to be about learning, wasn’t it?

Yes, sorry for the diversion; and when you think about learning, you almost automatically think about teaching, the other side of the same proverbial coin.

In a family, there’s a natural tendency to think that the parents should teach and the children should learn.

Section 02

Is “Adult Children” an Oxymoron?

Parents as teachers and kids as learners works well when the kids are still children.

In most of the families I work with, those “children” are now adults, which some people call adult children.

I’m familiar with a quote that states that “adult children” is an oxymoron; they’re either adults or they’re children.

I like the contrast this paints.

Let’s use that contrast to highlight the fact that once they’re adults, the ways that learning and teaching happen need to be updated to reflect the adult-to-adult relationship reality that now exists.

Families can and should begin to learn together, and the idea that learning only flows in one direction, i.e. “top down”, needs to be scrapped.

Section 03

I Want to Teach You a Lesson

We’re more than halfway through and I have uncharacteristically not yet shared the genesis of the idea for this post.

Alas, we’ve arrived.

In a family I’m working with, I’ve got a situation where a parent wants to make sure one of their offspring learns a lesson from something they overlooked about a decade ago.

As their family advisor, I agree that this young adult would do well to understand their misstep and learn a lesson from it.

The problem I’m wrestling with is that there’s a parent who seems to want to use this occasion to “teach them a lesson”.

And that has a very different look and feel, along with the sub-optimal consequences I fear it will entail for their relationship.

See also Questioning Someone Vs. Asking Questions.

Section 04

A Difficult Attitude Adjustment for Parents

The old “I teach, you learn” the parents used when the kids were actual kids stops working for them at some point and begins to work against them.

Getting those parents to recognize this is often one of the most difficult parts of my work.

Thankfully, some begin to get it and make the necessary adjustments, but some don’t ever get there.

See On Sovereignty and Self-Righteousness in Families.

There’s something I eventually remind parents of when they’re stuck here, and it’s about looking to the future instead of being mired in the past.

Section 05

The Almost Inevitable Eventual Role Reversal

When your children were babies, they relied on you 100% for food, shelter and even cleaning up after their natural bodily functions.

If you live long enough, that script will eventually flip, and you will be the one relying on them to oversee someone taking care of those things for you.

If that script flips abruptly, you may not like what you reap.

In an ideal circumstance, there will be a long period (decades) where the adult-to-adult relationship is relatively horizontal, and not “one up, one down”.

You can all learn together, from each other.