Eternal Families - How to build one

Here's an email I sent about the lesson on eternal families today:

Elders,

Hopefully we have a great discussion on eternal families tomorrow. Note that this is not about eternal marriage, which is a lesson for next month.

This is a timely discussion considering Bishop has asked us to deliver a message regarding the family to our home teaching families. Here's the link to Elder Porter's talk that Bishop asked us to present: http://lds.org/ensign/2011/06/defending-the-family-in-a-troubled-world?lang=eng

Pres. Monson has said the following concerning the family: "The family holds its preeminent place in our way of life because it is the only possible base upon which a society of responsible human beings has ever found it practicable to build for the future and maintain the values they cherish in the present." (from his biography)

Also, here's some thoughts from President McKay:

President David O. McKay said, “With all my heart I believe that the best place to prepare for … eternal life is in the home” (“Blueprint for Family Living,” Improvement Era, Apr. 1963, 252). At home, with our families, we can learn self-control, sacrifice, loyalty, and the value of work. We can learn to love, to share, and to serve one another.

Please consider what are the most important things to develop in a family. Also, how exactly on a daily and weekly basis can that happen?

King Benjamin shows that this has always been an important topic for members of the church. Here's Mosiah 4:14,15 -

14And ye will not suffer your ^achildren that they go hungry, or naked; neither will ye ^bsuffer that they transgress the laws of God, and fight and ^cquarrel one with another, and serve the devil, who is the master of sin, or who is the ^devil spirit which hath been spoken of by our fathers, he being an enemy to all righteousness.

15But ye will ^ateach them to ^bwalk in the ways of truth and^csoberness; ye will teach them to ^dlove one another, and to serve one another.

One quick thought/analogy from the business world. Culture is recognized as a very powerful tool in business and very hard to change for better or for worse once it's established. What we're trying to do in our families is develop a powerful culture of righteousness, love, etc. Just as it's hard to create a great culture in business and business leaders/founders should plan and think about how to develop a great culture, so must families. Below are some thoughts about culture from a talk given by Clayton Christensen, a Mormon Harvard Business School professor:

Create a Culture

There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.

The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.

In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.

If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.