Families and Their Focus

I spent yesterday in Court.

The question over child custody is one filled with many passions.

What matters to a court of law? There are no standard answers.

What is the bench looking for? Again, there are no standard answers.

The one undeniable goal for any family is to place the family focus on the child. It's not as simple and easy as it sounds. There are many adults who simply can't make a child the first priority because the struggle to survive is the first priority.

I read a lot of theology and philosophy because I like the challenge of complex thought. In order to be able to begin to enjoy something like complex thought, it's obvious that certain physical human needs need to be met.

These are safety, food, clothing, housing, and a sense of well being. Education of any kind requires that the basics be covered. People who are not comfortable because they are hungry, have no place to sleep, have nothing to wear, are going to focus on those things first, not education.

So, like the family who is comfortable, education becomes an important issue because there is time to invest in something besides the basics. Some families spend a lifetime just grasping for a roof, food, and a non-humiliating set of clothes.

When you look at a family who is dependent, who constantly has their hand out to anyone who is willing or even not so willing to supply the basics, who is dependent on the state for the basics, it's easy to see how education is not going to be a priority. It's going to be a secondary concern.

So in a court case that pits a dependent family against what amounts to an independent family, do things like education matter for the child?

In everyone's life there should be a time when he or she is the focus of the family. Usually that comes in childhood. A child can grow up as the center of the family life, gaining and growing and able to live the life of the child in innocence and a kind of childhood bliss that allows creativity and imagination to develop. Childhood is short enough. It matters in that the child learns certain important things about life: the positive approach to the passions because the greatest part of being in the human community is the ability to be positive and to have the creativity to turn positives to art, music, literature, and complex thought.

Then, when the child becomes and adult, he or she is able to dutifully engage in being the adult and is able to let his or her children have the center stage. He or she has had a turn, and now it's time to turn that turn over so the next generation can learn the same things.

When the family focus is on the adult instead of the child, the joys of life pass the child by. He is too keen on pleasing the parent, too keen on being the adult, keeping an eye on his parent's well being, worrying about the parent, the household, siblings, and whether there is enough of anything to go around. The very idea of creativity, art, music a postitive look at life is buried with an avalanche of daily chores and cares.

Recreation is usually an issue. "I am not getting enough for myself," cries the parent of a parent focused family. "More is never enough." And the child makes up for what the parent thinks he is not getting, by going without. In an extreme case, the child forfeits his childhood altogether for the sake of the parent.

When the child of a parent focused family grows up, he or she will either become the parent and steal from his children or continue to give the focus of the family away - to his own children. It will never be his turn to be the focus of anything. It makes saints and sinners.

As we look into the profiles of families, a thinking person realizes that the lives of saints and sinners are both common. Suffering is the human condition. The question is are we clearly going to see what's going on and stop it in individual cases, or are we going to blithely turn our heads and say it really doesn't matter.