Tools for Strengthening Families: The Family as A Learning Community

As parents and children become better students of their own behavior, they are able to help one another recognize when they are relating in emotionally healthy or unhealthy ways. This is the beginning of the family as a learning community. As such, it is no longer business as usual with parents as paragons of knowledge and virtue to be passed on to their kids so they can become just like their moms and dads. It recognizes that adults are not finished products but rather adults in training—imperfect, fallible human beings. Family members understand that all of them need to learn how to become better persons, and that this learning can occur as a family—children from parents, parents from children, and all together.

As part of this process, parents should consider having their teenagers (and where appropriate pre-teens too) read this book and discuss it together as a family—chapter by chapter, situation by situation, and game plan by game plan. Such a discussion, with its accompanying personal sharing, could further their getting to know one another better as people and not just in the roles of mother, father, and child.