Host: I just have a family meeting once a week with my children who are adolescents. They can discuss anything without punishment. They can discuss, what I did wrong as a parent and they are right and vice versa. We also set columns, A and B. A what they wanted, B what I wanted. If you wanted to have little more time and say have to stay up later, you did your homework, and performed correctly, we would match them up. If you don't, you don't, you didn't get it. So I didn't punish them. The rules of the contract, they knew, they even filled the contract -- does that make sense to you?
Guest: Well, actually I take your things in perfect sense, but I would take a one step further. I think we need to reinvent family dinners. If I had one wish for this entire country, it would bring back the concept, that everybody has dinners in family together.
I can tell you of my own family. Unless there is a major emergency, or there is something that I know in advance is planned, we all eat dinner together every single night. Sometimes it's at 6:30, sometimes it's at 7:00, sometimes it's at 7:30. But if I have a meeting scheduled, for example on a Thursday night, I will tell people, you know usually by Monday, listen I won't be home for dinner Thursday night, but people in our family don't eat by themselves in their rooms. They don't eat in front of the television set in the living room. We eat together as a family.
Sometimes family doesn't mean everybody together. There may be one or two people missing, that particular night, but the concept of the family dinner is a time where we talk and I often talk about the stupid thing I said today, or the dumb thing I did yesterday, as a way letting people know, yes you know we all make mistakes and sometimes we laugh at it and sometimes I just say well, what do you think to get that feed back? I thing it's really really important. Again that role modeling of parents not being invaluable, parents not always getting everything right. It's really important for kids.
I think it's also an important time to find out what you did that day? And one of my favorite things to do, when I get home is to say, how was your day? What did you do? Not just you know, everything is fine and then the TV goes on, and the iPod goes on, or the laptop goes on. But getting to know what your children are doing and who are they with and getting a sense of do they have friends and who their friends are. I think it's the most important thing to making sure that our kids grow up in a safe environment.
Host: I think they do like a hero as a single mother, who successfully brings up a child that's maybe who goes on to college, and kid does something in a very nice way. Those are the real hero's. It's a very difficult job.
Guest: I would say they are not new heroes, I think they have been around for many many years and sometimes they are not single. Sometimes for whatever reason, circumstances there may be, what we used to call intact families where a husband and wife are raising children. We know that there are families now, that are defined as, two men or two women and for whatever circumstances one of them is working very very hard and the burden really is on one parent. I think those parents are being heroes for many many years. They are the unsung heroes and certainly single dads and single moms are much more than normal, as divorce rates go up in this country and I think it's very very difficult for those parents to raise healthy kids and again I think the pediatrician needs to know, what social structure is at home We can't just assume, that there is two parents in the house and that everything is going to be fine.
So sometimes those questions which sound very very personal are very very important for us to know as providers to help families struggle with the issues that are going in the 21st century in this country.
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