"We were really close growing up, but not really as adults." Is there any way to stack the deck against that?
The answer is to not have your kids scatter across the country as adults, although I'm not sure exactly how a parent can stack the deck in that respect.
Terminate any pregnancy that doesn't involve conjoined twins?
Cripple your children emotionally so they can't handle most aspects of ordinary life without your constant hand-holding.
I've seen this work for other parents.
Ptolemy II's system has some problems, but it would mean the kept in touch.
The answer is to not have your kids scatter across the country as adults,
This is definitely part of our problem. First, my parents live in no-opportunity podunk.
But both my brothers moved to be close to their spouses' families. They both prioritize their spouses' family over ours all the freaking time, even though the brothers themselves used to be really close friends. And only one wife actually gets along with her family.
I would also guess that making it a point to participate in lots of extended-family gatherings while your kids are young would, assuming those gatherings are remotely pleasant, maybe impress on their impressionable young minds that staying in close contact with family is important/normal/enjoyable/expected. (This may be especially true of those gatherings involve long-distance travel, so the kids won't be able to think of that as an adequate excuse to cop-out.)
Of course, this isn't something you can do unilaterally, and since you say your family of origin is not tight, it might be tough for you to do this.
You could make a ton of money and then create a trust that pays out a sum of money every month as long as they all come together to pick-up the money.
not have your kids scatter across the country as adults
My wife's family is very close. She's one of seven kids, five of whom are still in the Raleigh-Durham metro (a sixth is in Hickory, about 2 hours west, and the seventh is in Nashville). So perhaps one answer is to raise your kids in an area with a resilient job market.
6: Despite urple being wrong about most things, I agree with this.
Yeah, seen 3 work, too, but don't recommend it. Leo's sibs are much closer to his family than he is. They would do well to move out and start establishing some independence.
My brothers are scattered across the country, but I think my family has stayed pretty close despite that. I think it helps a lot that my parents open their home to all and sundry whenever my brothers are in town, so that friends are like family. Probably also helps that my mom is tight with my brother's MIL -- the families can all hang together instead of my brother and his wife having to divide time between families.
I don't think there's anything you can do purposefully, really. Looking at families I know, tighter age groupings work better for closeness, but it's not a guarantee. Spouses are really the wildcard -- if your spouse likes spending time with your family (which I lucked out on; Buck adores my big sister, likes my father a great deal, and gets along with my mother as well as anyone) it's easy, but if they don't, and you like the spouse, you're not going to be close with your family. It's just not practical to spend a lot of time with people your spouse can't hack.
My grandparents had all their grandchildren ~14 grow up almost within walking distance of each other. We all went to the same high school and I had 5-6 cousins in school with me. There was a time I considered this the ultimate personal achievement, better than the Presidency or a Nobel, simply because it seemed so freaking hard.
A big chunk of the 4th generation are close, mostly because one grandchild had 8 children. But most are scattered now.
I don't have any lessons or advice. It may be social changes. But I think part of it had to do with limited, or different ambitions. Money and personal achievement mattered much less than time with family and community. Simply working on each other's houses, or watching each other's kids play sports.
Your brothers' story sounds similar to that of the brother of a friend of mine. He was very much the golden child of the family, very, very tight with his mom -- and then he got married. His wife is a nice, smart, accomplished woman, who doesn't like his mother. So all of those personality traits that fostered this fierce allegiance to his natal family simply transferred to his wife and everyone else is basically as cut off as they can remain while remaining within the bounds of propriety. (Don't want anyone to think you're they kind of weirdo who never speaks to his family, right?)
My parents have prioritized this, mostly by eagerly shelling out for planefare between family (despite their notorious tightfistedness in other domains).
14 probably helps a lot, if you're in a position to do it.
On the practical level, Apo's "live in a resilient job market" and LB's "Don't let them marry creeps who hate you" are really the two best pieces of advice. Neither of them are actually that practical, though.
I would also guess that making it a point to participate in lots of extended-family gatherings while your kids are young would, assuming those gatherings are remotely pleasant,
You know, this may be part of what went wrong with us: I think I was the only one who really enjoyed the extended-family get togethers. The cousins are closer to my age than my brothers', and I adored my aunts and uncles in a way that they didn't, and my parents clearly felt the whole thing was an obligation, not a pleasure.
6: This is true. Neither of my parents were close with their families at all (we saw my dad's sister, thirty miles away in Westchester, once a year most years), and as fond as I am of my family, not seeing them terribly often feels normal on some level. Luckily, Buck's family is an "Of course you're driving eight hours to get to your second cousin's wedding. You can stop halfway to pick up Tommy at the truck stop where he's leaving the eighteen-wheeler overnight, right?" kind of family, and I'm hoping it rubs off on the kids.
I see my sister quite a lot, as she leaves fairly near, but yeah, until she moved we are/were the proverbial siblings who were close as kids but not so much as adults. We do live in very different worlds, though. I imagine it's easier if your lives are somewhat similar.
I should say that my dad really likes his sister -- he's spent a lot more time with her and her family since he and my mother split up.
I'm not convinced that the goal is worthwhile in the first place. People's lives lead in different directions, and it's perfectly possible to lead a decent life without devoting most of your leisure time to your relatives.
And we failed at both points mentioned in 16.
16: Well, I'll see how it works out for Rory. But I'm hoping that raising her not to tolerate creeps and setting an example about prioritize will at least help with the latter park.
I have some sympathy with 21, too.
21: Hmm. This maybe highlights a definitional problem here. What does "close" mean?
Anyway, I have no siblings within driving distance of me and I do regret it.
I also sympathize with 21. If your family is a bunch of jerks, fuck 'em and good riddance. No obligation to be close to someone just because you share a common background. However, I really adore my family and generally miss them.
But, I can't move and I can't make them move.
I think it's important, or at least it's something, for kids, spending enough time with relatives that they're close. Having other adults for closeness and support who aren't your parents, arbiters of life, death, and whatever, seems like a big thing to me -- I like the idea that if Sally has some issue as a teenager that she's too worried to bring to me, that she might feel comfortable going to her disreputable aunt with it. And grandparents as an everyday presence, rather than someone you see as a big event on formal occasions.
Having other adults for closeness and support who aren't your parents, arbiters of life, death, and whatever, seems like a big thing to me
This, of course, doesn't have to be family.
My younger brothers and I are tighter now than we were as kids, which is not a very high bar. As the oldest, I loosened up a lot eventually but also I worked really hard to make an effort, taking them out to movies individually when they were in high school or in the youngest's case younger, treating them to meals every once in a while. Right now, we're all living in the same city and yet we're not seeing a whole lot of each other, partly my fault because I'm preoccupied with Mara.
Someone needs to push to get things to happen, though, and it's usually me, which Lee resents. But we all like each other's significant others, too, which helps a whole lot and makes it easier to go cheer for one brother's girlfriend when her roller derby team competes. Actually, that brother has ADHD and related problems to the extent where he could probably almost qualify for disability, though he's working at the moment, and I think all of us siblings feel sort of solicitous and have picked up a lot of slack in terms of calling him up and taking him out with us and our friends so he'll be involved with something.
Nothing here is letting me come up with recommendations. I've been pushing hard for Mara to spend time with my local family members and we did a big Christmas visit because I do want her to see that as normal and pleasant, which she does now. I have no idea how we'll deal with extended/birth/potential future adoptive relatives later.
Doesn't have to be, but it's easier. There's parents of friends, teachers, and that kind of thing, but family's an easy way to have that kind of alternative adult relationship for a kid.
I live within 5 miles of my parents and sister and I wouldn't call us close. Not estranged I see my parents every week or two and my sister about once a month, but I wouldn't call any of them just to talk or anything. I don't know why, but even growing up I don't know that I would call us close.
...and it's perfectly possible to lead a decent life without devoting most of your leisure time to your relatives.
Of course. I guess.
But I grew up in an environment that placed home and family as the ultimate, if arbitrary, value. We were taught to consider education, career, and spouse as means to stay in the community, not ultimate goods in themselves.
I mean it really was:"I want to be an astronaut!" "But that would mean we would never see you."
If this sounds like the repressive roots of classic conservatism, what h-g wants is pretty conservative. But these methods have worked for millenia, to the extent they worked.
I also have Amish-Mennonite roots.
35:Aww, I don't wanna. Around the Great Lakes.
Put it this way:We loved our grandparents. They were great people, who did a lot for us. They wanted the pleasure of watching their great-grandchildren grow up, almost every day. We got to see good, happy lives lived within those constraints, including a pool of friends and neighbors with similar values from which to choose spouses. It was a joyful duty, a pleasant sacrifice.
We knew some lonely people who never saw their grandkids.
Seeing Paree didn't seem necessary.
37: I've yet to see Paree, but seeing Garmisch Partenkirchen, and Salzburg, and Bamberg with my parents and one brother, and Prague and Munich and London and York with my other brother and his now-wife are some of the memories upon which our closeness (as I define it) is based. And since my daughter has family on two continents, travel is going to have to be a big part of building closeness.
If you want to have family in two continents without much travel, you could move to Istanbul.
Not recently or anything, but I won't go back to Adak.
I'm pretty sure you can't do much about this. The main thing my parents did that made me not always able to feel close to them was fail to regard me as a person rather than an offspring for too long. I think what I'm trying to say is efforts at making closeness happen are likely to backfire, and all you can do is try to have a good relationship with your kids in ways I'm sure you're doing anyway.
Another piece of wild overgeneralization of my life that leads me to believe there's not much to be done is that my sister and I went through pretty much the same stuff and she calls the folks every day and sees them a lot whereas I call on average once a week and see them maybe four times a year (up from 1-2 times since they now have a place four hours away...in the town where my sister lives.) I feel bad that I'm the distant one but it feels like this happened for a million little reasons nobody could have planned around.
43 and heebie's own family experiences and a lot of my personal anecdotal evidence all suggest that one of the things you could do to increase the odds of keeping your adult family close is to have girls rather than boys. (Comment 2 could be revised to clarify the prescribed mechanism.)
Obviously that's neither necessary nor sufficient, as some of the other anecdotal evidence in this thread indicates.
Although it does seem to work that way, I think particularly when there are kids. Buck's family is generally closer than mine, but we spend a lot more time with mine. That's largely because they live closer, but I think there's something to the gender thing.
It occurs to me that I occasionally have fantasies of my family being close, but they're usually when I'm totally fucking depressed about my life. Once, in that kind of mood, I said in an I'm-probably-joking tone that we all should move to the town where my mother's family lives. The general tenor of the response was ha-ha-ha-NO. So suddenly drawing a spurious conclusion from this instead of it just being a "save it for the couch, Smearcase" moment: part of the problem is people's fantasies of closeness don't necessarily match up well.
"One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time."
--Lorrie Moore, "Willing"
44/45 -- My sister and I both certainly feel more obligated to spend time with family than my brother does, and we make more of an effort than he does. But we also find it more obligatory and effortful than my brother, who seems to actually enjoy/not mind it (whereas for me it's a source of constant guilt and stress).
However, one thing my parents do to ensure that the siblings are at least sortaa close to each other is to make themselves maximally stressful to be around, such that we're much more likely to want to go to their house if at least one other of us is going to be there too.
I tend to think that birth order plays at least as much of a role as gender. My sister, who lives on the other coast, is consistently the best at making great efforts to get the family together and to do things, but she clearly doesn't especially enjoy it. I'm the middle, and I do my begrudging minimum. My little brother genuinely seems to kind of enjoy family stuff, which I'll never understand. My guess is that the brother who organized the ski trip is the eldest, the one who doesn't want to come is the middle, and that h-g is the baby.
I also believe you can't do much to engineer this, beyond the emotional crippling plan rhc proposes. Or guilt. Lots and lots of guilt. Another approach might be a disease requiring regular blood and marrow donations, but those are usually genetic, so you'd have to prepare for that at the level of selecting a mate/sperm donor.
I was going to advise not pitting the kids against one another, which is probably good general advice, but sibling rivalry sometimes just develops on its own. People who hate eachother as kids can become very close as adults and vice versa. My brother and I fought like badgers growing up, but were on our way to a real adult relationship when he died.
Growing up, my Dad's family all lived in the area and got together about once a month, but none of them were close except with my Grandma, and after she died folks drifted their separate ways (a political and religious crazines in some sibs helped encourage this, but it wasn't the main thing). My Mom's family were scatted all of the country, and didn't always like eachother, but they arranged visits and called and kept in touch regularly, so those relationship are still there.
"scattered all over the country"
The other thing seems like a lot of effort, but guess it depends what sort of covered you were looking for.
My guess is that the brother who organized the ski trip is the eldest, the one who doesn't want to come is the middle, and that h-g is the baby.
I'm impressed.
I tend to think that birth order plays at least as much of a role as gender.
I wonder if there's a combination effect: if the eldest is female, she's more likely to feel an obligation to corral the siblings into doing things than if the eldest is male.
51: This totally makes sense in my family -- my sister does a lot of work to get the family together (and stresses out about it all the time), and while I don't enjoy family stuff, I'll do it out of a sense of guilt and obligation. My little brother seems to like it, but seems to feel no sense of obligation and puts no effort into it whatsoever.
So I think the answer is to have all girls, and try your best to have maybe one oldest daughter. All the rest should be youngests. Definitely no middle kids.
So I think the answer is to have all girls, and try your best to have maybe one oldest daughter. All the rest should be youngests. Definitely no middle kids.
This is my family of birth (two girls) and I'd say that it's not a silver bullet.
Having one really difficult family member can really make closeness difficult. One of my parents is estranged from one of my siblings, and always on the brink of being estranged from the rest of them. And while I spend time with the difficult parent, I feel guilty about spending more time with the other parent, or with the estranged siblings, and about enjoying that time more, so I end up not spending as much time with any of my family as I might.
For emotional crippling to work, I think you also have to have intellectual and professional crippling going on. I've seen that work with most of my friends' parents' families, who often ask my parents what they did wrong that their kids are far away and not in constant contact. It also helps if the family has some kind of tragedy or odd political/religious stance that turns all other people into enemies.
On the other hand, I often fantasize about what it would be like if my parents really knew and loved me as I am; I'd be a lot closer to them and to my sibling if that were true. We'd be less likely to find partners that don't hate our families, because we'd look for people who give us comfort and real love in that way.
As it stands, we got a little of this, and a little of that--lots of support in our ambitions, and plenty of exposure to wonderful ideas, but also lots of lies and shaming. It makes it hard because, on one hand, our parents do seem to know quite a lot about our characters, but don't want to know any of the details. They want us to love and be there for them, but they don't want to offer the same to us. It's irritating.
I must be a slacker as an older brother. My younger sister, but still the oldest of the sisters, organizes stuff. I should probably help her.
My dad is one of four brothers and his family is very close. My dad was in the army, so we almost always lived pretty far from my parents' family, but my parents made it a priority to visit them. I can't recall a single vacation we took while we were living in the states that was not to visit family.
One thing that I think really made a difference between my mom's and dad's families is that my dad's family has a cabin. It makes spending time together easier because it's sort of neutral territory -- no one is the host or the guest and there are all sorts of communal chores that foster togetherness. Most of the nine of us cousins still make an effort to go there every summer even though six of us live more than 1,000 miles away.
Of course, there's also the fact that my mom's mom subtly expressed her disapproval of all of her kids' spouses.
My parents spend a great deal of money making it relatively easy for the family to spend time together: buying plane tickets for adult children, paying for hotel rooms when necessary, etc. It seems to work, and we're planning to do the same for our kids when they grow up.
call on average once a week and see them maybe four times a year...I feel bad that I'm the distant one.
Goodness. My fiance calls her parents about once a week and I regard them as being in quite close contact. I probably get around to talking to my parents quarterly or so.
But I've always been bad about keeping in touch with anyone who I don't naturally encounter on a regular basis - family, friends from school, former coworkers - they all fade away as soon as I'm not in the same space with them every day or every week.
The family I know with the most successful, enduring espirit du corps throws great feasts and has for a long time. Growing up, we would regularly drive four hours to see them for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. They have four kids, three of whom Brady Bunched in, and as the kids have married they've hung on to Thanksgiving and let the in-laws take Christmas. My mom and sister still fly in for Thanksgiving, and their son who's my age flies across the country for it. (I miss the fun, having ceded Thanksgiving to my dad.)
From observing them, I would say the keys to their success are:
1. Throw really good feasts. Take all day to cook and all night to eat. Establish it as an annual tradition.
2. Have a destination. Obvs wealth helps. They have always had a big house and for the last 15 years have had a great beach house in a quiet corner of the Massachusetts coast, and two years ago expanded it to accommodate the wave of grandchildren.
3. Be into activities. Aside from the cooking, they seem WASPily sporty -- they bike and play tennis and Scrabble and stuff.
4. Open it up. Family alone is suffocating -- be the destination for other families and strays as well. There are a number of regulars who have persisted through the years (like my family) and good people are always coming in and out.
Some if not most of this comes from being fun, extroverted people. I imagine quiet, introverted families also maintain connection, but with other techniques.
My ex-wife's family also maintains intense connectedness -- family feasts are the key. The pattern with them was Christmas with the nuclear family, then my ex-m-i-l and her brother and sister would throw an amazing, up-all-night New Year's feast, sometimes at one of their houses and sometimes at some even snowier destination.
They do it without much of #4, and for #2 are very willing to cram lots of people into the same location. One year my ex and I stayed in the RV in the garage.
To the OP, you can buy a large vacation home in a beautiful location with enough room for everyone, bring the kids there over the summer so they develop a sentimental attachment to it, and then encourage them to come back every year as adults with their families (because who wants to refuse a vacation in a wonderful place to which they have a sentimental attachment?). It works even better if other members of the extended family and old friends have vacation homes nearby and the kids can develop summer romances, etc., as teens.
By using this method, my ex is insanely close to third cousins and extended family members and whatnot.
Of course, this plan requires you to be really, really rich. Sorry!
Oddly enough, we live next door to the vacation house of a big extended family who normally lives Galveston.
Definitely no middle kids.
This is nonsense. The middle kid, by nature, will constantly want to accommodate everyone, making the get-togethers that much easier. The middle kid will also likely be the mediator who promptly senses and smooths over budding tensions.
I imagine quiet, introverted families also maintain connection, but with other techniques.
Each day we shovel fuel! Each day we work in silence!
61: But if you read "Goodbye My Brother" by John Cheever, you can see how this doesn't always work either.
63: Middle child, I presume?
In contrast, I am evidence that one shouldn't have a youngest child.
Of course, this plan requires you to be really, really rich
Buy low, now, in the outskirts of Detroit. Spend the next few vacations building family spirit in twin campaigns of arson and rezoning. By the time grandchildren are on their way, you'll have a country manse surrounded by charming tetanus jungles.
59: Goodness. My fiance calls her parents about once a week and I regard them as being in quite close contact.
This was my reaction as well. I consider my family to be appropriately "close" and we probably call about twice a month except when something's being planned or whatnot. I also think living within a 2-6 hours reach (most of our lives) but not in the same city was a win.
you can buy a large vacation home in a beautiful location with enough room for everyone
My family's version of this is a rather nice cabin in the middle of nowhere, Yukon. We had a hell of a family reunion there this summer (with my mother footing the airplane fare *and* threatening to cry if people backed out), but it's very, very far away.
Actually, maybe in Texas you don't have to be insanely rich to do the large vacation home thing. Doesn't like every fourth person have a "ranch" (with a few live animals to get smoe kind of tax benefit)? How expensive is the Hill Country?
I would seriously love to have a nice cabin in the middle of the Yukon. That sounds great. Plus I like the notion of a well-planned hideout.
63 does not describe my birth family. Oldest and youngest are good at the emotional stuff, middle is oblivious.
We had a hell of a family reunion
I'm pretty sure you are saying this was a positive experience, but that phrase is certainly open to different interpretations.
61.1:My youth described and we weren't even UMC. 800 sq ft, twenty people on a weekend with ten kids sleeping on the floor. Bathroom and an outhouse and the lake.
Doesn't take money.
74: I like the "bathroom and an outhouse" part. I hate that I don't have a choice now.
61: Yeah, my dad married the girl who lived next door to his family's cabin, and his brother married the girl who lived on the other side.
No one was rich though. This was Minnesota in the 1960s.
My boy scout troop had a cabin in the Sierras that they built in the 1930s. The government tore it down in the 1960s when the area was designated as a wilderness, untouched by human hands. They also tore down the cabin not far from it, but left up the dams in the lakes nearby.
76: Then people started putting curtains on the cabin windows and all the fun stopped.
Of course, this plan requires you to be really, really rich. Sorry!
Perhaps a budget alternative would be to have your family be the hereditary maintenance crew for a rich family's vacation compound!
Kidding aside, it's interesting how little this thread has mentioned technology, especially since, aside from rituals and traditions, it helps for it to be easy and pleasurable to stay close. It may be much less likely these days to play a capture-the-flag game with only cousins, but it's very easy to play e.g. World of Warcraft with someone thousands of miles away. There's some real likelihood that things like carbon-pricing will make long-distance travel pricier for the next generation than it is for us now, but the IT revolution is likely to continue in new and surprising ways.
You sound like at AT&T commercial from about 1995.
Instead of my fantasy reply in the Messy thread, here's what I actually replied with:
Dear Brother #2,
I understand - pretty short notice. Anyway, with Brother #1's 40th this summer, I think we'll have a chance to really spend a few days doing nothing but letting all the kids run around and get to know each other. I'd love to actually rent a house on a lake or something for a week, and just hang out as a family. Plus you can meet Hokey Pokey and Brother #1's new baby.
Love, Heebie
I'm pleased with my sneakiness.
It may be much less likely these days to play a capture-the-flag game with only cousins, but it's very easy to play e.g. World of Warcraft with someone thousands of miles away.
Wow, what a wonderful future we have in front of us!
79 reads like the intro. to an essay in Reason.
Wow, what a wonderful future we have in front of us!
Imagine a gauntleted thumb refreshing Unfogged comment threads--forever.
I mean, I'm sorry, but the snarkiness in 80, 82, and 83 seems a bit rich. I suppose someone needs to send out the Tim Burke signal or something to defend gaming--didn't someone here recently link to a good piece on a woman getting a lot of meaning out of WoW after her marriage fell apart?--but do we even need to have this conversation? Here, on what's basically a pseudonymous BBS?
85: The important thing to remember is that my snarkiness was first.
I liked the scandal where the Bush admin official revealed confidential information in the chat window of some game while complaining to some friends about the job.
Actually, the Yukon property, I have recently learned, is actually a "compound" because it has multiple buildings: the big cabin, the dinky little cabin, the outhouse, and a decrepit old shack. It is seriously awesome up there, but the distances are truly formidable (as is the winter, which is 9 months of the year).
The Detroit idea is rather clever. It's also a lot easier to get to than the Yukon!
Maybe there's some vacant downtown high-rise your whole clan could takeover. Like a compound, but vertical!
Most of my family is in Europe. I'm also an only child. I am quite close to one of my cousins and get along very well with her sister in that 'we're family, we like each other, but we would never be friends if we weren't related' sort of way.
I'm sure lifelong proximity helps but (given a certain availability of money for travel) in my experience it's not absolutely necessary - my sister and I grew up on a different continent than most of our family but spent some time with them every year (Christmas trips, or being deposited with them for a few weeks in the summer) and are pretty close with them, especially our surviving grandparents. Also, I went to a boarding school for high school so effectively stopped living with my family when I was 14 - but my sister's my best friend and I'm very close with my parents. If adults inculcate the necessity/joys of keeping in touch with family (especially now that long distance phone calls don't cost any more than in-town phone calls, and email/facebook/skype/following each other's blogs/etc. are virtually free [given computer and internet access]), I think children will absorb the lesson pretty easily (if their family is actually fun to spend time with.)
I'd also want to add that if you want your kids to be close to your parents, you yourself have to be close to your parents. Why the hell should I invest a ton of energy in people you resent and avoid?
Why the hell should I invest a ton of energy in people you resent and avoid?
If you don't like your parents and your parents don't like their parents, then hanging with grandma and gramps is rebellion, like smoking.
92 Yes. My parents would routinely send me off to Poland for the summer as a little kid, and later we would try to go to Poland for Christmas every other year, subject to visa issues. So I grew up spending a decent amount of time with my mom's family and am pretty close to them. On the other hand, after we moved to Europe I spent very little time with my dad's side (brother with daughter in Chicago) and now I haven't spoken to them in years. Not because of any ill feeling; we're simply not even remotely close.
85: I meant to write 77 rather than 79 in 83. In other words, I was responding to fake accent, not to you. That said, if Sony invents an Orgasmatron attachment for the PS3, I'll sign on for the virtual utopia you're promising us.
I'm not convinced that the goal is worthwhile in the first place. People's lives lead in different directions, and it's perfectly possible to lead a decent life without devoting most of your leisure time to your relatives.
With the crappy social safety net in this country, it can be really economically important to have ties to family.
Further, one of the things that I hate about my job is that I'm supposed to assess people's family and social support systems. The hope is that they'll get support from family and friends so that they'll use professional services and the mental health system less.
I fully support making more friends and all, but some of these people have such crappy, abusive families that I hate that Medicaid wants me to encourage them to get in touch with them.
Plus, I hate the way it tries to shift what should be a shared societal burden to individual families. Of course, I don't tell people they should do this, but I can't just write, "client does not want to see his/her family." I have to write that this assessed need area is being deferred, because.... unsuitable, unsafe etc.
I need a new job. Great boss, but the system sucks so bad.
The BF's mother desperately wants him and me to be close to his brother and sister-in-law. We get e-mails reminding us of her birthday and are basically told that we will be exchanging gifts. Fun.
This has been a fascinating comment thread to read. I have a supremely f*cked up family, but the problem is primarily with the parents and the former parents. One of my sisters and I are plotting how to cultivate something healthier for the future, and a large part of it involves me being the Totally Awesome Child-free Aunt to her future children. (This is also the plan my husband and I have for the half-sister he is closet to. She just had a baby, and I spend a lot of time making scrapbook pages and buying awesome stuff to send them. It also helps that his family is less supremely f*cked up than it was in the past, and that the parents, stepparents, and bioparents no longer actively hate each other).
102: Hurrah for no longer actively hating!
No more masturbating to Hurrah for no longer actively hating!
I'm kind of wary of close-knit family ties, because at least in my family, people use it as an excuse to take liberties with each other... like of course we love each other, that's why I can meddle in your affairs, and you'll just have to forgive me, 'cause it's for your own good. This is one of the reasons why both my parents are somewhat estranged from their families... being too close is unpleasant.
104: Don't you want to stop masturbating to Hurrah for no longer?
65
But if you read "Goodbye My Brother" by John Cheever, you can see how this doesn't always work either.
Strangely enough I read that story within the last week or two.
On the post topic, in my experience paying your children's expenses is a good way to get them to go somewhere.
This thread made me sad that almost my entire extended family lives within an hour of one another in Chicago, and they do things together pretty routinely. We're the oddballs on the East Coast. (There's another small group of oddballs on the West Coast.) Anyway, there was a recent almost-death-in-the-family scare that made me want to get back there to visit very, very soon. It's been too long. </earnestness>
what you should do is have such a chaotic, insane household that the children have to band together to survive. I had to get food for my brother when he was 2 or 3 sometimes, and started making dinner for the family when I was 11 (roast chicken, rice, frozen peas.) what if there's a three day party and everyone's tripping! what if your parents are out in da club at 4am and the baby wakes up? or your stepfather doesn't do laundry? I can't say the results have been a total success, but we are all 3 very close as adults. my bro's here now (has been for almost 2 months) and my sister's coming to stay for 2 months soon too. good times. as long as she stops offering me morphine, and/or I stop accepting.