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Re-valu-ing
the Family, Part Twenty-four: What Business and Media Could Do for
Families
by
Richard and Linda Eyre
(www.valuesparenting.com)
Note: In this
twenty-six part column, Richard and Linda Eyre explore the recent
revolution of the family from the honored centerpiece of society
to a disrespected and seemingly redundant appendage to the larger
corporate and cultural institutions of our new world. Re-valu-ing
the family, the Eyres believe, is the only alternative to America's
demise. The sequence of the column is: A. Re-valu-ing the family
(part I); B. sThe "crux" (parts 2 and 3 -- why family is the foundation
for everything, including happiness); C. The "curse" (parts 4 and
5 -- the social problems that plague our society today); D. The
"crisis" (parts 6 and 7 -- the breakdown and breakup of families
that allows and leads to the social problems); E. The "cause" (parts
8, 9, 10, 11 -- the reasons our families are failing); F. The "culprits"
(parts 12, 13, 14, and 15-- how our new, large institutions are
destroying the small, most basic institution of family); G. The
"cure" (parts 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 -- what you as a parent
can do about it); H. The "case" (parts 23, 24, and 25 -- a case
for government and big corporations to pay more positive attention),
and I. Finding or forming a family support group (part 26).
Part
24
"Thorn" Recommendations
Large private, public, and nonprofit institutions make countless
thousands of decisions, policies, and choices of direction and orientation
every day which affect families. If every manager, every policy
maker, every decision-making officer of every large corporation
could be implanted with a tiny microchip that did nothing but maintain
awareness of family importance and consistently pose the question,
"How will this impact families?" . . . that would, in fact, turn
the hearts of policy makers in the direction of family needs
. The world we live in would rapidly begin to become a different
and better place.
Since the "chip"
approach isn't possible, we'll try the "thorn" approach. Each "directional
recommendation" that follows is intended to be a little attention-getting
thorn in the side of decision makers in a larger institution . .
. to get their attention and prod them to consider their products,
their pitches, their procedures, their priorities, and their patterns
in light of the net effect they are having on families. What follows
looks a lot like (and in fact is) a wish list -- a set of things
most parents wish larger institutions would do to help
(or to stop hurting) families. Most of them aren't likely to happen
anytime soon. But while we're fixing our own families, we can wish,
we can wait, and in some cases we can even demand.
1. Family
Supportive Suggestions for Work and Professional Institutions
Families are
being squeezed harder than ever before by corporate America. The
corporate preoccupation with profit and stock price is causing short-term
policy that will hurt everyone in the long run.
What should
corporations do for families? In essence they should wake up to
the fact that devaluing their employees is a very bad long-term
policy -- bad for everyone, including stockholders and top managers.
The companies that emerge on top in the new millennium will be those
that can attract and hold a loyal work force. And as the number
of available workers declines, companies with reputations for greedy
top management, low worker wages, long hours, and poor family benefits
and flex options will be the big losers. Those who are getting away
with it now will not get away with it for long.
At the very
least, any mid to large corporation should seek to offer its employees:
1. A fair
wage and other compensation commensurate with the company's overall
profitability (a truly enlightened company will plan a tight limit
on the ratio between its CEO and its lowest paid worker).
2. Real,
well-publicized and accessible job flexibility options that can
accommodate the needs of parents and kids -- the whole gamut from
flex time to job-sharing, from telecommuting to child and elder
care, and from real child care leave to shorter work weeks . .
. all should be considered and fine-tuned and incorporated. Companies
need to turn these catch phrases into accessible realities.
3. Locations
transfer policies that do not uproot families against their will.
4. Job security
that can be interrupted or threatened only by extreme incompetency
on the part of the employee or extreme profitability stress on
the employer.
2. Family
Supportive Recommendations for Financial Institutions
Nothing destroys
families like debt. By making high interest credit card debt so
easily available to everyone, and particularly to young parents
and college age kids, banks and other financial institutions are
putting huge stresses and strains on families even as they increase
the default rates that result in higher costs and interest rates
for everyone.
Instead of
offering "pre-approved" credit cards to us all and competing with
each other to see who can create the most debt and charge the highest
interest rates, financial institutions should take more responsibility
for assisting families in learning and practicing sound fiscal policies.
All any bank
officer needs to do to be more family supportive is to treat and
advise all customers like he would his own children. If his married
daughter and son-in-law asked about credit cards, he would say,
"Use a debit card for now and avoid any debt except for education
or to buy a house." If his college freshman son received unsolicited,
pre-approved credit cards in the mail at his dorm, the father would
say, "Cut them up and throw them away or if you want to use one
to establish credit, get one with a low limit, not more than $1,000.00,
and use it for one purchase a month and pay the bill each month
before there is any interest."
If that same
banker and his counterparts everywhere would give the same advice
to everyone, countless families would be saved and spared the devastation
of heavy consumer debt.
The best goal
of banks and other financial institutions could adopt -- a goal
arrived at benefitting their customers and thus benefitting themselves
over the long term -- would be like a coin with two sides: 1. Avoid
any policy or practice that endangers or hurts families; 2. Actively
develop and implement programs to assist and help families.
In their best
light, financial institutions and their services are enormously
important and helpful to families. They allow the purchase of homes,
they facilitate savings and retirement, they give security and provide
for retirement. Yet by making credit and debt too easy they destroy
so many of the very families they could have helped. In sum, their
services are constructive and helpful to those who are financially
responsible, but can be destructive and devastating for those who
are not.
Banks ought
to take a longer and closer look at the market segment that uses
credit unwisely and offer everything from simple educational tools
to highly-promoted debit cards as an alternative to credit cards.
Financial institutions ought to begin to judge themselves not by
how high their average interest rate is but by how many stable family
economies they can assist, knowing that those families will become
lifetime customers with resource levels that produce bank revenue
through long-term growth and investing rather than through gouging
short-term consumer interest.
3. Family
Supportive Suggestions for Advertising/Merchandising Institutions
Advertising/merchandising
institutions hurt families in two broad and basic ways. 1. Through
marketing strategies that induce greed, encourage instant gratification
and cause the kind of over-extension that endangers families economically
and turns parents' attention and priorities outward rather than
inward. 2. By creating ads and other images that glorify casual
sex, violence, and materialism -- the very things that damage and
divide families most.
Trying to imagine
our advertising/merchandising institutions reversing these two things
is so difficult that the two following suggestions or calls will
be instantly labeled impossible if not laughable. Still, we feel
compelled to make them -- first because that is what this book is
about and second because this group of institutions and any company
within it would actually gain substantial long-term benefits by
following them!
1. Advertisers/merchandisers
should honor moderation and actually advocate and teach delayed
gratification . . . push the benefits and well-being of saving
and waiting rather than the quick thrill of credit buying . .
. list the full honest price and promote the savings of paying
cash rather than hyping the half truths and false promises of
monthly payments. Over time, short-term loses would be overcome
by the long-term benefits from loyal consumers who appreciate
the honesty and the motives.
2. Advertisers/merchandisers
should create messages and images that theme on values and on
positive emotions like love, loyalty, and personal integrity.
These ads and messages probably cost more and require brighter
creative input but over time they will help implant the same respect,
loyalty, and love from the consumer that they portray
to him.
These two dramatic
shifts, impossible as they sound, could benefit most marketing institutions
over the long haul . . . and they would help save the family.
4. Family
Supportive Suggestions for Entertainment and Media Institutions
Perhaps the
two most self-serving, delusional public lies of the last couple
of decades have been (a) the tobacco industry saying smoking is
not addictive and (b) the movie, music, and television industries
saying they don't influence public or individual morality
and behavior, they only reflect it and report on it.
In fact, the
media has enormous influence over how we perceive ourselves
and our world and over how we live within it. Those who say otherwise
are trying to defend the indefensible.
There is a
basic question with a surprising answer which leads to some challenging
recommendations:
The Question:
Why is so much of our programming, our movies, TV, music, and other
media so full of violence and sex? And why is really good portrayal
of values, families, and positive role models so hard to find?
The Answer:
It's not as simple as "sex sells" or "people are drawn to violence"
or "producers give people what they want." The fact is that really
good movies, about positive and powerful things do sell
-- as does truly great music and value-oriented, even spiritually-related
television. Even upbeat, positive-slant news is well received if
it is well reported and well produced. Yet there are nowhere near
enough of these. Why? Simply because the baser the emotion, the
easier and cheaper it is to portray. You don't need a great script
or great actors to depict sex and violence. It takes much more subtlety
and much more artistic talent to get audiences or listeners to feel
faith or fidelity than to feel titillation or terror. Media institutions,
in it for the profit and for their own preservation, churn out easy
formula -- the stuff they can produce for cheap and that they know
they can't miss on.
1. Recommendations
to writers/producers/directors: Have the courage to attempt the
portrayal of the more positive (and more difficult) emotions and
characteristics. Take the risk of making something about honor
or truth or courage rather than the "safe bet" of more sex and
violence. Show the real and honest consequences of things. Actually
think about the effect and influence on the consumer. Meet the
challenge that is inherent in all creation: Think more about the
ultimate quality, effect, and legacy
of what you make and less about the short-term profit.
2. Recommendations
to actors, artists, celebrities, "role models,' and their agents
and publicists: Show the significant rather than the seamy. There
are so many celebrities with strong families and strong views
about priorities -- sides we never see, partly because of privacy
and partly because it's thought not sensational enough to sell.
But in fact, there is a hunger for human interest things that
we can connect to and identify with. If people knew as much about
the "good" as about the "bad," we might all be amazed (and reassured)
that there is more of the former than the latter.
3. Recommendations
to news producers and directors: If every news director or Internet
producer had a child he really loved -- say a ten-year-old --
and if he knew that child would see and hear everything he created
-- we would probably reach far higher standards in what comes
at us as news and information. Show the good and the hopeful as
well as the bad and the hopeless. Don't sugarcoat anything, but
don't drape it in black either.
4. Recommendations
to Funders and benefactors and to resources that are not "players"
now but could be: Most of what ends up on the big or small screen,
or on the CD starts off as writing. And writers write
what they think will sell. And often the only buyers
are the producer types already discussed who subscribe to the
sex and violence theory. Grants and prizes, both of recognition
and of remuneration can stimulate a lot of better writing. Foundations,
corporations, endowed universities, churches -- any entities with
resources and with a desire to impact entertainment positively,
could (and should) set up some form of writing prize for scripts
or books or lyrics that portray positive, family, and character-strengthening
emotions and story lines. Any philanthropic or alternative-minded
organization looking to maximize its reach and impact would have
a hard time finding a more powerful way to allocate its resources.
We were
featured guest speakers not long ago at Michael Eisner's convention
of top Disney corporate officers and division heads. We wrote a
brief "parents' plea" for the occasion attempting to articulate
the appeal we felt all parents would
want to extend to the Disney organization in light of some of their
moves away from the family entertainment that made them
famous. Let's call it "Err to the Light":
We appeal
to you now, today, as parents, as "everyparent," from a part of
the heart that only parents know. We have been with you in these
convention sessions, looked around and tried to calculate the influence
in this room. It reaches every American and every American child
and beyond -- to the whole world, not periodically but daily.
Because
of your size and who you are, because of media's stretch and subtle
stimulus, you may have more influence than any other company, even
more, perhaps, than any other single institution of any kind, more
than the Presidency, more than the Congress. Actually, "influence"
is too small a word. You have stewardship. You touch our children
every day. They listen to you longer and with more concentration
than to us.
What we
say to you now is born not of statistical analysis or profit-margin
expertise (although we promise you that "goodness sells"). It comes
from a simple clarity bestowed only on parents. Because, you see,
while our own personal commitments and values, our desires and dreams
may quiver with ambiguity, they take on a firm, sharp focus in what
we want for our children.
As mere
people, we are confused by complexity when we look at our world.
But as parents, we are touched by simple pure wisdom when we look
at our child. In that wisdom we see the joy of right decisions,
the wonder and trust of selfless love, and the nobility of simple
courage. We see the good and love in the world reflected in our
children's eyes. We feel the deep desire to pour all that is good
into their lives. And we feel the need for help because we also
see the damning dangers of the dark dimming of sensitivity, the
callous desensitizing and loss of wonder that not only robs them
of their childhood but steals their awe and hope.
So, first,
we thank you for the times you have portrayed the light better and
stronger than others portray the dark (and when you portray the
dark for showing it accurately, for making it lose), for the times
when you have reached the deeper realism of right that is truly
stronger than might. Thank you for escapes into fantasy that are
not to places outside ourselves, but to the deepest and truest parts
of our own hearts. Thank you for the times you've shown the courage
to speak of and to the spirit and softly and carefully of a higher,
better being to go with a higher, better way. Thanks for the times
you have avoided the mindless amorality which is, in its public
face, more widely destructive than immorality.
Media,
goes the old poppycock, doesn't influence a society's values, it
only reflects them. Is that why prime time ads cost a million a
minute -- to reflect? Media influences us and our children so profoundly
it cannot be measured. "With influence comes responsibility" goes
the old cliche. A stewardship? A burden to bear? But isn't it more
an opportunity, an opportunity to lift, to love, to help us all
live in a higher realm?
As parents,
our plea to you is so basic: Help us. Help us remind ourselves and
our children of who we really are and who we really can be. Help
us to see the light within ourselves. Help us to be better parents
by being our ally, by giving our children heros and models, by creating
good that is both beautiful and believable.
If you
err, err toward the light. Be willing to earn 15 percent instead
of 20 percent by avoiding the dark. Light brings strength, and a
sure-footed, clear-headed creativity and confidence that makes up
(financially and otherwise) much more than the missing 5 percent.
Err to the light, not only in turning down a bribe, or a sweatshop,
or a tax dodge. . . . Err to the light in turning down an amoral
script, or a superfluous excess of language or violence, or a tarnishing
sit-com. Err to the light in storying the noble human spirit rather
than the pseudo-sophisticated "realism" of the underside. Err to
the light by believing and portraying that human beings are still
good at their core.
From parents
to Disney: Err on the side of right, err on the side of light.
Next
: What other public and private institutions could do and should
do for families.
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Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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