This is A Personal Touch, a chance to check in with ordinary people making an extraordinary difference in the world. I’m Rebecca Cressman and today our guest is DeAnne Flynn, who has been trying to help what she calls, The Time-Starved Family.
Q: And I want to talk a little bit about that with you because, DeAnne, you have seven children from the littlest all the way up to nineteen. So if anyone knows what it is like to try to juggle the demands of a family, it’s you. So when did you decide to put this in print?
A: You know, I was always talking to my friends’ mothers who were living in their cars frantically moving from one lesson and activity or play date to another and saying, “What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Is this necessary and essential?” And so it became a discussion for a couple of years, and my friends were quite frankly sick of hearing about it. I was always saying, “Guys we are in the talent trap,” is what I called it, because everything revolved around talent development, not just education but entertainment, and…
Q: In other words, whether it is flute lessons or dancing lessons or sports.
A: Yes, but it wasn’t just educational pursuit. It was the Gymboree or the little gym. It’s these bounce-off-the-wall classes that I thought, “Is this necessary for our two year old to be… us to be paying and driving to this place where they can sit in a circle and then run around a room?” I don’t know. It’s not like I don’t love those programs. I just thought, “I can’t do that with seven children.” And I was constantly saying, “Why are we doing these things and are they really important? Isn’t it more important that we should be eating dinner than quickly running somebody to a lesson at dinnertime?” And so it kind of grew out of a natural passion. It wasn’t a goal to write a book or anything like that. I just thought, “You know, other mothers must feel the way I feel. That our family time is really going away for things that are important and they’re fun, but they are not the most important things.”
Q: So then what did you do, you said, “Okay, realizing whether I’m raising two children or one, or seven, or eight, or whatever, there is always going to be opportunities out there for them, and I do want my children to develop, so where is the balance?
A: I think it’s exactly what you said, “Where is the balance?” It’s going to be different for every family. For me, I’ve chosen to have a large family so the outside activities, they are fewer for us. And we decided as a family that we will each have one activity that’s a sport or a dance activity and one that’s a music activity. So that still makes fourteen different things a week but they are doable. And each family needs to decide for themselves what is important to them and what they are going to do to make time for the family, because in today’s fast-paced world we sit in front of screens, we drive in our cars, we really don’t sit down the way we used to and connect with each other.
Q: Hmm, is it a difficult challenge though? I want to go back to that idea of you walking with other women and talking with other women about it.
A: It is and most people, I was surprised though, quite honestly, at some of the reactions I got. Because mothers got defensive about the choices they’ve made. They said, “But you know, if you want to have a talented child, then you have to make those sacrifices for the family.” And I thought, “Yes that’s true,” if that is your goal. If talent development is your goal, then definitely; but for me I feel like the spotlight experiences we were giving our children were not always the best thing for them, personally. I think, sometimes that makes them egocentric, and it doesn’t help them to be as ‘other oriented’ as they could be. So we started talking more about service than about spotlight and we started saying, “Okay, what kind of an individual do you want to be? Great if you can dance on pointe, fabulous, but that’s not probably going to be an ambition that you will continue after high school, and so what would be an ambition that you would continue, and what are the talents and gifts that you’ve been given that you could develop that would help you as a person, as a parent, as an adult.” And childhood is fun and it should be fun and carefree, but it’s fun when you are together not just separate in different classrooms for different activities.
Q: Well when you talk with the kids about that, what kind of feedback do they give you? Because it is true as a parent, you want to celebrate the accomplishments. You do get a sense of validation. My child is doing well if they are spotlighted, or if they accomplish this level, or if they are able to be chosen for the premier choir, or whatever. That does bring some sense of real validation to a parent and for the child as well. So what is it, what do the kids say back to you about it. All right, we’re going to simplify a little bit.
A: Well some parents get their validation solely from those experiences and I examine that in chapter five where I say, “What are your motives?” I mean truly sit down and I give many different motives. What are your motives for these ambitions, these activities, and these lessons? And sometimes you have to stop and say, “Is this really for my child or is this for me? Is this making me feel like I am doing something worthwhile with my child?” And for my family, I think we got so frantic and it was so hairy that we thought, “We want to slow down. We feel like this is something that’s good for everyone involved.”
Q: What about, and I know the book just came out this year so it’s been a number of months that it’s been out, how do you address the fact that we have so much demand on using cell phones for example? They are always an interruption into the family’s life. What have you done strategically that makes you try to think about how we can keep that away from stealing too much of the time from our family?
A: Right and that is something that you bring up that is a very good point, because even when we are together as a family driving in the car or sitting at the dinner table, a child, a teen, can have a cell phone under the table texting and they’re looking right at you while they’re texting their friend. And so we have some rules about cell phones. For one thing, when they come in at night they put them on our dresser so they don’t just sit in bed and all hours of the night text friends. And another thing is, when we’re together as a family, we say, “All cell phones off.” You don’t bring them to family night; you don’t bring them to the table if that’s our time. When you work and you have to have a cell phone to get calls, we turn them off at certain times of the day, when we can just set them aside to have family time, specifically dinnertime.
Q: Hmmm that’s good.
A: But there are a lot of things that you can do. Even just talking to your kids, especially your teens about your feelings and the reasons why you want to do things. I mean that’s kind of exciting, we call it the “Flynn Family Slow-Down Project,” so…
Q: [laughs]
A: …we were all doing it kind of as an experiment together to see if we liked it better and we did. We actually did. We did it for a year and we did like it better and we’ve continued it.
Q: All right and so it’s kind of like taking you life, putting it back in slow motion, not necessarily going back in time, just saying, “Okay, knowing that we live in a modern world with so much that we need to balance, how do we reassess things?” When you talk about being, “The Time-Starved Family,” how do you judge whether you feel faded or whether there’s enough? Are you hoping to build an hour, an hour and a half a day that is uninterrupted?
A: You know it’s different on each day. And now that football season’s cranked up, it’s a different time and a season because of the sport we’re involved in. But I just feel like if everyone would prioritize and just reassess their lives, I think it would be clearer to them. As a mother I think you know, you have a sense for when you’re in the groove and when you are not. I feel like if we just think about it more, and talk about it more, it will become clearer to us as families and as parents how we’re doing and what we need to change to become closer and more connected.
Q: And of course, your book has sixteen ideas on how to take that and actually apply it and go ahead.
A: Yes, any family can do those things.
Q: Well DeAnne Flynn, thank you so much for joining us and for writing a book that is reflective of what we are all balancing right now, and an honest and humorous perspective too. So I appreciate that because I’ve learned to have to laugh at myself throughout life as well.
A: So do I, or I cry; thanks so much Rebecca.
Thank you so much, and I’m Rebecca Cressman, we want to thank you for joining us for this week’s edition of A Personal Touch. Be sure to check your email next week to find out who else is making a difference in our world, like DeAnne Flynn, with ‘a Personal Touch.’
End of interview.
