December 20, 2016
Interview with Bruce Feiler, author of the book The Secrets Of Happy Families
Mike Carruthers:
Is your family a happy family? It turns out that happy families have a few important things in common.
Bruce Feiler:
They adapt all the time, there’s a system where they can change in our case we have a family meeting once a week where we talk about how we’re functioning as a family.
Bruce Feiler, author of the book The Secrets Of Happy Families…
So they adapt all the time, they talk a lot and the final thing is they go out and play. It sounds easy but it’s actually the thing that we most forget.
If you want to cut down the number of family fights…
It turns out we know a lot about fighting so the highest conflict time in families is between 6 and 8pm. Everybody’s coming back from their busy day they’re bringing their own tension. So we no longer have those conversations between 6 and 8 in our family.
I’m sure you’ve heard that having family meals together is important.
Here’s the problem; a third of us aren’t doing it. Americans rank 33 out of 35 countries in having meals together. What if my wife has to work late or my child has sports practice, am I just doomed to have an unhappy family? Well the answer is no because when you dig into the research it shows that’s there’s only 10 minutes of conversation in any meal. The rest is taken up with take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. And you can take that 10 minutes, move it to any time of the day and still have the benefit. So if you can have family dinner great, but if not have family breakfast, meet for a bedtime snack, even 1 meal on the weekends can have benefits.
