Answer

What Does a Good Family Actually Look Like?

You have a picture in your head of what a good family looks like, and your family does not look like it. Most families do not. The picture is usually assembled out of other people’s best moments, and it makes ordinary life feel like evidence of failure.

Much more ordinary than the picture. The Proclamation gives the list, and what is striking is how unglamorous it is: nine practices, most of them available on a bad week, none of them requiring the house to be tidy or anybody to be at their best.

Eternal Truths

God named the practices, and they are all things you can do today. The Family: A Proclamation to the World says happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded on faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work and wholesome recreation. There is no photograph on that list.

It is a pattern, not a template. The same document acknowledges that disability, death and other circumstances require individual adaptation. Families differ enormously in size, shape and difficulty, and the same nine things strengthen all of them. That is how it can describe an ideal without indicting every household that does not currently match it.

The goal was never a perfect family, it was a perfecting one. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf taught that we are not looking for someone perfect but for someone with whom we can build, over a lifetime, a loving and more perfect relationship (“In Praise of Those Who Save”). The same is true of a whole family.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Social media hands you a strange comparison and never labels it as one. You are measuring your Tuesday evening against other people’s best forty seconds, edited. The families that look effortless are also not effortless, and they are the ones you have the least real information about.

What Research Shows

Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush found that children who knew more of their family’s ordinary stories scored higher on self-esteem, sense of control and family functioning, and coped better under stress. Those stories get told at dinner tables and in cars. The study cannot rank families. It does suggest that unhurried time together is doing more work than anything impressive.

Questions to Think About

• Which of the nine practices does my family already do without calling it anything?
• What am I comparing us to, and where did I get that picture?
• What is one thing I could start that would survive a bad week?

What You Can Do

Pick one item off the list of nine and put it somewhere it will happen, this week. One meal everybody is at. One prayer. One apology you have been putting off. A family that adds one practice and keeps it is doing exactly what the Proclamation describes. The essay behind this answer works through all nine.

Jesus Christ made the home the place discipleship actually happens, and He is more interested in the direction your family is moving than in how it currently looks.