1. Pretend you know it all! Do not ask for help or seek advice from those who have expertise in building healthy families. Just make it up as you go along.
2. Don’t listen to each other. Be sure and stare at the TV or stay online whenever other family members are around. Do not share meals around the dinner table.
3. Create an atmosphere of crisis. Spend all your time putting out fires and being frustrated. Don’t plan, or budget, or set goals as a family.
4. Criticize often. Be sure to tear each other down in front of others. Name calling works great for this!
5. Never discipline your children. Try to be their best buddy, or better yet, try and live out your own unrealized dreams through them.
6. Be someone different at home than you are in public. Especially when it comes to church. Be “Ozzie and Harriet” on Sunday morning and then live like “the Simpson’s” the rest of the week.
7. Keep things as serious as possible. Don’t laugh often. Be so insecure that you cannot laugh at yourself, once and awhile. They might think you are human.
8. Talk to co-workers and friends about problems with your spouse more than you talk things through with your spouse. Your husband or wife will LOVE to hear how badly your co-workers and friends think they have blown it!
9. Take up hobbies that dominate your time and then guard your turf. Do not allow your family to violate “your space”. When something comes up, making you miss your appointment with your hobby, be sure and let your family know what a sacrifice you are having to make by being with them.
10. Never deal with the elephant in the room. Pretend its not there. It will just get better on its own.
11. Do not apologize when you are wrong. When one of the other members of your family messes up, or wrongs you, hold it against them as long and as often as possible.
What do you think? Is there something you could add to the list?
Many thanks, to Sam Rainer. He adapted a Newsweek article about ways to be a bad boss into a blog about ways for Pastors to be a poor leader to their staff. I adapted his ideas to concepts dealing with the family.
