Rebecca Farraway
Leadership Challenge
Final Paper
Instructor: Jose Gomez
December 13, 2007


Leadership
The
Challenge
Fostering Leadership Within Families


14 PART EIGHT
Fostering Leadership In The Next Generation:
Personal Reflections - Practical Solutions

My business is my family and my family is my business.
Joe Kennedy, Father of U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Can you imagine anything more energizing, more unifying, more filled with satisfaction than working with members of your family to accomplish something that really makes a difference in the world?
Steven R. Covey, Franklin Covey Institute - Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families


Each autumn, my husband, two daughters and I celebrate the fall harvest by spending a Saturday morning picking vegetables at a local farm. No grocery store produce department can compare with the rows of vibrantly colored vegetables, the smell of chlorophyll in the air and the sense of connectedness that we feel to each other and to the earth while engaged in this rewarding tradition. This one day of hard work brings my family joy and satisfaction throughout the entire year. Every time we sprinkle locally grown and self-picked sun-dried tomatoes on a salad or reach into the freezer for a bag of yellow and red peppers to add to a spicy Cajun dish, we feel the sense of accomplishment and appreciation that comes from hard work.
The psychological benefits of hard work are proven and time-tested truths. Hard work brings a sense of accomplishment and pride to the participant; it fosters self-esteem yet, ironically, decreases the likelihood of an individual becoming too cocky or self-centered. Above all, hard work instills appreciation within the individual.
In a traditional agrarian society, families worked side by side to accomplish the tasks which were needed to survive. They experienced a direct, obvious and logical sequence to the type of work that was performed and the end results which they achieved. As a result, the value of work was clear; people worked to support the family. It became easy to connect the dots between effort and reward. Families planted, watered, weeded, picked, sold and ate their crops. Most families participated in building their own homes. From a young age, children were a part of the family business and this involvement was not limited to farm work - even doctors, lawyers and shopkeepers involved their offspring in the workings of the family business. In addition, the direct results of other’ labors were fairly obvious and easy to observe. There were few middlemen to dilute the connection between the processes involved in producing the end results of labor. In spite of its shortcomings, agrarian life provided a large number of natural opportunities for teamwork, leadership, problem solving and familial bonding.
Contrast the experience of the agrarian family with the plight of today’s families where children are often unaware of what their parents even do at “work.” From the child’s perspective, the parent simply disappears for the day and then, emerges in the evening, usually tired and often frazzled. Many children in 20th and 21st century homes lack an understanding of how money is earned and even why it is necessary. Today’s young people rarely witness the steps involved in earning a living - they only see the end result. Not surprisingly, this jump to the end brings a lack of understanding about how and even why productivity is important. Soon, feelings of entitlement begin to emerge and selfishness, instead of gratitude is learned.
It is important to provide children with opportunities to see their parents work. Just as importantly, it is absolutely crucial for parents to find ways for their children to work along side them. Working with your children fosters crucial bonding within the family unit and helps young people acquire the skills necessary to become happy, productive and contributing members of society.
Support Your Child’s Dreams
On its website, the non-profit company Idealist.org gives a list of organizations started by kids. Among those listed is A Place to Call Home, a program which was started by teenager Kirsten Thomas of Colorado. She started her company after a trip to Denver with her Dad. On the trip, she noticed the many homeless people in Denver’s downtown area and wondered how she could help. With the encouragement of her father, Kirsten enlisted the help of her friends and began colleting donations of necessities such as baby food and toiletries along with toys, bibles and other comforting items. Kirsten and her friends continue to compile the items and distribute them to the homeless in the Denver area on an ongoing basis.
In 1999, at the age of thirteen, Carolyn Rubenstein established Carolyn’s Compassionate Children, an organization, which creates pen pal relationships between volunteer teens and critically ill children. Since that time, Carolyn’s program has expanded to include organizing an annual school supply drive, holiday letter and gift drives and even offers scholarships to college students.
Another charitable company featured on the Idealist.org site is Melissa Poe’s Kids For A Clean Environment (F.A.C.E.). The organization which Melissa started in 1989, when she was only nine years old, focuses on finding ways for kids to help protect the environment and to talk about their concerns with other children. Currently, Kids F.A.C.E. has over 300,000 members throughout world. Through the program, they have planted over a million trees.
Kirsten, Carolyn and Melissa each chose a different focus for their organizations and yet, they all share one thing in common; they have parents who listened to their concerns, ideas, interests and dreams. In addition, their parents worked along side them and helped find the resources needed to support their children in becoming young leaders.
Foster Young Leaders
Almost every parent remembers the deep bond that they felt when they saw their newborn child for the first time. Nothing on earth compares with the bond between parent and child and yet, competing influences constantly bombard parents and children in an effort to pry apart their attachment. Everything from video games to the kid next door fights for a piece of your child’s time. Combine these competing factors with the average schedule of today busy parents and it is easy to see how a multitude of options can replace the bond of the family. According to psychologist Alan Loy McGinnis,
In every person there resides a basic need that in the technical books on this topic is called “the affiliative motive.” Each of us likes to belong to some group of tightly-knit people where we are known and accepted, where we are committed to each other, and where we know that the other members of the group will be loyal to us if we are in trouble. It is the old tribal instinct. Ideally, this will occur in our families, where people forgive anything. When such devotion is cultivated in families, people may stray away for a while, but they inevitably return (Bringing 138).

Successful businessman and motivational speaker Gary Palmer asserts that parents should devote at least as much time to the raising of their children as they do to their chosen professions. In his company, My Kid’s CEO, he frequently asks parents the question, “If you aren’t your kid’s CEO, who is? Is it another kid at school, is it the media?” Palmer’s company helps families find ways to spend more time together whether it be through service projects, starting a family business or simply creating a home business plan and mission statement which includes roles, responsibilities, expectations and positive and negative outcomes. According to Palmer, “Working together creates a strong eternal bond within families that no outside influences will ever break. Paradoxically, children who are tightly bonded to a sense of family also develop a strong sense of purpose and vision…a primary characteristic within leaders.” Essentially, if we want our children to become leaders, we should show how this is done. By listening our children’s ideas and dreams, by helping them to establish goals and by teaching and modeling the purpose and value of work, we create ever lasting bonds that foster leadership in the next generation.
According to parenting advocates, Linda and Richard Eyre,
The interesting thing about being a parent is that what we’re really trying to do is work our way out of the job. We’re aiming to get our children to a point where they can govern themselves, where they are law-abiding citizens who can handle their own money, live by good values, and become parents capable of passing the same abilities, mortality, and basic happiness on to their own children (our grandchildren) (Three 21).