>>i am curious how you foster such a feeling of family connectedness. how do you get your kids to feel like they are all on a team and they need to help each other? perhaps it is a corralary of them growing up all together instead of being farmed out to schools, but your family really seems to band together and i would love to have more of that here. any suggestions??<<

 I addressed this somewhat a year ago – http://vibrantmoms.com/parenting/kids-helping-each-other-and-being-responsive-to-moms-requests/.  But I was thinking more about this.  Sometimes we do things and we’re consciously trying to get certain results, and sometimes we do things and we don’t realize that we’re doing something that’s creating the results.  Was that sentence way too confusing?  🙂 

Anyway, this question falls into the second category for me, so I needed to think about this.  We do have a strong sense of family connectedness, but I didn’t specifically try to create that.  I would tell you that we spend a lot of time together and that we have expectations of how family members treat one another, and my expectation rubs off on everyone.  But that’s not so helpful as a practical suggestion, and since there are families that spend a lot of time together but they don’t feel like a team, it’s not by itself enough.  I do think having a lot of time together is a key component, though – it establishes a framework for everything else to happen in. 

I’ve been thinking about this since I got this question last week.  I asked my husband and he said he thinks we expect everyone to be a team and they are.  But I started listening to myself talk to the kids and realized that the way I talk builds this up.  For example, instead of putting the baby down in his bassinet, I put him on the couch and told my ds3, “Can you take care of your little brother and make sure he doesn’t fall off the couch while I get a drink of water?”  (Baby doesn’t roll and was tucked into the side of the couch away from the floor.)   Did I need him to watch the baby for thirty seconds?  No.  But I try to give them opportunities from the time they’re young to take care of each other. 

When I have something to give to a child, I very often ask one of the kids to give it to the other.  This can be something as simple as giving a sibling a fork or a piece of fruit.  Sometimes this is a help for me and sometimes it would be easier for me to give it to them myself.  But I want them to have the feeling of giving and getting something nice from one another.  If someone gets himself a drink, I’ll suggest they give a sibling a drink, too.  Just now, my ds7 asked if he could peel a carrot for himself.  I told him if he peels one for ds3 also, then it’s fine with me.  I wouldn’t have been likely to have said yes close to dinner to his request for just himself.  So he gets the message that helping his brother helps him, too.  Even with my baby, who’s just 2 months old, when I pass him to his siblings to be held, I tell him how lucky he is to have big brothers and sisters who love him so much.  Little things like this, all day long, day after day really build up the message that we love each other and take care of one another. 

Rav Dessler wrote that giving brings to love.  Culturally, we think of love in terms of what we get from someone, but it’s not true. Why do we love the tiny infant so much, so soon?  Because we’re immersed in giving to him all day long.  The more we give, the more we love, and when we encourage our kids to do things for one another, then that builds the love and connection they feel. 

My part in building this dynamic is to support it from a very young age. I encourage my kids to play mostly with each other and to view friends as supplemental. In fact, if someone isn’t behaving kindly to his sibling, there is no way I will allow him to play with a friend until he has remedied that (and I don’t mean a quick ‘sorry’, either).  They all have friends outside of the home, but the quality of the relationships the kids build while living at home together is the foundation of their adult relationships that they’ll further develop when they get older.  I want my kids to have strong relationships with one another that will be a source of strength and support as they get older.  If it doesn’t begin now, when will it happen? 

Avivah