Familius

Talk About It

My thirteen-year-old son and I are reading In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Opdyke, a seventeen-year-old Polish girl who helped and secreted Jews during WWII. She witnesses the horrors of Poland both under the Russians and the Nazi regime. Early this morning before he left for school we talked of these things and he asked, “How can people be so cruel? I don’t understand.” I really had no good answer for him other than that they had been taught and had become accustomed to violence and hate. They forgot or ignored that every human life is a gift, is sacred. We talked of the many survivors and heroes, of the mistakes made, and tragic loss of life, family, and even whole communities. It is sad to think of these things, but so important to educate our children and teach them to think of others and help them contemplate, “What would I do? Do I have the courage to do what is right though I could lose everything?”

There are so many hard topics that we must discuss with our children, war, violence, sex, drugs, politics, inequality. There are inspirational topics too: discoveries, heroes, beauties in the earth and sky, religion, education, love, and family. Children have so many challenges and joys ahead. Read together. Explore together. Talk about it.

--The Mater Familius

For more ideas on how to talk to your children consider Glad to Be Dad: A Call to Fatherhood and Muddling Through: Perspectives on Parenting.

Become Like a Child

Many of you are familiar with Google Earth, a program that allows you to view any place on the earth from the comfort of your home. A few of my children found that you could go onto the settings and create a flight simulator that allowed them to pilot different planes around the earth. They’d take off and fly to destinations, often spending hours flying over jungles, mountains, European cities, to eventually land in some location they were interested in.

Yesterday, I found that my 11-year-old son was flying a plane under the ocean. I said, “How did you get under the ocean?”

“I found that if you choose specific planes,” he said, “you can go under water and explore the ocean bottom.”

I watched him flying his plane along the transcontinental drift and was amazed that an engineer had built this into the program and that an 11-year-old boy had discovered it.

One of the reasons we need to surround ourselves with children is to be reminded that the world has far more possibility than we, as adults, imagine.

Become like a little child and discover the world around you.

Film Festival to Celebrate Families

The Familius Family International Film Festival is officially open for submissions. 

We will accept submissions until March 31st. The competitive festival will be viewable from April 1 through June 5. 

Please go to www.familius.com/film-festival to see this artistic exploration of what it means to be family. 

We want to create a gathering place for professional and amateur filmmakers to showcase artistic films that celebrate, promote, and interpret family life. We believe that the family is the central unit of society and more needs to be done to explore this universal experience.

We encourage you to share the festival and submission information through your social media and consider submitting a film that you believe aligns with the Familius mission and the festival criteria.  

Familius showcases films digitally on its platform upon acceptance and approval. The annual film festival occurs the first week of April through the first week of June each year, where the finalists, Grand Jury Award, and Audience Award winners are announced. Familius awards $1,000 to the Grand Jury Award winner and $500 to the Audience Award winner. All finalists are showcased or premiered at the annual physical festival each summer.

Thank you for being part of our family. 

Lights! Camera! Action! Family!

From the Festival:

The Homemaker

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only― and that is to support the ultimate career. ” ― C.S. Lewis

Why Seek for Beauty?

“The new focus on beauty for beauty’s sake turned something as banal as picking out a head of fennel or selecting a toilet paper dispenser into a serious exercise in aesthetics, an exercise reserved in other cultures for things like buying a painting to repainting your entire home. I began weighing and measuring things with my tongue, fingertips, ear, nose or eye, always judging things for their beauty, be that beauty in taste, texture, sonority, scent or appearance. That’s a lot of aesthetic exercise. I was becoming an Olympic aesthete.

You wonder, maybe, why bother? Why make the effort for beauty? Why not just allow for beauty if it happens to pop up in nature (like a hearty, well-formed dandelion), but force it (like a sculpted topiary)? Why plow down a whole inner city for beauty, as Baron Haussmann did in order to transform Paris in the early nineteenth century from a congested, fetid medieval city into the model, bourgeois, flaunty Paris it is today? Why? Because, for one thing, human nature responds to beauty. It needs it.

It could be that we behave differently in a beautiful place than we do in a fetid one.

And this all translates into a lesson I learned from my girlfriend who was gravely particular about the bed linens she chose for her son Ludovic’s bedroom. She refused anything with images as grotesque or aggressive (both directly translatable words in French), in other words images as moche (ugly), as she called them, as cartoon images of dinosaurs or super heroes. All this because such grotesqueness and aggressiveness, she explained, can be absorbed into our subconscious. Into our dreams. Just as we drift off to sleep. And especially when we are little. Like two years old. Like Ludovic.”

From Global Mom, A Memoir: Eight Countries, Sixteen Addresses, Five Languages, One Family by Melissa Bradford, releasing this May. 

The Road Less Traveled

Metaphorically there are doors all around us that when opened lead to different adventures. As Robert Frost made famous in his poem “The Road Less Traveled” you cannot go down two roads at once . . .

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,     

And sorry I could not travel both

. . . or through two doors at the same time. You have to choose.

The growth is not just in the adventure behind the door; it is also in the choosing which door to open.

If you are afraid to choose, you are not moving forward. You are stuck.

Get rid of the fear and choose. Go through the door. Get on a road, even one less traveled.

Life is about experience. And by making a choice we experience. And experience is very profitable.

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Superhero Powers

Our six-year-old son believes he’s a superhero. Last week he whispered to his older brother, “Don’t tell Mom, but I’m a mutant.” He then listed his powers which included sonar, where he stamps his foot and can “see” by the echoing vibrations; invisibility (we believe this is to avoid discipline when he doesn’t do what he’s supposed to; and Ninja skills, which are helpful when our home is attacked during the Zombie Apocalypse, an event his older brothers have explained is inevitable.

With such great power comes great responsibility. We hope he’ll use his powers wisely.

As for the rest of us, what superpowers do we have that make us unique?

·        The ability to make someone smile?

·        The power to feed a family with only three ingredients in the pantry?

·        The ability to catch screaming, naked children who have escaped from the bathtub?

·        The ability to help your teenager with calculus and AP physics by skimming the chapter enough to know what it asks?

·        The ability to assist a neighbor with his car repair?

·        The ability to comfort a crying baby?

·        The ability to do seven loads of laundry, organize a scout meeting, and make peanut butter sandwiches simultaneously?

·        The ability to see into someone’s heart and know just what to say?

·        The ability to tell a joke when things are so serious we might cry?

·        The ability to love someone who has wronged you?

Superpowers are not just for those with imagination. They are real and each of us has a few. They make us unique. What are yours and how do you use them to help your family be happy and the world a better place for all? 

For more help in your superhero quest see Dude to Dad by Hugh Weber.

The Family Table

Do you have a family table, a table that either you designed and built, or commissioned, or searched for years to find, or had handed down to you from generation to generation?

The table is the nerve center for our families. We breakfast, lunch, and eat dinner at the table. We break bread here. We invite guests to pull themselves up to our table and bond with us. Our children do their homework and crafts at the table. We hold family councils at the table. We educate our children at the table about politics, religion, morality, integrity, food, and more. And, late at night, parents discuss their challenges, their hopes and fears, their finances, and they make decisions that they hope will make their family better.

A good table can bring a family together during holidays and during crises. The stories these tables can tell.

What does your table have to say about your family?

For stories told around family tables, see Global Mom by Melissa Bradford.

Your Own 15 Minutes

Last Saturday I drove my second son two and a half hours to a university for a music audition. He’s applying to their cello program. After twelve years and almost twenty thousand dollars, including instruments, his opportunity to further his music education at a university and reduce tuition through a scholarship hinges on a fifteen-minute audition of four songs by Bach, Haydn, and Rachmaninoff.

Friday night he was still practicing. I suggested he stop and relax. I said, “When the time to perform has come, the time to prepare has passed. You are ready.” He was prepared and did fine. The decision, however, of whether he is admitted is entirely out of his hands.

So much of our life is spent preparing for our own 15 minutes. And as Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Make your 15 minutes count.

“If music be the food of love, play on.” —William Shakespeare 

Why Civilizations Cling to Family

“When a high national official visited us recently, he said, ‘The family is so critical; it is so fundamental to the strength of our civilization, a fact that seems to be forgotten. It is so terribly important. It is our chief source of moral strength, our chief source of physical and emotional health; it is our chief source of protection against adversity. It is the only institution that guarantees an environment which will insure the perpetuation of the principles and concepts that have made us strong.

‘I remember a witness,’ he said, ‘that was testifying before a Congressional committee about the family, and he said, “Before you fool around with the family, you’d better realize that all known human societies during the recorded history of mankind have all ended up with a family organization for the rearing and training of children. Before you try to get rid of it, you’d better find out why all civilizations in history have clung to it.”’”

—Spencer Kimball