Do you find yourself comparing your family to your neighbors, friends or siblings? Trying to keep up with the Jones’s? According to Dolores Curran, author of Traits of a Healthy Family , that is the worst thing you can do. Curran developed the 15 traits of a healthy family by interviewing middle-income families in urban, suburban and rural areas. The results were the following traits listed as only guidelines for healthy families:
- Communicate and Listen
- Teach Respect for others
- Have a sense of play and humor
- Teach a sense of right and wrong.
- Have a balance of Interaction among its members
- Respect one another’s privacy
- Foster table time and conversation
- Admit to and seek help for problems
- Affirm and support one another
- Develop a sense of Trust
- Exhibit a shared sense of Responsibility
- Have a strong sense of family in which rituals and traditions abound
- Have a shared Spiritual Core
- Value service to others
- Share leisure time
Curran stresses that there is no such thing as the perfect family and that she has never worked with the family that demonstrate all 15 traits including her own.