Being a Production-Pilled, Happy Family

Our President Oaks, with the approval of our prophet Russell M. Nelson, deplored the few number of babies among the Saints and tied it to many an LDS family being a consumptive family instead of a productive family.

Elite level visual pun right here

Here I am going to outline the very basic principles of being a productive family for the many, many Saints who have enthusiastically embraced the prophets’ call and are wondering how to begin.  Each and every one of you make us proud.

• The four fundamentals of being productive
• Why being productive matters
• How to be productive (it’s easy)

Many of our friends are already production-pilled.  Please discuss what you know with the Church, especially friends and family, along with anything you learn here.

But first, a reminder of what President Oaks said to us in his first keynote Conference address:

The national declines in marriage and childbearing are understandable for historic reasons, but Latter-day Saint values and practices should improve—not follow—those trends.

…

In my boyhood 80 years ago, I lived on my grandparents’ farm in a setting where almost all that happened during the day was under the direction of the family. There was no television or other electronics to distract from family activities. In contrast, in today’s urban society, few members experience consistent family-centered activities. Urban living and modern transportation, organized entertainment, and high-speed communication have made it easy for youth to treat their homes as boardinghouses, where they sleep and take an occasional meal but where there is far less parental direction of their activities.

Parental influences have also been diluted by the way in which most current members of the Church earn a living. In times past, one of the great influences that unified families was the experience of struggling together in pursuit of a common goal—such as taming the wilderness or earning a living. The family was an organized and conducted unit of economic production. Today, most families are units of economic consumption, which do not require a high degree of family organization and cooperation.

…

Parents also have a duty to teach their children practical knowledge apart from gospel principles. Families unite when they do meaningful things together. Family gardens build family relationships. Happy family experiences strengthen family ties. Camping, sports activities, and other recreation are especially valuable to bond families. Families should organize family reunions to remember ancestors, which lead to the temple.

Parents should educate children in the basic skills of living, including working in the yard and home. Learning languages is a useful preparation for missionary service and modern life. The teachers of these subjects can be parents or grandparents or members of the extended family. Families flourish when they learn as a group and counsel together on all matters of concern to the family and its members.

Some may say, “But we have no time for any of that.” To find time to do what is truly worthwhile, many parents will find that they can turn their family on if they all turn their technologies off. And parents, remember, what those children really want for dinner is time with you.

…Great blessings come to families if they pray together, kneeling night and morning to offer thanks for blessings and to pray over common concerns. Families are also blessed as they worship together in Church services and in other devotional settings. Family bonds are also strengthened by family stories, creating family traditions, and sharing sacred experiences. President Spencer W. Kimball reminded us that “stories of inspiration from our own lives and those of our forebears … are powerful teaching tools.” They are often the best sources of inspiration for us and our posterity.

–thus President Oaks

The Four Fundamentals of Being Productive

1.   Work on something productive together.  It’s important that some aspects of the production involve everyone in the family being together and seeing and experiencing each other working on it.  At the best, everyone’s efforts make a real difference and even the father and mother feel like the kids’ work helped.  This is the aspect of being productive that everyone gets, but by itself its not enough.

2.  Consume what is being produced together.   This is the key point that is often overlooked.   It’s important to the experience of being a productive family that you consume some of what you produce.  Otherwise you are only productive in an abstract sense.  I have seen a number of good Saints since President Oaks’ talk explore starting a small business, which is a fantastic idea depending on the type of small business.  Anything from lawncare to construction to cleaning grills could be great if the family can do it together because there is a tangible outcome that the family can see together.  This isn’t the highest level of consumption but it is still something.   But processing medical bills or something would be more abstract, more difficult to ‘consume.’

3.  The consumption should be rewarding.  What you produce to consume should be rewarding.  It’s better to grow tomatoes than to grow zucchini, if you guys don’t like zucchini.  Growing zucchini that you then force yourselves to eat is not being a productive family.  It is almost the antithesis of it.

4. You, the authority figure, should point out that they are experiencing something rewarding because of the family’s joint efforts.  Making an important experience conscious makes a difference.  People don’t always figure it out on their own.  Especially children.

We can short hand these as

PRODUCE            CONSUME            EXPERIENCE REWARD             POINT OUT

Why Being Productive Matters

Closing the production loop makes the family happier and creates a family identity (both are closely related to each other).  In essence, when a family consumes without producing (or produces without consuming) the individual family members experience the family as just a sub-unit in a larger sphere, almost just an administrative convenience.  But when the production-consumption loop is closed in a rewarding way, for deep anthropological and psychological reasons the family is experienced as its own unit, with its own value.  The family doesn’t have to ‘close the loop’ in everything to experience this deep, soul-satisfying sense of belonging to something real and immediate.  A few things can be enough.  The result is that the family is happier, the parents are happier–they are more likely to want more children–, everyone values each other more, and the children have a fulfilling identity that they are going to want to perpetuate when they are grown.

Other extremely important benefits are a) the time spent together–notice how President Oaks was able to be consoled by his grandfather when his father died because they were working on a farm together.

And b) the opportunity for children to experience frustration and failure in a way that their parents are part of and can help the child work through.  Production-pilled families have more resilient children.

Easy Ways to Be Productive

If you and yours want to go all in on being homesteaders or starting your own business, I cheer for you.  What an amazing response to to the new prophet’s call.  But that level of commitment isn’t for most (and on the homesteading side, please talk to me first–there are a few solid, proven ways to do it that work well, and a hundred that don’t).  For everyone else, there are a few simple methods to be a productive family.

• Cook and eat together–simple and obvious.
• Garden.  Grow fruit.  Raise chickens.    Hunt.  Fish.  Then eat what you produced.  The more felt reward and the less replicable it is from the store, the better.  Fruit and tomatoes are really good choices here.
• Other lawn and household care activities, as mentioned buy President Oaks, including things like polishing shoes or ironing clothes or making repairs.  Simple but with a visible reward.  The trick here is to make them feel, at least some of the time, like family activities.  Kids will work much more enthusiastically if you are working along side them.

There is also non-tangible production that is still very real and valuable

• Service, where the family sees an obvious result and feels good together
• Spiritual production–most LDS families already do this.  Make sure to occasionally point out how good it is to be part of a family where you can rely on each other for spiritual growth and testimony, where you don’t just have to figure it all out on your own
• Cultural production–this almost deserves its own post, its so important and so frequently overlooked.  Tell stories, read books aloud, put on plays, play games together, go camping together, do sports as a family.  When you produce part of the culture you consume you are reaching into deep wells of what it is to be a family.