Full Family Joy

I think it’s weird how recent college seems but I do still think of it as a recent occurrence.  So I can still tell you like it was yesterday that I took a philosophy class in college.   The years are a little bit more obvious when I attempt to recall the exact details of that class but I do remember being deeply impacted by the thinking of one Mr. Kant.  I’m not super theoretical – I’m sort of the level of philosophy fan that takes cool quotes and applies them to life, but for some reason this was a minor exception.

The idea (in case you weren’t quite as impacted as I was) is that the best and right things for people to do are the things that maximize utility or happiness – basically do the things that maximize the benefits and minimize the costs*.   I know it sounds sort of like we will all end up drinking at a leather bar all day and night (no? only me?)  but debauchery isn't exactly what it’s all about.  But a tiny bit – whatever makes the most people happy, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, is the good stuff.

I loved this idea for a long time and only recently have struggled with it.   I struggle with it because of having four amazing kids and a rockstar spouse and myself.  And the things that maximize the joy for any one of those people seems to somehow have great potential take away from the rest.  Like date night.  I love date nights.  And we could probably go on date night every night.  Or like 5 times a week.  But then we’d have no money.  And we’d have no time together as a family.  And the kids would be sad (maybe).  So the collective happiness wouldn’t be maximized, see?

But date night isn’t really the ultimate battle in the war for maximizing familial joy.  The ultimate to me is that the kids are so incredible diverse in their needs, interests and approaches to life.  We have the joyful and physically active extrovert and the laid back, physically challenged introvert.  We have the imaginative creative reader and the dyslexic scientist.  There are good pairings and bad pairings but a trip to the pool makes ¾ excited and ¼ so miserable that it cloaks the entire experience in doom.  A festival makes ½ elated and ½ cower in misery.  Something as simple as a walk in the park makes the insect paranoid person cringe and the outdoorsy person leap with joy.  Finding something that makes everyone look like they are having fun for a picture on Facebook is tough stuff.

If you have kids with any special needs or just diverse needs, you know what I’m talking about here because you can’t “force” a kid with a legitimate fear or a true disability to do something.   Because that borders on cruel.  But you also can’t divide and conquer your life away and hope the weekends pass quickly so that everyone can tuck back into their individualized school environments for the week where they each get what they need.

I curse the day that I was struck with the blinding truth of Kant’s theories because success will forever elude me now on the quest for the ideal balance of happinesses.  I’m pretty sure that video games aren’t the answer.  Or private TVs.  Or doing four activities per day to suit everyone’s needs.  But we try.   We try to balance traditions and individual quiet time with loading people up to do something educational and interactive and engaging and not too loud or chaotic.  

In the end I guess Kant was sort of right - it's not a contest for the most amazing, fb worthy activities completed in a weekend,  it's a contest for the most smiles.


*If you are a for real philosophy person - I know this isn't the deep part of the philosophy but that's not even the point.