Covey's Intergenerational Model: Family, Character, and Community Integration

Introduction: Personal Transformation Through Reading

The readings undertaken this term and the analyses performed on these texts have deepened my understanding of how to become a better person across all aspects of life—as an individual, as a family member, as part of a larger community, and as a worker and employee. One key message I have taken away from this course is that it is important to create a unified sense of self. While differences inevitably exist between how one conducts and visualizes oneself across different social and psychological contexts, I now understand how to integrate the core aspects of my perspective and personality across all spheres of life.

This paper synthesizes what I have learned from Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, particularly his emphasis on the intergenerational person and the transitional person. Covey explains the intergenerational person by exploring what it means to be a member of a family in which different individuals occupy different generational positions. By merging the different strengths of these positions, Covey argues, a family creates a whole far more powerful than any individual. He contends that a large family in which members of different generations work with each other provides the best basis for a well-run life—a point with potential strengths but also with significant problems.

Family Solidarity and Its Limits

Covey stresses the importance of family solidarity, something that might initially surprise readers associating "being highly effective" with workplace success. Typically, we think of efficiency in employment terms, and it is usually at work that individuals strive to be most productive. One of the most valuable aspects of Covey's book is his insistence that the person we are within our families is also the person we are in the workplace.

This principle holds true largely because so much of who we are results from the family in which we were raised. We can—and many do—work to overcome less functional family patterns while emphasizing the healthy ones we learned. Because the family is, for most of us, the first group we experience extensively, we transfer and translate what we learn in families to all later experiences.

However, Covey tends to idealize the family and family solidarity. While such support can be valuable, Covey fails to be realistic about its limitations. As helpful as his book and advice are, I found myself critical of his ideas about intergenerational life because he celebrates traditional family structures over all others. Specifically, he seems to present one particular arrangement as the only acceptable model (p. 315).

This represents a broader fault in Covey's work. While his enthusiasm is admirable and his book has been extremely helpful, I believe flexibility in adapting to situations is crucial. His assertion that the best family structure is one in which people live close to aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, siblings, and grandparents is simply unrealistic. In contemporary American life, it is not possible for all family members to live near each other—whether for economic reasons or others.

Someone who differs from their family's religion, who chooses college over immediate work, or who diverges on important ethical or social issues may find that becoming a fully realized person requires moving away. The family can indeed be a "powerful force," as Covey writes, but powerful forces can damage as well as support. This possibility does not seem to have occurred to Covey, whose examples focus on two-parent nuclear families with traditional and conservative concepts of family, individuation, and agency.