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.

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.

Family Solidarity and Its Limits

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.

This criticism should not be interpreted as dismissing Covey's entire work, merely as suggesting it requires caution. His distinction between two types of ethics and how they operate within families and beyond is valuable. He distinguishes between "personality ethics"—essentially using "human and public relations techniques" to get what one wants from people (Covey 19)—and a more character-based approach.

Character Ethics Versus Personality Ethics

Such personality-based approaches can be effective in the short term, Covey argues, but are not sound long-term strategies. One way to understand this is to reflect on how short-term approaches work within families. Generally, they fail because family members interact across an entire lifetime. When interactions are ongoing, it is far better to choose ways of interacting that allow both sides to prosper long-term.

Personality ethics allow people to achieve immediate goals through applied skills and attitudes that are largely contrived. This approach relies on what might be called "cheap parlor tricks" rather than genuine hard work. It can even involve dishonesty if the individual believes that the ends justify the means. Yet such shallow integrity rarely flourishes for long, even within families.

Only those dedicated to what Covey calls "character ethics" are capable of making decisions and taking actions that will sustain them over the long run. Covey describes character ethics as integrating important persistent traits into everyday life: integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, industry, simplicity, and modesty. These attributes can be used profitably in the broadest sense to benefit an individual.

It is difficult for anyone to be guided by such virtues, as virtuous behavior can indeed be demanding. This difficulty can be partially overcome by individuals who live within communities connecting them to both older and younger people. According to Covey, someone living a truly intergenerational life has the psychological support needed to maintain character ethics that do not rely on manipulation to achieve what they want.

As noted, Covey emphasizes that consistency of character and behavior helps maintain both character and actions. The individual who acts with good faith within the family can translate that character strength into working life. For many people, however, the balance between personality and character ethics differs markedly between family and workplace. While theoretically one should maintain a consistent ethical style, at work employees often struggle to assert character ethics.

This is unsurprising, not simply because workplaces emphasize competition and profit-seeking—both of which encourage less ethical behavior—but also because workplaces operate under multiple and conflicting standards of what is right. These can prompt individuals to act in ways conflicting with their family ethics.

A useful analogy for understanding how Covey's advice applies to my own life comes from viewing his concept of intergenerational living through the lens of community neighborhoods. Consider a neighborhood housing essentially one generation versus one housing a demographically diverse group of families.

Covey repeatedly stresses living all aspects of life as one was taught within the family. He emphasizes, for instance, being interdependent with others rather than fully dependent—retaining autonomy while relying on others' strengths. This model works well within families but has obvious limitations. Infants and the elderly depend on help from others, but these dependency periods are balanced by decades of autonomy for those without significant disabilities.

Critical Questions About Family Structure

One frustrating aspect of Covey's writings is determining whether he intends his advice literally or metaphorically. Does he expect readers to use family dynamics as a metaphor or a blueprint for life? He seems to treat it as a blueprint, which is problematic. While Covey has the admirable goal of inspiring better communication and clearer understanding of personal goals and needs, he does so by asking people to base their life assessments on an idealized, conventional family structure.

For Covey, family is the key to understanding all other aspects of life. But how is this helpful if one's family—whether of origin or current—is neither idealized nor, even if healthy, simply different from Covey's only acceptable model?

Covey explicitly connects family life to workplace success. He argues that effective employees and managers require the same relationships, ethical stances, goal-setting abilities, and interpersonal management skills that families require of members. Turned around, the key limitation of Covey's work emerges: he understands not the company in terms of how families work, but families in terms of how companies work. It is as though he created an image of the perfect employee and worked backward to create the family that would produce such a person. There is one "correct" and "proper" type of worker and manager, raised in a correct type of family.

Many would see nothing wrong with the family type Covey describes, especially as he presents his own role as parent. His model of the proper father is distinctly authoritarian. While he describes himself as providing constant, unconditional love, Covey nonetheless depicts himself as the household authority, expending great energy teaching his children to act exactly as he would (pp. 20, 35).

Reading through each chapter, I found many useful ideas. However, taken as a whole and reflecting on what I learned in this course, Covey seems interested in imposing habits and behaviors from outside rather than encouraging individuals to develop their own internal belief systems for self-sustenance. He seems far more interested in controlling his children than in educating them.

His desire to be the sole household authority is further reflected in the near invisibility of his wife, Sandra, in the book. He describes her as a "helper" (p. 20) rather than as an equal and even seems to go out of his way to humiliate her. He depicts her as dependent on him and mentally incompetent, presenting a story about her attraction to Frigidaire refrigerators as humorous. He uses this story to psychoanalyze her in a way that is deeply uncomfortable.

Age Segregation in American Communities

Covey taught me a great deal. Upon reflection, I realized he taught me both through extremely useful tips—such as methods for listening more effectively, which I have already applied in various situations—and through negative examples. I would like to become as effective as he is and believe I can use his advice to do so. However, I have realized I do not want to be effective in the same way he is.

In synthesizing what Covey said throughout his book, I realized it might be helpful to explore his idea of intergenerational living in a broader way. Covey looks to the family to explain how living with, working with, and communicating with individuals of different generations creates an excellent basis for all other aspects of life. In this section, I extend that model to include the larger neighborhood and physical community in which one grows up and lives. By examining intergenerational living at a community level rather than just the individual family, I can develop a model not based on his nuclear family authoritarianism.

Much is written about how the American social landscape is segregated by race and class. People who live near each other and interact in ordinary but important ways tend to be the same race and class, and are linked by education and religion as well, since these characteristics correlate with race and class.

Yet another critical way American neighborhoods are segregated is by age. Drive through a typical new subdivision and you will notice that not only are all trees in front yards exactly the same height—having been planted within a week of each other—but all children appear to be exactly the same height, having been born within months of each other. Conversely, aging suburbs are inhabited almost entirely by people in their late middle years whose grown children return periodically with grandchildren to visit. Long-term care facilities house the aged, with occasional visits from younger generations.

This age stratification in American society makes such segregation seem natural and proper. However, while age-segregated communities have advantages, they are not the only option. When people discuss such advantages, they focus on how communities bring together those with similar needs. Families with young children want parks with playground equipment and good schools—concerns of little interest to older residents, though some may value parks for younger visitors.

City planners overseeing age-segregated neighborhoods find it easier to arrange amenities each demographic wants, giving them little incentive to diversify communities by age. Additionally, most Americans, unaware of intergenerational community benefits, are content with available neighborhood options.

One reason Americans hesitate to embrace intergenerational neighborhoods is association with their families' countries of origin. While such arrangements may benefit older generations, they can seem stifling to Americans—especially recent immigrants eager for fewer older-relative responsibilities.

Research on intergenerational living, particularly among Chinese citizens, reveals that older people living with or near younger people benefit significantly from the association. Yet the research also notes younger people benefit:

Findings reveal that providing instrumental support to children and satisfaction with children directly improve parents' well-being. The benefits of receiving support from children are fully mediated by parents' satisfaction with their children. The positive effects of providing functional support are magnified among parents who adhere to more traditional norms regarding family support. The results suggest that the psychological benefits of intergenerational support exchanges should not be ignored when developing elder care policy in China. (Chen & Silverstein, 2000).