Forging family life-style

Intentionalizing and structuring the practices of family living, including decision-making and budgeting. The effect is to create families who see themselves in a global context, who are ready to assume responsibility for all of society, and who stand as a sign of the possibility of deciding one's own life-style. Such families enable others to gain increased awareness of their global responsibility.

An integral aspect of intentionalizing generation roles to enable the individual's active participation in the responsible creation of his life by becoming conscious of the significance of his life phase.

Tactics include: accountability structures to ensure that the family tasks are done, symbolize family mission, and set family priorities; celebrated journey to affirm life-style, allow the family to reflect into the past and the future of the life-style it has chosen, and honour life-rites and phases through celebration; employed consensus to assure the practice of a collective method of decision-making with global implications; accepted assignments to enable the internal ordering of family tasks and serve as a sign to others of the family's intentional use of time, as well as its broader global mission; and contexted mission to motivate individuals to see their particular task in its broader context. An example would be a family whose area of concern extends beyond its own household; such a family is the opposite of those families that operate out of a parochial, nationalistic perspective. Indications of whether a family has a global outlook may be found in the nature of its conversation, its dress, its cuisine, and its budget.

In Hong Kong and China the interdependence of family members has an economic and religious basis. Since young people still tend to live with their parents until marriage, they make substantial contributions to the family's income.