Dr. Ken Rivenbark is a successful entrepreneur and television personality as well as a two-decade veteran educator. In preparing his treatise “Bringing the Family Back to the Table,” he brings to the fore prospective solutions to what many perceive as the dissolution of the family unit. Ken was lead to this effort as an entrepreneur dealing with family history through preservation of heirlooms that attach specific memories to the loved ones who have cherished them. Ken has watched families so “caught up” in a multitude of tasks that diminish quality time spent together addressing the needs of every child. Ken’s thesis is that a reduction in the number of events so that time of a quality nature can be spent together, particularly at family dinners, allowing discourse, which would develop in the child the traditions of the family through use of the mind and discourse with the parents in an unhurried atmosphere. Ken decries the advent of too much multitasking, which diminishes the time parents spend with their children in actual dialogue. As a professional educator myself I have seen what Ken describes close up. The view that I have had permits me to professionally concur with the premise put forward by Ken. I endorse the very cogent effort that he has put forward. It seems to me that his premise, at least at some levels, is reflected in the popularity of a long running television show of a New York family that in every episode depicts the family eating together engaging in discourse across four generations andpraying together.

I unreservedly recommend to you Ken’s utilization so that he can bring to fruition his dream of bringing the nuclear family back to our culture in its traditional sense. This is a very necessary step if our culture is to have the vitality to grow in a manner that has proven successful in past centuries and is now at risk.

Mary Jane Caylor Ed D
Former Superintendent Huntsville City Schools – 1982 – 1991
Former Member of the Alabama State Board of Education January 1995 – January 2011