The drive-thru line at Chick-fil-A stretched around the block, packed with oversized SUVs at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. Engines idled.
No one honked. No one seemed in a hurry. It was one of my first glimpses of life in Wichita, and it felt like a different world.
I had just finished my postdoctoral training in New York City, where I had worked with children and families in a wide range of settings. I was confident I understood family systems. I had the degrees, the supervised clinical hours, and the professional language to explain how families function under pressure.
Then I had my first son, and my husband’s job brought us to Wichita.
Here, I found a dramatically different rhythm
Geography dictates many things, from food to recreational activities.
Despite a plethora of farms, fresh produce felt scarce in many areas. Flat vistas, no ocean in sight, and real tornado threats. Yes, Dorothy, I was really in Kansas.
Community looked different in this Midwestern city, too. Sunday mornings were quiet: no lawn mowers, no delivery trucks — not because nothing was “happening,” but because people were at church, had personal commitments, and reason to pause in a way I had never seen on the East Coast.
In New York City, Sunday mornings meant brunch reservations and open inboxes ahead of the workweek.
What struck me most was the way people spoke, and the naturally unrushed pace of speech. There was no impulse to fill the silence. No one really said, “We should get lunch sometime,” with no intention of doing it.
If someone said they would call you, they called you. If they said they would show up, they showed up.
On the East and West Coasts, where I had lived as a child, I had grown fluent in a kind of conversational currency where words were placeholders for intentions that may or may not exist.
In Wichita, people meant what they said and said what they meant. I remember thinking, quietly and repeatedly, that this was a beautiful thing.
Professionally, Wichita taught me a lot
As a clinician trained to assess family systems, I did not experience my new life as merely observation. I experienced it as data.
I had spent years learning to recognize healthy functioning against a fairly narrow, unspoken standard, one shaped almost entirely by the fast, achievement-oriented environment I trained in.
Watching an entirely different rhythm operate successfully, with its own coherence, its own values, its own quiet integrity, was not something my training had prepared me to see up close.
The lesson was not that one rhythm is correct and the other is not. The lesson was that families do not follow a single template for pace, values, or connection.
A family can be thriving while looking almost nothing like the families I had been trained to recognize as thriving.
It is easy, especially coming out of a field trained heavily in one regional context, to mistake familiarity for health. A fast-paced, achievement-oriented family is not inherently dysfunctional. Neither is a slower, more relationship-centered one, built around Costco runs and Sunday mornings and saying exactly what you mean.
What matters clinically is whether a family’s own rhythm is actually working for them, not whether it resembles the one I happened to experience myself growing up and in my training.
These lessons stayed with me long after I left Kansas
Today, I’m based in Pennsylvania, though my work takes me into homes across the country.
Every family brings its own history, community, geography, values, and way of moving through the world. Those influences don’t exist outside the family system. They are woven into it.
Now, whenever I conduct an intake for a clinical evaluation or a school-admissions strategy session, one of the first questions I ask parents is, “Where are you from?” I want to know not only where they live now, but also about the roots that shaped them long before their child was born.
My training taught me how to recognize patterns. Wichita taught me to ask where those patterns came from before deciding whether they needed to change.
Every place we live leaves its imprint on a family. The communities we call or have called home shape our expectations, beliefs, and even the way we communicate with each other.
Understanding a family means understanding and accepting those roots, not as a point of comparison, but as a foundation to a healthy dynamic.
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