Hello everyone! This week I've decided to write about culture and all the things we see in families that make up their own unique cultures. What makes up the culture in a family exactly? Well, a summed up definition of family culture is the shared values and beliefs that are practiced within the family. Basically "how you do things". In other words, we can possibly relate culture to traditions, religious practices, family rules, as well as family roles, which we talked a little bit about last week.
An interesting thing about culture is that we can/do often relate it to class. lower class, middle class, and upper class. If we look at each class, we can observe that they all have a different culture and may have completely different lifestyles. Starting off with the lower class, the first thing we can look at are the parents. What do they do for a living? Do both parents work? Is there just one parent taking on all the responsibility, single mom/dad? These are all a result of the lower class stereotype. So what resulted in putting these parents in this type of situation? Well, it could have been laziness, financial difficulties, or even the way they grew up. We can imagine what kind of culture these families are practicing at home. Some examples could be a single parent, as we mentioned before, trying to juggle their kids, work to support their family, and household duties. Some outcomes of this could be a sibling ending up taking care of the kids instead of the single parent, or one of the siblings cooking or cleaning while the single parent is at work, to name a few. Middle class may be a little different. What makes someone fit into the category of a middle class citizen? Maybe they have a lower income than the upper class. Maybe they only have one parent working and the other as a stay at home mom taking care of the kids as well as the household while the other spouse is at work. They might just be living comfortably, with just enough money, but not enough to go to the extra fun stuff. We can assume that the middle class parents just decided that they needed one of the parents to stay home with the kids because they simply didn't want their kids to "raise themselves", and the other spouse makes enough money that that's possible to do. I saw this in my own household growing up. My mother refused to work, unless it was from home, because she wanted to make sure her children were nurtured and raised right by their mamma. Now as much as this sounds amazing, she had eight of us kids to deal with. This resulted in us older four kids, taking care of the younger four kids when she got diagnosed with cancer. My father still had to work, so that left us kids to do all the work. Now this culture and experience is probably not common with a lot of families, but it's more common than you think. Whether this is because the mom is sick, like mine was, or because the mom has too much on her plate to give her full attention to her children, leaving one of the other kids to do it for her. My entire adolescent life it was my role to take care of my little siblings, my older siblings, and even my dad would confide in me sometimes. I made dinner, ran the kids to and from school, as well as making sure they were okay emotionally. That was my families culture as a middle class family. As for upper class families, their cultures might include two working parents, or one working parent that makes a butt-load of money. It might include kids with many privileges and opportunities that the lower class and middle class families wouldn't be able to have or even dream of having. Now even though these families may seem to have it all, they may not be the most healthy. Always remember that it doesn't matter what class you're in, happiness is always what you make it.
Finally, let's talk about cultures that you would like to someday have. Whether you already have a family, or you're hoping to someday be able to create one. I came up with some of my own cultural elements that I hope to someday practice in my own family. Lots and lots of "I love you's" as well as lots of hugs, I would like trusting communication between my spouse and I as well as open and trusting communication with my children. Some daily things I hope to practice is to be outside as much as we can, have dinner together every night, and spend the evening together as a family every night whether that's doing an activity, playing games together, or baking a yummy dessert that we can all enjoy. Think about the environment you want to create when you have your own family. What are some family cultures you want to accumulate or maybe even enforce? What rules/roles will you keep from the family you're already in?
Thank so much for reading my blog!
Comments
Post a Comment