Our Family Cultures!!!

     Last week I touched on symbolic interaction theory and how our cultural backgrounds can lead us to draw conclusions. There are so many different types of family cultures. We all have our own family culture and when we get married, we start our own family culture. When we start our own family, it is easy to continue doing what our families have down and keep the culture we grew up in alive. While families are amazing, no family culture is perfect. Getting married and starting a family is an opportunity to keep and change things from the culture you grew up in. 

We can also draw from other families around us. Those we babysit for, go to church with, family friends, etc. By being around different families, we can take and discard ideas that we would like for our own future family, but we actually have to be intentional with the things we want to include or we won’t make any changes; we would keep our old cultures, the good and the bad. 

I know from my own family I would want to keep how we always try to do stuff together as a family to stay close and connected. We go on vacations, have family traditions, play games, watch movies together, and spend a lot of time with each other and extended family. I want my family to be close just as I am close to mine. I also my relationship with my husband to be first and then our kids as my parents are in my family. It is them and then us.  It taught us that my parents are a team, that their relationship is important, and that we need to respect them. I know I won’t be able to implement either of these without having my relationship be the most important thing with my future husband and without making the time to have that quality time with my kids to have that closeness. I have been taking parenting classes and marriage and family classes to help me prepare for my future family because I truly want to be a good mom and wife and draw from my culture what I would like to keep and change. 

Now, while I love my family more than anything and I love how they raised me, they did a great job if I do say so myself, but there are definitely things I would like to tweak for my own family. My family is very protective of us, as they should be, but I have come to realize for myself that I want my kids to be more aware of the world around them because of what a shock it was for me when I went back to public school. Fun fact, I was homeschooled from third grade to eighth grade. When I went back to public school, I was very shocked, judgmental towards others, and it was hard for me spiritually. I think it is important to be protective, but I want to be more open with them so that they can love everyone even if they are different in standards, judge righteously, and not be so shocked and hurt by the world around them. There is one more thing, though I don’t find it huge and even my parents have said it is not effective, but spanking. From my parenting class and relatives and my family I have come to find out that I don’t want to spank my children. My parents agree it didn’t do anything, and I would rather find other ways of punishing that aren’t hitting. 

It is hard for me to say the things in public that I would like to improve from my own culture because this is public and I think my parents are the best parents out there and I know that I am so lucky to be a part of their family. I just hope whoever reads this remembers that families are not perfect and we all are just trying to do what we think is best. Now after saying that, I know how important it is to try to improve our culture that we come from for our families because no family is perfect. I do know though that even though families and parents aren’t perfect, they do the best they can for their kids and love them more than anything. If we want to change something about our culture, we need to be mindful about it and truly try to implement it or we will just keep our old ways.