Blog #3 - Culture in family life

     There is a culture in families, such as patterns and traditions that form. Every family has lots of patterns and traditions. A pattern would be you calling your parents by their first name. I would, every so often when I wanted my mom's attention would call her by her first name. I rarely did that, maybe less than five times so I don't remember exactly what she said when I called her by her name. But many kids do that when wanting attention or are mad.

    Family patterns are a characteristic quality of the relationship between the members of a family. Patterns in a family forms emotions and attitudes between family members. That would go along with what I said earlier about calling your parents by their names. Each family has different patterns based on their connection. I watched a video about this women with four boys. They lived in a trailer home and didn't have much money and she worked at a fast food restaurant not making a lot of money. She was struggling but that was her following her family culture and patterns. That's how her family grew up, there were a ton of children in her family and they lived poorly. So she made that her life when she was on her own. But just because that is how your family was when you were living with them, doesn't mean that's how you should do it when you have a family of your own.

    Just because you grew up one way is not necessarily how it should be forever, if you want a change then make the change. If you want and need a better job go to school and work towards it. It may seem weird and different at first, but it will be good for you because you learned from the situation. I didn't grow up like that, my dad had a good job and a good house. But if I did grow up like that, then I would want to push towards going to school and getting a better job to show that it is possible. I am not saying that it is bad if you grew up like that. I am just saying if you want a better life for you and your kids then you can do that. The lady in the video wanted that but didn't know what to do to get to that life because her parents didn't show her. 

    I talked about patterns and a little bit of culture. Now with culture I think of traditions in the family. This can also mean patterns too, culture though can mean a lot of things in each family. Traditions are very important because as you are growing up they stick with you. Traditions move to when you are married and you loved them in your family so you bring it with you to your marriage. Two traditions that my family had that conflicted with my husbands both had to do with Christmas, there are many traditions but these are a couple that I am talking about. The first tradition we do on Christmas is look through our stockings first. Then we open our gifts one person at a time, switching off who gets gifts. The second tradition is on New Years Eve "Santa" brings us one more gift and fills up our stocking again. When I told that to my husband he thought both were a little weird and that his family would open all the gifts first then the stockings. So then when you are done opening your gifts you still have your whole stocking to look forward to. After talking about it we compromised on what to do to make it our new family tradition. When it comes to traditions and patterns in the family, compromise with your spouse on what new traditions you could bring into your new family.