Cultural Diversity in Family

Cultural diversity in the family is the hot topic for this week! What do I mean when I say cultral diversity? What is a good definition of family? " Our definition of family, thereof is a group united by marriage or cohabitation, blood, and or adoption in order to satisfy intimacy needs and or/ bear and socialize children."Well lets begin with an analogy. A pizza consist of many different ingredients. This may also vary according to the kind of pizza that you like, but to keep things simple lets use a pepperoni pizza for this analogy. What are the core ingredients that make up a pepperoni pizza? In a pepperoni pizza you have the crust, the tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni and maybe some extra pepper, salt, and oregano. Now, if you examined each ingredient individually, (not included vegetable oil, butter, yeast, flower ext.) you'd notice that each ingredient plays a role in the taste and texture of the pizza. By themselves they are valuable but together they make this grand and heavenly food called pizza! So what would happen if you didn't have the crust, would you really have a pizza? What if you didn't have the cheese or the pepperoni, would you have a pepperoni pizza? the answer to those question is no. Each ingredient is key to the making of the pizza. Much like pizza, our individual family members play a role in our individual family system. For example, my mom would be the crust of the family. She keeps us together and gives us purpose. My father would be the cheese. If you put to much cheese on the pizza it can overwhelm the other ingredients; however just like cheese on pizza my dad is an essential role in the family system. No we know not every family is the same, and this is the core of our discussion today. What we know for certain is that every family is different. Every family has there own way of handling stress, showing love,and doing day to day things. Families are unique! This perpetrates a discussion on the question, " why do we do what we do?" Now i'm not going to facilitate all of the philological reasons behind that question but I will give a simple suggestion, and that suggestion is, its because of our family system. Each family has there own culture. You know what I mean when I say that. We all know when dad gives that look that we better listen and straighten up. We know that when our brothers and sisters are sarcastic that that means they love us, or we know that when mom starts being a little louder in the kitchen when cleaning, she is feeling  little upset. Now this may not be your family but you can think about certain things that your family does that is unique.

What is interesting is that although we have a family that does certain things it doesn't mean that we will carry all of the same traditions into our own families. So how can one carefully choose the aspects of one culture to keep, and how do we perpetrate those into coming generations? As we know not all family culture is ideal for families. It wouldn't be ideal for my family if I sat at home watching TV all night after work each day. So one way that we can promote good culture is to be joined together with your spouse, be on the same page. Persistence is key. When trying to keep good culture in your family you may not always see instant results, but that doesn't mean that its not good or that its not working. It just means that you need to keep doing it, and one day your children will thank you for being consistent in those things. It may be very difficult to perpetrate good culture, and there may not be one solid answer for that, but each family needs to adapt to there unique way of living and find a way together to figure it out. Some other key concepts to live by are, giving positive feedback, and establishing rules.

Our family systems will ultimately impact us for the rest of our lives.We all have different family cultures. What if we changed that definition of family, and how would our families culture change? This impact in our lives will effect those around us, our community, our nation, and the world, for better or for worse. Literally our families culture is what promotes community culture.