The Power of a Family

Statistics on divorce are often confusing and misleading. Most often when a number is thrown around, they take into account the rate of divorces per a number of married people as found on their legal registration, which doesn’t accurately predict how likely a marriage is to last. That being said, while divorce rates have actually dropped a bit in the past couple of years, the overall rate of divorce over the last 100 years has increased greatly. In particular, once people no longer needed a specific reason for divorce, such as abuse or infidelity, they occurred much more often, as couples who were simply feeling unsatisfied with their current marriage could end it without as much legal hassle.

While it is often a topic that is rarely discussed and looked down on, divorce can be an important way for a married person to be able to escape from physical, mental, or emotional harm. It is an important decision that should be made only after considering all the consequences it will have and all of the people it will affect. While it can cause some serious problems in the lives of the couple divorcing, in my own experience, it has a much greater negative effect on the lives of the children of the couple. As I have discussed much in previous blogs, children that come from a stable home situation with both a mother and a father will have a much higher chance of avoiding trouble and succeeding in life.

So, I will reiterate what I have learned reading about this touchy subject. Divorce can occasionally be the right decision in extreme situations, but the spouse should really consider it’s the far-reaching impact on their children and should only take this step in situations that are either harmful to each other or harmful to their children.

This is going to be my last post, so I would like to communicate just how amazing and resilient a family can be. During this class, I have learned so many different principles and so many different factors that go into making an amazing family. Our families, and the way we run our families can be such a personal thing that many times this wonderful tips and principles are not heard about or implemented in various families. While I hope that this can change over time, I realize that the world is imperfect and even if every couple was required to take an introductory family course before getting married and having children, some of these concepts can be hard to implement, and some of the factors for a successful family our out of our control.

That is why I am so grateful for a loving Heavenly Father who has a plan for everyone. He has understood from the beginning that families could never be perfect, so just like he has designed us to be resilient to the problems we face, he has designed families to be able to weather great problems as well.

Whether it might be divorce and single-parenthood, death or disability in the family, harmful or hurtful choices made by a family member, or even a family member diverging from the spiritual path, we can have a loving family atmosphere and provide a support network of success for life. Just because a person wasn’t raised in a loving home with two biological supportive parents doesn’t mean that person can’t go on to have a successful life and start a loving, stable family of their own.

Truly I am grateful for my family, I am grateful for the family unit as a part of society, and I look forward to one day being present God’s eternal family with my loved ones.

Agency in Parenting

Parenting is often a topic of much debate. I have heard many jokes in the past discussing the idea that the ‘secret’ to parenting just doesn’t exist and that trying to be a good parent is really just a hopeless cause. Personally, I have often been very nervous about the possibility of taking on the role of a parent in the future. While I am sure it has its enjoyable moments parenting can be a huge responsibility and the cause of a lot of stress. However, this week in class, we learned some effective ways of parenting. There is still no ‘secret’ that will suddenly make someone a good parent, but there are principles that a parent could strive to follow that can lead to positive outcomes in the lives of children and in the family as a whole.

The model I will talk about comes from a family therapist named Michael Popkin who developed a parenting model he calls ‘active parenting’. This model comes from some of the theories of Alfred Adler, who was a close associate of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer in childhood development.

The primary idea of this model is that parents should focus on building a relationship of mutual respect, love, and obedience through allowing their children to make safe, age-appropriate, choices. Children should be left to make choices and face the natural consequences of their actions, as often this is the best way to prepare them for life in the future. The idea is that our brain is already fitted with the capacity to examine our actions and the consequences of those actions and to developed behavior based of that. Most of the time, behavior learned this way is the most effective, as the child comes to respect the parents for allowing them to choose and not punishing them arbitrarily.

I have seen many instances of parents trying to protect their children from the harms of the world in an extreme fashion, and while the parents may mean well, later in their lives, they will end up hurting their child because they will be unsuspecting of many of the natural consequences of life when they move out.

There are times when parents do need to step in. Specifically, if the action or choice is dangerous, the consequences of that action too far in the future, or when an action harms others.

While parents should step in on these occasions, it is important for them to understand that rather than using rewards or punishments, they should be more focused on using ‘logical consequences’. While rewards and punishments are focused on trying to get a child to act a certain way, logical consequences are focused on the child receiving immediate, less dangerous, feedback on choices they made to which natural consequences might be difficult to see at the moment.

A common example includes a child hitting another child. At the moment, the only natural consequences are the child asserting dominance and the other children most likely becoming fearful. Both of these consequences are most likely going to be possessive to the child in the situation, however in the future assault could lead to dangerous situations or jail. While jail would obviously be an inappropriate consequence for the child in his current state, a good logical consequence would be putting a child in timeout as that would simulate the experience. It is also important the child knows ahead of time what the logical consequences are to his actions.

I have been blessed to have great parents who follow the active parenting model pretty well, and while I have never seen perfect parents, I also notice many parents have many good qualities and genuinely care for their children. I hope that all current and future parents can learn more about the importance and methods of effective parenting and that they can strive to improve.

Importance of Fathers

In class this week we talked about the importance of fathers in the family. In the society we live in today, the notions of a family are being questioned and perceptions are being changed. The status of mothers has been under attack, and while they have traditionally been important, there are many today who would consider them less important. Because mothers spend so much time with their children, I personally think they hold the most important and influential position in society.

The role of a father is also under question, but I think there has been a stigma regarding their role in the family for a very long time. They are often seen as merely providers; they bring home the cash and make overhead decisions while ignoring any other responsibilities at home. However, I have seen on many occasions just how influential and beneficial it can be for children, and even the wife, to have a father who is involved in home life. While fathers generally should be responsible for providing a living for their family, they can also do so much more to help.

My father has personally helped me out in many different ways, of which I am grateful for, and I have seen how influential fathers have been in many of my friends’ lives, but I wanted to find some academic research that backs up this claim. Too often I see people make claims on how to help everyone based only on experiences in their own lives. I have found two academic studies, one which focuses on how fathers influence their daughters and the other which focuses on how fathers influence their sons, and I am excited to talk about them.

The first study I looked at was from the Society for Research in Child Development (Ellis, et al., 2003). I looked specifically at the results they took from the united states. The researchers observed a sample of 242 girls from age 5 to age 18 and were interested to see the effects on the absences of a father in girl’s stability, safety, education, and sexual activity. They found that girls whose father had been absent for any amount of time had a much higher chance of living in an unsafe neighborhood, had more family stress, and had less parental support, while girls whose father had been absent since they were young (age 0-6) scored even lower on these values. The most interesting statistic to me though was that girls whose father had been absent from an earlier age were two times more likely to engage in early sexual activity and seven times as likely to experience teenage pregnancy. Girls whose fathers had been absent later in their lives were still about were only slightly more likely to engage in early sexual activity and twice as likely to experience teenage pregnancy.

The second study I found was also from the Society for Research in Child Development and looked at the absence of Father’s on cognitive development in boys and girls, but I am just looking at the results of the boys (Santrock, 1972). It was a bit simpler than the previous study and looked at 3^rd and 6^th graders in several schools, taking their IQ scores and compiling their general achievement into a score. They found boys who had absent fathers scored significantly lower in IQ tests and scored much lower in their academic achievement.

So, looking at all of this data. I think it is clear that even just having a stable father figure in the life of a kid will significantly increase their chances in life. It makes me very grateful for my father and all he has done, and I hope to be able to be actively involved in the lives of my children when I get older.

Communication

As we go about our day to day lives, we often take for granted just how amazing and complex our everyday communication is. Our modern technology allows us to compose and send short messages to anyone across the world in a matter of seconds. Through video chat, we can not only talk to but actually see someone thousands of miles away from us in real time. Even without technology, we can communicate complex ideas and stories to others through a series of sounds and gestures. Communication is truly amazing, yet it has many flaws, some of which we often don’t realize or think of.

Unfortunately, we cannot just directly transfer what is in our head to someone, so every time we want to communicate, we must follow a process that we almost never realize we are doing.

In the first step we have to encode the message that we want to share. It will not be a perfect one to one representation of what is in our head, so we will have to try our best to get the general idea across.

Secondly, we must choose a method to transfer the message. Traditionally this almost always been through face-to-face communication, with an occasional written letter used by those with the proper education, and while face-to-face communication is still probably the most common, more and more people are starting to use other methods such as communication through text, phone call, email, and social media.

Third, the person who is the target of the message must receive it and decode it as best they can. Many issues can arise here because the way we see the world is often very different from the way others see the world, and what may mean one thing to us might mean something entirely different to the person receiving our message.

Finally, in order for complete communication to occur, we must receive some sort of feedback from the person we are talking to.

As you can see, normal, everyday communication that we often take for granted can have problems and become disrupted quite easily. I know from my personal experience, I often and misunderstood when I text because of the way I use punctuation or the length of time it takes me to get back to someone. I now take my time to think out what I am texting and how the person receiving it will view it because I don’t want to be misunderstood.

Now, what does all of this have to do with the family?

We usually will spend the most time of our lives with our family, and without effective communication, many problems can arise in family situations. Growing up, my family was really close, and we always had each other’s backs. That being said, the most common form of contention between my parents, and with us kids sometimes, was a lack of communication. When we sat down and talked about it we were usually on the same page of thought, but oftentimes at the moment, we would sometimes have trouble communicating with each other which would lead to misunderstandings, which would lead to temporary frustrations with one another.

So, what can we do to get better at communication?

The way I saw my family get better at communication was through family counsels. We would discuss coming activities or challenges and my mom and dad would get input from us kids before making final decisions on things. Another way we to boost communication is through doing activities together. The more we spend time with one another, the better we understand each other and the more we will strive to pay attention and communicate clearly in the future. It is also important to use the right form of communication at the right time, and while face-to-face is often the most effective, sometimes it is better to write a letter or email to really get your thoughts out and to avoid letting emotions get in the way.

Stress of Life

We face stress every day of our lives, we vent our stresses to our close friends and family members and while we try to avoid it, we accept it as a normal part of our lives. But what really is stress?

Stress, at its roots, is primarily a physiological system. Our brain is made up of a series of different parts with the parts that are generally more advanced and evolved on the outside, and the generally simpler and less evolved on the inside. Two of the innermost parts are the limbic system and the brain stem. The limbic system is the part of our body the controls our natural bodily reflexes, while the brain stem controls our unconscious, metabolic functions like heart rate and breathing.

When our body encounters an event we perceive as stressful, our limbic system kicks in and starts to take control of the brain stem. Our heart rate increases, we breath more quickly, our sleep cycle is ignored, and the other parts of our brain focused on problem solving and creativity are devoted exclusively to the problem before us.

So, why does this happen?

Our brain knows that in order for us to have the highest chance of survival, we need to devote all our energy to the immediate problems. This would be very useful to ancient hunter-gatherer civilizations as people living in that time probably faced frequent attacks from predators and those with a strong stress response system would have been more likely to survive and pass on their traits to their children.  The problem we face in today’s society, however, is when our stress responses become prolonged and start cause detrimental effects to the rest of our body.

As we become more irritated, and more angry, due to our having a difficult time sleeping and our hormones being out of sync, we naturally start to take out our frustrations on those around us who are closest to us, which is almost always our family. Once our personal stress starts affecting the family, it transforms into a family stressor. Family stressors come in many forms, most commonly consisting of marital issues, death of a family member or someone close to the family, economic uncertainty, or harmful behavior from children or adults.

That being said, there have been proven ways to overcome stress. I think back to a time when my family was going through a stressful period. While my dad has had a consistent job and we have always had the money for our needs and then some, we aren’t particularly well off and live in a relatively small 4-bedroom house. Another family from our church congregation had recently gone through a traumatic experience as the father tried to kill himself in front of his family. We offered their family a place to stay in our house, but it involved trying to fit their family 7 in with our family of 7 which lasted for about six months.

While their family was great, they came from a very different background compared to ours, and it was just a difficult situation in general when you try to fit 14 people from different families into 4 bedrooms. I remember hearing my parents argue about something for the first time in a very long time, and I remembered feeling down and stressed out because our personal space had been obstructed.

However, as we learned in our class, stressful situations can lead to a stronger family. Our parents frequently let us know how important we were to them, and how important our sacrifice was, which helped us see the situation in a better light. A few weeks after I overheard my parents arguing, we had a family scripture study in which they testified to us kids about how much Christ has sacrificed for us, and how important it was that we helped everyone we could. Looking back, some of my most favorite memories were from the time we were helping that family. Ultimately my parents were able to turn a stressful situation into a period of family growth.

Intimacy in Marriage

Intimacy in marriage is probably one of the most awkward and taboo subjects to discuss, and I am lucky enough to have to write an entire blog on it!
Sarcasm aside, as we have talked about this touchy subject this past week, I have thought a lot about why it is so taboo. For one thing, we live in a culture that puts a lot of emphasis on sexual and intimate relations being private, and although I feel like this is changing a bit, it is still a deep-rooted societal norm that is shared across many of the major world cultures. Another reason this topic is so awkward to talk about it because it is very personal, and it really isn’t our place to give people specific advice on their personal marital intimacy. With those points being said, I would like to talk a bit about some of the general themes and ideas that marital intimacy affects us on a personal and cultural level.
As might be expected to someone who has a basic knowledge of the biological makeup of people, men and women are affected by martial intimacy in very different ways. There are three big hormones that are released during intimate moments, these are dopamine, serotonin, and in women oxytocin.
Dopamine is something most of us are familiar with as ‘getting a high’. It helps us feel excited and good while performing a verity of acts and is part of evolutionary development in most animals to reward us by performing acts that benefit us. Sexual reproducing is very important, and uses dopamine extensively, causing us to crave it.
Serotonin is another important hormone, which has more to do with giving us a feeling of wellbeing and contentedness. It is sometimes used to help treat extreme depression and is important in making us not only feel excited about intimate relations but also feel like they are important for our wellbeing.
Both males and females produce these two hormones during intimate or sexual acts. The hormone oxytocin, however, is only produced by females. Oxytocin is important in helping us build connection and trust with those who have shared intimate moments.
So along with these difference in hormones, males are also aroused a lot quicker and with less control, while females are aroused over a longer period of time, and their arousal is stronger based on their feelings of safety and trust. Because of this, sexual moments for one marriage partner can mean something a lot different than for the other partner.
This can present problems because a man might be able to feel as though they have a satisfying intimate relationship, while his wife may not be fully satisfied because. It also becomes a problem with the culture of casual sex that seems to be prevalent today, because while a man might be able to have sex with just anyone and not really think much about it, a woman would build up at least a small amount of trust and connection with people she is having sexual relations with. Long term, this can lead to attachment issues, causing them to put less emphasis on those trust feelings and causing them to suppress natural mental processes of connection when none exists.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in this subject, but I think as we come to better understand this taboo topic, we will be better able to understand our feelings and our partner's feelings in relationships. These reactions have developed over the long course of our evolutionary history, guided by God’s hand, and we have them for a reason. It is our duty to discover this reason and use it.

What is love?

What is love?
The question to define love is asked so often that it has almost become a cliché in today's culture. The biggest problem is that it can have so many definitions and there are many situations where we apply the word or concept of love. It is also one of our most powerful emotions and inspires acts of great courage or great stupidity. I have personally always been fascinated by the concept, and always enjoy learning more about it.
Ancient philosophers in Greece first came up with four types of love. Storge is the love of a parent to their child and is seen as nurturing and protective. Philia is the love of friendship or connection and was valued most highly in Greek society. Eros is the romantic and erotic love that we most commonly associate with people who are ‘in love’. Agape is not love for a specific person, but rather a more general love often translated into the English word charity. This theme of four loves seems to be prevalent throughout history and even though it fails to describe some forms of love, such as the love a child has for a parent or, the love a person has for objects or activities, it can be very useful in learning how to express our love.
So, all of these ideas and thoughts on love are interesting to think about, but how do they actually apply to our lives?
A good way to apply this is the Relationship Attachment Model or RAM. Displayed below, it shows how to keep a relationship safe and healthy.

The idea is that our relationships proceed from left to right. We first come to know someone, and if that goes well, we start to trust them, and then actually rely on them. The more we rely on someone the more we feel committed to them, and as an innate desire, we display that commitment through touch and intimacy.
When we look at where our love is coming from, it can often help us in all relationships, especially romantic ones. If our love is too focused on eros we will naturally start to push the relationship very quickly towards the touch, and if starts to surpass the other values, it could cause dangerous situations and spell later problems for the relationship because trust and commitment were never fully developed. It is good to follow the natural progression of relationships, keeping in mind that we shouldn’t rely on someone before we trust them, or trust someone before we know.
It seems that we should have all forms of love in our life. Having a love for all people is very important, but we shouldn’t necessarily trust everyone. In close relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners, it is important to have that connective or ‘friendship’ love so we can build up trust, and to help our romantic relationships to grow even furthers we should have a passionate eros-like love to help build to commitment and touch.