The What and Why of Family Culture

There is nothing more influential in our lives than our family culture. In an earlier post I talked about how important our family culture can be for not just our own lives, but for all of society. This past week I was able to learn a lot about how social class, ethnicity, life experiences, and many other factors play a huge role in how a family culture is developed, and as I have come to understand this it has helped me better understand those living in family cultures that are very different from mine.

As part of our family relations class, we spent about an hour on a demonstration of what a typical family culture would be for a family of illegal immigrants from Mexico. We did this by creating a hypothetical situation that would be typical for those families, and then several members of the class role-played different family members as they made the perilous journey from Mexico to the United States. I had the unique opportunity to play as the teenaged son of the family. As I was trying to think of what a kid like that might be going through and put myself in his shoes, I had a really eye-opening experience, and I feel like I understand the difficulty and challenges a young man like that might face much better.

One of the biggest challenges with family culture, is that it can have a strong domino effect throughout the generations for the primary reason that the only culture we know to pass on is usually the culture that we are familiar with, the culture we were raised in. Those families that struggle with the difficulties of extreme poverty are likely to perpetuate the same culture across many generations because many of the challenges of the social-economic class, such as a lack of a stable household and little time for the parents to be home will have a huge effect on the children raised in those situations.

I was also surprised to learn that those in very wealthy households can also face generational struggles with family structure. While many of those coming from a poor socioeconomic status struggle to keep a stable household due to outside influences, those with a higher socioeconomic status also struggle with a stable household often because they build many of their family structures and roles around nannies and maids.

So, what is the solution to these problems? If many of these external factors have such a huge impact on our family culture, how can we end up rising above it and change our families for the better?

I don’t pretend to have a solid answer for this, but what comes to my mind is the importance of being informed. We live in a time where some of the greatest innovations known to humankind are available for everyone to learn about and take advantage of. There is a lot of information and research about the family out there, and as we spend more time learning about how families operate, and how we influence each other we will have the knowledge to start to transcend those ethnic and socioeconomic gaps. There is no perfect family culture out there, but there is also no family culture that is not worth examining and learning from. We should make every effort to talk to those around us in different family cultures, and together, we can all make our families and communities more beneficial to all.