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.