The Structure we Grew up With

This week my class discussed the effect of social class on families. This was an interesting topic and a good reminder of how much my family has been blessed. My family is not ultra-rich or nor is it poor, in reality, my family’s situation in life is such that my mom was able to stay home and be there to help and teach her kids. In fact, she valued being able to spend time with her children so much she decided when we moved to California that she was going to try homeschooling. She did this in part because as the oldest in her family she remembered her younger siblings coming home doing their school work and not having time for anything else before they went to bed
The social class that children grow up in is not something that they can really get away from. Though people can overtime move out of the class they are born into, but even if they do so it takes many years for them to better understand the rules for the different classes and more time for them to be able to fully use them without having to constantly think about them. This is because it is when we are children that we learn and develop our behaviors and basic patterns of thought. The example that we get from our parents is usually the one that we cling to for most of our lives, and that we fall back on it as a familiar.
Each family has a social class that they are a part of, and that becomes familiar to them as they grow. As children grow up with that class they watch their parents and who they interact with and the ideas and opinions that they have about the different levels in society. People don’t realize that these opinions help to shape them into who they become. Every family’s culture is influenced by the social realm that they grew up in, but even inside these family cultures, there are some that are better than others.
Here in the United States of America, it can be really hard to say that there are ideas, values, or better ways of doing things. This is because if anyone were to say that to people who have a very different perspective, everyone involved can become frustrated and offended. They may feel that they have just been told that everything they do is somehow wrong or inferior, especially when it comes to how families are run. Family culture is a very hard topic to talk about because every family’s culture was created by the parents as they worked out the differences of their family culture that they brought with them from their childhood experiences. This new merged culture is what is then given to their kids. 
The kids don’t truly grasp how much their family culture affects them or how each of their friend’s families have little nuances and differences in their own family culture that they may think of as odd, or some things that they would like to have in their own family. In my family, my siblings and I learned from a young age to take good care of everything that we own, something that we have only gotten better at over the years. Something that I love from my friend’s family is that they use a Japanese greeting whenever they return home. 
Though there is not one perfect way for a family culture system, each system has both good and bad qualities to it. As we step back and look at our own family culture we may find things that we want to bring to our future families, or things that we may want to change. No matter what we decide, our family culture has the ability to impact not only our own lives, but also our families as well as those around us. 
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