Family Culture

For class prep this week I was asked to answer a question about how my social class had affected my family life.  As I pondered the answer, I realized that my social class has impacted me less than what I believe and how I was raised has (my culture).  I’m not sure what my social status officially is, and I don’t care.  It’s what I believe that matters because it is what has made the real difference. 

In class we discussed a video about a woman named Tammy who lived in a dumpy trailer with her two sons and walked 10 or 12 miles to work every day.  We talked about how her socioeconomic status affected her family.  Because she was a single parent and worked all day, she didn’t have the resources available to provide well for her children.  She didn’t have the money required to give them opportunities and she was rarely at home to supervise them or to provide emotional support.  Because of this there was little structure in her home.  An example of how this impacted her family could be found in the life of one of her sons, who indicated in the video that he wanted a better life than he currently had and was planning on going to college after graduating from high school.  In a second video we saw the same family 13 years later.  The son had gotten his girlfriend pregnant as a senior in high school and had dropped out to provide for his family.  Brother Williams stated that the lack of family structure in this boy’s life had affected his ability to follow through with what he valued.

These problems in Tammy’s family structure can be blamed on her low socioeconomic status, but I believe that the culture of her family was the real issue behind her problems.

One major point of interest in this story was that Tammy refused to become a welfare recipient.  A single mother has access to benefits worth tens of thousands of dollars every year from the government.  If Tammy had chosen to do access these benefits, she could have spent more time at home with her boys, giving them both structure and supervision, but she had declined.  As one of twenty-something children, she had seen her father work hard to support his family and she had admired him for that.  She wanted to follow in his footsteps while teaching her children the value of work, and so she refused to become a welfare recipient and kept her Burger King job.

A second issue was the fact that Tammy was a single mother in the first place.  The videos said nothing at all about the father of her children, but we could assume that his absence also stemmed from a culture learned either from family or from society in general that it’s okay to cohabitate and have premarital sex, as I would think that if he had been a faithful husband and father and had simply passed on, he would have been mentioned in the video.

One lesson that we can learn from this the story then, is that culture is a main cause of problems in a family’s structure.  Contrary to popular belief, not all family structures or cultures are as equally effective in meeting family needs (see this study), and this can be demonstrated in the lives of Tammy’s grown children.

Last week Brother Williams shared with us a negative pattern in his family of origin’s structure that he had become aware of and was able to keep from continuing in his own family.  We tend to revert back to the behavior that we learned as children because it is familiar to us (notice the root word family in familiar), but if we are aware of these traditions then we can change them and help our families to function better.  He asked us not to blindly fall into the rut of family traditions, but to selectively create our own family cultures to best meet the needs of our own families.

I want my future family to have an effective culture, which is one of the reasons why I am taking this class.  There were a lot of things in my family of origin that I found ineffective and I am seeking to learn better ways of doing things in order to prevent repeating my parents’ mistakes.  This includes taking classes, reading books, going to workshops, asking questions and observing other families.  I am excited to create my own family culture.