The Strains of Change

 

                This week has been an especially interesting week in class because we talked about real world circumstances and situations. I help make this make a bit more sense, last week we talked about roles each member of a family may fulfill. Such as a father taking the role of an older brother to an only son or an older sister taking the role of a best friend to her younger sister. Last week we spent much of our time talking abut the different roles and changes our own families have gone through, and it was an incredible revelatory time for me and understanding my own family. This week we applied it to social and economic problems the world faces today.

                The primary subject of our conversation focused on qualitative studies of families in different situations. The main one we look at and evaluated was a family that immigrated to the U.S. illegally. As I read the article and then talk thought the process in class, I began to realize not only how pertinent the roles we play are but how they can be so disrupted without anyone ever intending too. To help you all understand and perhaps learn some of the things that I learned this week I would like to walk you a situation we read and talked about.

                To start off we took a family who lived in Mexico and hoped and dreamed of a higher education for their kids and learning English here in America. After living in a small town with lots of family near by that was heavily involved with the kids, and a hard-working husband had saved enough money to cross the boarder the family had decided to begin the process. As a family they decided that the husband would go first and establish himself there and send all he money he could back home, so the rest of his family could pay to come over as well. They planned on being apart for roughly 6 months. The father made it here and found employment doing some labor-intensive work that played next to nothing due to his lack of documentation but lived very humbly and sent what he could home. Over the course of the next 6 months the wife picked up a job so they could pay for their basic necessities and live a somewhat normal live without having their father around.

                What began to happen next though almost no one thought about. Roles began to change. Mom became the primary source of income and was almost never home. Kids spent much of their time home alone or at their aunt and uncle’s playing with cousins. Mom began to be seen less as a parent than did the aunt and uncles for the younger kids while older ones began to choose to go to work over school to help try to help fill the shoes of their father. After waiting much longer than the expected six months. The family had changed a lot but they were about to be reunited again.

                After a long and rough journey across the border they met up with their father.  At first things seemed great and wonderful, but the family soon realized they didn’t fit together they way they used too. Both mom and dad had changed a lot and had to find a new dynamic tot heir on relationship, their oldest son was 19 and felt his father had no lace to tell him what to do after being gone so long and the youngest girl had been removed from all her friends and family and had a hard time fitting in being she didn’t speak English, so her mom became her sole friend.

                As you can see, although all worked out in the end. The dynamic of this family had changed drastically and there were some definite growing pains as they went. Although I have used a bit of an extreme example here, I think that we aught to be ore aware of how our circumstances may change the way our family interacts with one another. Most of the time it will never be something as drastic as this but eve the little things in our lives can throw off our family’s homeostasis. I personally have made a greater effort to be conscious of this and do my best to protect our family bonds.

What Roles do You Play in Your Family?

 

    This week in class we talked about something very interesting that I had never considered before. A least to the depth in which we talked about it. The primary focus of our discussion was “family roles”. Now when most people think about family roles, they think about how the man’s role is to protect and provide while the women’s role is to nurture and make a house feel like a home. (I’m speaking generally here.) Yet I think we forget about perhaps the most important roles we play. The individual roles we play in each of our family members personal lives. For example, an older sister often takes the role of role model and best friend of her younger sister. Or maybe a father takes on a role similar to one of an older brother to a son whose closest siblings are all girls or hasn’t any. These are often the unspoken roles we take on in our families.

    This week I was invited to create what’s called a “family map” I had never heard of one before and had no idea what it meant when I first heard about it. But what it is, is a “map of the relationships within a household. Not just the blood ones but the emotional ones. One is typically drawn by placing everyone’s names in a cluster on a paper and then drawing circles around the close relationships. For example, there is usually a close circle around a husband and wife. Then another around the mother and an oldest daughter, and maybe one around the 2 siblings that are closest in age to each other.  It really just depends on the family. I found it very fascinating and helped me to see some of the roles my own family members play. Ones I had never even considered.

    The conversation took a really interesting turn when we began to talk about when a change occurs within that family system or map. Maybe an older sibling moves out, or a baby is born, maybe even a divorce happens. Regardless of the change, a stage of unspoken chaos always seems to follow. This is because when any part of the system changes it effects every other part at least to some degree.  Lets use the my own family for example, My mom, my dad, and my younger sister. Growing up my dad and I were always pretty close and them my sister and mom were always pretty close as well. However, there was a bit of a rift right between the genders. Not a lot of change really happened in my family so this is just kind of the way to stayed for a long time. That is until I left on a 2-year mission for my church where contact with my family was very limited. I noticed my families lives back home seem to be pretty chaotic for a while, but after about 6 months something began to change. My father began to cleave unto my mother more than I had seen in probably 10 years and things became much happier around the house. You see when I left my father was left alone to a degree or had no one in his circle anymore. I think this sparked a new and evolved relationship to form between my parents and for that circle to be reinforced. Things have pretty much stayed this way ever since as I have not been home much for some years now due to a mission, college, a job, and being married myself now. It will be interesting to see what happens when my sister finally decides to move out.

    In closing I invite whoever may be reading this o think about what their family map may look like and how and why it has evolved over the years. It has led me to a great amount of insight and shed new light on my own family. For me it was a bit of an emotional and revelatory experience.

"It Happened Again"

    You’re probably wondering “What happened again?”, and since this is basically my first post, you don't even have anything to look back at. So let me begin with a story. My first semester of college I came to school here at BYU-Idaho as a business major. And well, that lasted all of about three days. The reason being, that I didn’t like any of my classes. After one particularly longways I came back to my apartment questioning my life choice of even coming. That’s semester I had a roommate who was a mechanical engineering major and he invited me to come along to one of his classes. It was an introductory course to engineering and that day they had all of the different engineering departments come and speak to the students. I found it very interesting but nothing too exciting. It all sounded too hard and not really worth it. But then, the automotive engineering faculty came up and immediately I felt the spirit practically straighten me up and say "pay attention". Needless to say, by the end of this 8-minute lecture I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Three years later my major is still Automotive Engineering Technology, and it has been a life changing journey to say the least. I graduate in just a few months, and I have job offers from Tesla, Ford, and hopefully more to come soon.

You may still be wondering, “What happened again?” The reason I shared the story above with you is because every single semester I have attended here at BYU-I, I thought I had all my classes figured out. Yet, without fail, every semester I always go through the very stressful process of changing at least one of my classes after the semester has started. It’s happened eight times now… Now, the really interesting thing about it is, that every one of the classes that I ended up taking in place of another, has ended up being a life changing experience. Hands down the classes that 30 years from now I will remember what I learned in them. This Semester I ended up switching my second U.S. History class for a family relations class. I know what your thinking, “Why is an automotive engineer taking a family relations class? “ Trust me, I thought the same thing. But let me tell you, it has already been a life changing experience for me. I have learned things that will forever affect the way I make decision regarding my own family and others around me.

When someone is lying on their death bed looking back at their life, thinking about what purpose their life had and how they spent their time. For some reason their thoughts always seem to come to a focal point on their family… Why is that?... Perhaps it’s because family is what brought them the most joy in their time here. Or maybe its because they feel that their family was their purpose. I don’t know that have an exact answer for you, but I do believe there is something divine about that. So let me ask you this. When someone asked you what you do for a living, why do we answer first with our occupation and most of the time only with that? When really our family is what matters most. Why don’t we answer first as a husband and father, then as an engineer or what have you. It sounds weird, but in all reality isn’t that the order our purposes fall in? 

We live in an interesting time, where I think for the first time in history, we are more afraid of the devaluing of money than we are of the family. And I am here to tell you that, that is a grievous mistake. This week in class we talked about how although the worlds population is growing, birth rates are falling dramatically and have been for a long time. Studies show that the world will actually begin to depopulate by 2050. Most people believe that this is a good thing. That its better for the environment and that a higher standard of living can be achieved by having fewer people. This is something that I have learned that could not be farther from the truth. The smaller and less value we place upon our families, the more a society falls apart. Family is the central unit for society and the disintegration of it will bring upon the disintegration of nearly every other social order. Throughout the next 12 weeks I will be discussing these subjects along with many other on why family is so important and how we can help to strengthen the most fundamental element of  our worlds society.

Introduction

 Hello everyone. My name is Ryan and I am currently a college student at BYU-Idaho. I'm studying Automotive Engineering but that's not really what this blog will be about. This blog will be about families, and why they are the very foundation of our society.  Although many of my post will likely be about my own experiences with my family, I will also talk about how families are changing around the world and why this is both good and bad. Hopefully someone besides myself will read these and find them of worth.

See you next week.