Social Class

This week we talked about social class. I found it really interesting to look at the statistics of the difference in pay between different levels of education and even between genders. Something I thought about while we were going over these numbers, I thought about how even though in our country we have the opportunity to rise above our situation and change our class, it is difficult to change. There are so many unspoken rules within social classes that it takes a long time within the class to understand how things work within that class. Its also hard to have to drop to a lower social class. My husband grew up in a wealthy family. His father is well off and he has always had easy access to the luxuries of life. But he is going into education and we will never have the kind of money that his parents do. The first few months we were married we had to talk about budgeting and how to manage money. It was a big change for me and especially him and it took a while to change some of the spending habits that we both had. Another thing I thought about this week was how blessed we are in this country because even on the lower end of income, we still make more money than other families in other countries. I am grateful for the blessings that I have to be financially stable.

Boundaries

This week we talked about family rules and boundaries. We had to draw a map of our family boundaries. There are only four kids in my family but it got complicated really fast. I guess boundaries and implicit rules were something that I always knew were there because I lived by them. But it was really interesting to actually think about the boundaries that exists between my family members and the rules that governed our relationships - both the explicit and the implicit.
I also thought about how the boundaries and rules have changed a little over time as we have grown older and our situations have changed, some of us moving out and getting married, having our own children and even one moving back home. I also thought about my husband's family and how I fit in with them and what boundaries I have with them. I've slowly started to learn the implicit rules and things that are and are not acceptable within his family and I think he's also started to learn the same things in my family. It's interesting to me that even as we start our own family, we still fit into and have certain roles within our families of origin.
I'm learning in this class that families are complicted and complex. There are so many minute details that when woven together form this functional symphony that directs the life of a family.

Family Research and Trends

This week we talked about research and trends of families. We talked about how it can be difficult to study families because there are so many differences between each family and how there are so many trends related to families - premarital sex, living alone, cohabitation, divorce and remarriage, babies born out of wedlock. What I learned from all of this is two things. In relation to the differences in families, I thought about how Heavenly Father knows each of us individually and He puts us in a family that we can strive in, or at least wont put us in a family that we can't handle. There are so many differences to families and they each provide for the families needs in their own way. The second thing that I learned was in relation to the different trends that we see in families. Family is such a central part to our Heavenly Fathers plan which means that Satan will try so hard to attack the family in whatever way he can. This is evident in all of the trends that we studied. It is so important that I do all that I can to protect my family from becoming part of these statistics of negative family trends.