Family Culture

Culture is something that most would agree has a great impact on today’s society. But how does culture affect our families?

First, let’s define culture. Culture is defined as customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or geographical group. Each family typically has their own culture based on their traditions, religion and other beliefs, ethnicity, language they speak, geographical location, even the family dynamic determines their culture. But sometimes subcultures emerge in families, when a family member changes there religious beliefs, when not all family members speak the same language, when a family member moves to a new geographical location, you get the idea.

I would like to use my own family as an example of these “subcultures”. I grew up in a traditional family with my father, mother, and three sisters all living under one roof. We were your typical American family—went to church every Sunday together, ate family dinner every night, had family night once a week, we even did movie and game nights quite frequently. However, our family culture completely changed when three things happened.

First, my dad started his own business which kept him traveling nearly every week. This changed the culture of my family a great deal, because we got used to our family being us five girls the majority of the time. We still had family dinner, still wen to church every week, still spent time together as a family. But because my dad wasn’t home very often, we had this new subculture of us girls. It was much different when my dad was home, almost as if he were an outsider. And things became much different for our family from then on out.

Second, my dad changed his religious beliefs. This was an extremely drastic culture change for my family, because being member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, this was a very big deal for our family. Religion is a huge part of culture, and my dad’s change in his beliefs caused our already formed subculture to be even bigger, and he became even more of an outsider to our family.

Thenthurd thing that drastically changed my family’s culture was my parent’s divorce. Their divorce created even more subcultures in my family, because now it wasn’t just my mom and us girls compared to the entire family. Now we had this new subculture emerge of just my sisters and me because we were going through this incredibly hard thing together. My family culture was completely different, and continues to change as my parents hav remarried and there are new step-parents and step-siblings thrown into the mix.

Through all this change, I have at times ondered how my family got so far from the culture I grew up in, all the way to this completely different, new culture. I have often told myself that I would never allow my own family to get so off track, but have also wondered if it’s inevitable that my family’s culture will always affect me.

But I learned something recently that has completely changed my perspective on things.

We all get to choose the family culture we create so long as we are aware of it and willing to change.

This has stuck with me ever since I heard it, because I realized that I have the power to choose the culture of my family. I can choose which things I take from my family and which things to throw out. I have the power to completely change.

Though family culture is an aspect that will always be there whether we realize it or not, it is in our control. This piece of information has completely changed my perspective Andy I hope it can help even one person out there too.