Changing Family Essay: The Change In Family

The Change in Family
What is family? When people think of family they think of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc. Family are the people that we grow up around and they have a big impact on how we see certain things in life. The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary says family is a group of people who are related to each other. However, the definition might shift as people go from being children to adolescence then to adults.
When children hear the word family they think of the traditional definition. For instance, they think of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc. They do not think of anything else because that is what they have always known. They have never known about anything else. This is what they are accustomed to as children. What they see is what they do and what they hear is what they learn. The upbringing of people and how they learn is all based on what their family

As people get older they start to understand more and depending on what they go through alters what their definition of family means. Maybe friends people have known since they were in diapers become part of the family and relatives are not family like we thought they were. For instance, on my mom’s side of the family I have relatives that are biologically my cousins, but I would not consider them my family because my definition of family is not the same as it was when I was younger. As an adolescence my definition of family was altered. My definition of family still had some of the traditional meaning such as siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents, etc. but just because we are related doesn’t mean we are family. I would consider Azala more a family member before I considered some of my cousin’s family. As people get older the definition is changed by something that happened or they start to see things in a different way and as they go from being a teenager into being an adult it may change a little