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Cultural differences in interpersonal relationships
Cultural contexts may affect relationships and the way people communicate
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In today’s society, my family would be considered an average American family. Our house is very mediocre with brown bricks and a white fence surrounding our backyard. We are located in a small town called New Lenox, which is in southern Illinois. My parents were not connected through either of their families; they first locked eyes on the Metra train while commuting to work. In that day and age, there was no such thing that either of them was required to do to get connected to each other’s families. As we talked about in class, brides and grooms had to give certain services and money in order to gain good relationships with each other. Now, they have been together for a little over twenty-four years with three daughters and a dog. Amira, my …show more content…
My previous neighbors that moved from Texas lived with their extended family. They lived in a patrilocal family structure. Everything was surrounded by the grandfather, father, and uncles. They were the only people in my neighborhood that I knew of that lived with extended family. Since they were not from around the Chicago area, I understood that their culture and norms were different than what I was used to. The closest thing to a patrilocal or matrilocal family structure that relates to me is that my grandparents live in surrounding suburbs. Since most of them do not live out of state we have frequent visits with them over the holidays and special …show more content…
Being in a bilineal family has allowed us to be a part of both my mother’s side and my father’s side. My family does not favor either side more than the other because if we were to do that tensions would arise. Even though we have my father’s last name, we still recognize ourselves with my mother’s family line too. To be fair in all that we do my family likes to split up the holidays between both sides of the extended family in order to make everyone happy. We spend Thanksgiving and Easter lunch with my mother’s parents and dinner with my father’s parents. Christmas Eve is with my mother’s side and Christmas day is with my fathers. New Year’s Eve is just with my immediate family but for New Year’s Day we spend the day at both of my grandparent’s houses. For the Fourth of July and other small holiday’s we spend them with my mother’s side. When I was told to make a family tree in Elementary school, I included both sides of my family. I maintain connections with both sides and talk to each of them on the phone equally. The drive to both of their houses is about the same so it is easy to make visits to both sides of grandparents. In our society now, I have the physical ability and economic stability to keep ties with extended family unlike some people who are limited to who they can
While watching the documentary “Two American Families” there was three aspects I noticed within the two families. The first being how there was a shift in the social class of the families due to economic problems. The second being the role reversal of the male and the female. The third being the effect of the families’ financial instability on the children and their decisions into adulthood.
“Christmas must be crazy.” This is the traditional comment that I have received time and time again for my remarkably nontraditional family, which consists of five stepbrothers, one stepsister, two half-sisters, my little brother, my stepmother and father, my mother and her fiancee (with his own set of children!) as well as the legions of extended family and my host family in Ecuador, not including the numerous friends on campus and elsewhere who affectionately refer to me as 'Mom', 'Mother', or 'Momma', and who are considered practically family by this point. However, Christmas still goes quite smoothly, and I must ask: Is my rather large, rough family circle really that atypical of modern American society? The NYT issue of Science Times titled “The Changing American Family” by Natalie Angier asserts that our family structure is indeed changing, and we as Americans no longer subscribe to the traditional nuclear family modeled by shows such as Leave it to Beaver or the “blended” but still idealized model of The Brady Bunch. And, when we examine America's families, we find that the shift is happening not only from decade to decade, but constantly, especially with the passing of new laws and new understandings surrounding human rights and identities.
Beginning in 1992, a man named Bill Moyers has followed the lives of two American families in the film, “Two American Families.” Produced as a documentary, the film covers an 11 year period. The two families shown in the film are the Neumann family and the Stanley family. Both families have multiple children and struggle economically. The main difference between the two is that the Stanleys are African American and the Neumans are white. This leads to the question of whether race was a cause of all their struggles.
As we have learned through Skolnick’s book, as well as Rubin’s research, the make up of the family is influenced by many factors. The economy, culture, education, ethnicity/race, and tradition all help to create the modern family. The last few decades have heavily influenced the family structure, and while some try to preserve the past, others embrace the future. Through it all, we find you can have both.
In society today there tends to exist a nostalgia for the utopian family life of the past.
There was an article in The New York Times called “The Changing American Family” by Natalie Angier that illustrates this point. The writer discussed the way in which the typical family structure has morphed into the many versions that can be seen today. Through her research, Angier noted that “anthropologists have traditionally used the term ‘fictive kin’ to separate such relationships from ‘true’ kinship based on blood or law, but many researchers have recently pushed back against that distinction, arguing that self-constructed families are no less real or meaningful than conventional ones.” (23) Personally, I think that if someone acts like family, then they become my family. These “fictive kin” do not exist to me. The title of a family member must be
The American family has come a long way and has changed a lot overtime. Liberals and conservatives have their own views on the American family today. It is very tough to raise a family nowadays. However, there are some easier ways to raise a family today as well. Some of the things that I will talk about are divorce and its effects, welfare, abusiveness on children and wives, and a couple of articles in the book, "Families in the U.S."
The American family model traditionally included the mother and father with two kids, a boy and girl. In this 1950’s family model the husband is seen as the breadwinner while the mother is the homemaker. This model is exemplified in the Battleship advertisement where the father is resting from a hard day’s by work playing a board game with his son. At the same time the mother is doing the days dishes with some help drying from her daughter. Today however, these rigid stereotypical roles are no longer applicable to the members of the modern family. With increases in divorce rates and teen pregnancy combined with the shift in economic roles of the majority of families, the traditional nuclear family is a minority (Wetzel, 1990). The JCPenny
Family, a group consisting of parents and children living together in a household. Although family is a concretely defined term, the idea of family varies from person to person. But, what makes a family? For those who are surrounded by loving blood relatives, for those who have never known the one to grant them life, for those who have left their blood behind for a more loving and nurturing environment, what can commonly define a family? Family is something defined by the individual. Family includes those who you have come to love, whether platonically or romantically, those you have suffered with, those you have come to respect, and most importantly those you have cared for and in turn have cared for you. To one that could mean people who
Among the nuclear family there is also extended family, where relatives live in the same home as parents and their children. The results from my survey presented that not many people have extended family, but the extended family that does exist consists mainly of grandparents. There are advantages to the extended family over the nuclear family, such as more emotional, physical, and economical support for the family as a whole. In the television show Family Matters, extended family is demonstrated when the grandmother comes to live with “Winslows”. She was portrayed as a loving person who was always there to listen to her family’s problems. In this case of the media, we see that extended family is properly used.
The family unit is as diverse as the societies they each represent. This sometimes can manifest traditional roles of doting mothers and providing fathers into a home with two sets of parents (Kurrien & Dawn Vo, 2004). Therefore, the involvement and importance of the extended family: grandparents and other family members such as aunts and uncles play a significant role in both its economic and social function.
In this discussion, I will be explaining how I define family. I will also include my immediate and extended family. I will also describe what family means to me, how mine differs from other families in my neighborhood, and also how they are similar. I will also describe my family’s ethnicity and how it may affect any of my family’s health.
The social institution I have chosen to address is that of family. An individual’s family life, both past and present, can have such a big impact on a person’s life in both a positive and negative manner. It is how we as individuals chose to handle life changing situations that will shape our lives and those around us. Family is such a fascinating social institution to study because every individual comes from a different family background or has a different experience than that of a sibling. You can learn so many things about a person by looking into their family background, origin and what type of up brining they had.
Many people have interesting stories of where they come from. Some may find mine to
Family is the most important thing in the world a single word, with many different meaning. As the backbone of society family plays an important role in who an individual can be. The family can determine the class of an individual, the education level, and their religion. There are different types of families that have existed and some that are still present today. In the past the nuclear family was the ideal model. The nuclear family also called domesticity is characterized as, women being responsible for keeping the home and children and men being the breadwinner. It is two adults living together in a household with their own or adopted children. Another type of family is the extended family. The extended family is defined as a family group consisting of more than two generation of relatives living either within the same household or very close to one another. Grandparents, aunts, and in-laws are examples of extended families.