Personal Narrative: My Cultural Identity

My cultural identity has been shaped by the occupations of my parents, growing up in southern culture, and living in the self-enhancing American culture. Both of my parents have jobs that allow them to work with children who face poverty, abuse, and many other levels of adversity in their lives. My father is a children’s psychologist and for the majority of my childhood he worked at a nonprofit that worked with victims of child abuse. My father’s job required him to talk with children who have been abused and help them to understand what happened to them and also help them to work through it. Because of the innocent nature of children, my dad had to put on a brave face every day and smile and laugh with these children in order to help them

Growing up watching the bravery of my parents and their true kind spirits has helped shape me into the person that I am today. This cultural influence has helped to make me kind, empathetic, patient, and understanding. My parents influence on me is an example of transmitted culture because the values, attitudes, and beliefs that they showed me as role models are values that have been passed down to them and from their own role models. My maternal grandmother was a teacher and my maternal grandfather was a pastor. My mother grew up in a similar culture to me with two parents who were heroes in their field and worked every day to improve the lives of others through kindness and empathy. My paternal grandparents moved through several odd jobs throughout their life but my father had 5 siblings and watched his parents work tirelessly to provide for his family. This culture of “loving thy neighbor” has had a great influence on my life and I believe that everyone has a seed of kindness planted within them that can be awakened. This seed within all of us represents evoked culture which refers to “cultural differences created by differing environmental conditions activating a predictable set of responses.” The

I don’t think that this is a unique or ground breaking discovery, but I do find the trend intriguing. Until coming to college I did not think that I had any deep rooted problems or that the world could be seen much differently from the way I saw it. I also didn’t believe that I could change much as a person and I did not plan on taking on a psychology minor. The independence of college has helped me to realize that there is much more to the world than what I know and while self-confidence is important, too much pride is not very healthy. The culture chapter stated that “many studies have documented that North Americans tend to maintain a generally positive evaluation of themselves,” and “one study showed that the self-concepts of American adults contain more than four times as many positive attributes as negative ones.” This idea that Americans tend to have a more positive self-concept shows our culture’s self-enhancement. In elementary school we were encouraged to see the best in ourselves and ignore any flaws that we may have. To a certain degree, this is a good lesson because it teaches children to be confident in themselves. However, it led to me be prideful and not work as hard as I could to be the best I could be. Other cultures, such as Korean and Japanese cultures, tend to make less positive statements about themselves and focus more on the negative