The Train Ride of Divorce

Getting divorced is like riding a train. There are more than one stops that you take along the way because there are more than one ways in which you have to get divorced. It is not just a legal matter; there is a lot more than one station that you have to stop at along the way.

The first is the emotional divorce. You have depended on this person for a significant amount of emotion support, and whether it was for a short or a long period of time does not matter. Regardless you are loosing a big part of your support system and often times you do not have the time to prepare to do so. You no longer have someone constantly looking out for you and your well being. There is no longer trust or respect in the relationship, so from now on both of you are only looking out for number one.

Then comes legal divorce. Even if this is not the only station, in fact it is a rather small station, it is still a stop you have to take none the less. This is the time in which a court legally declares that you are no longer a couple. This is a just a tiny piece of the separation process, and yet people treat it as the biggest part of the divorce. This can be done in the blink of an eye, with the banging of a gavel. Everything else is the really hard part of divorce.

The next station is the economic divorce. You and your partner must divide up all of your assets in a way that will hopefully benefit you both. It does not just involve taking your bank account and cutting the number in half. You must also split your possessions, and even your debts. Then you will still impact one another long after the legal divorce is final. You will still have to pay alimony, child support, and have to go out and purchase the possession that you did not get, such a blender or couches.

After this comes the co-parental divorce, but only those with children will stop at this station. When this occurs, you have to decide who will get the children and when. It used to be far more common that one person would get full legal custody, and the other parent would sometimes be granted visitation. This was due to the fact that divorce typically only occurred when one partner was at fault and was therefore unfit to be a parent anyway. However now, with no-fault divorce, it is far more common that parents will go with joint custody. This means that both parents can do things like take their child to the doctor, register them for school, etc. It also means that the children will not just stay at one persons house. Often times they will move back and forth between their parents houses according to a set schedule. The biggest problem with this however, is the fact that the split custody will never truly be equal because that would be too hard on the children to have to move back and forth that often.

Community divorce is often times not thought about, but the fact of the matter is people are going to have to choose sides in a divorce. Family will often choose the side of the person they are biologically related to, but for friends it is a lot harder. If they were friends before the marriage, they will choose that person's side. However it is a lot harder to choose if you are friends to the marriage, not a member of the marriage.

The final stop on this journey is the psychic divorce. You have to realize and accept the fact that the relationship is over. You are no longer going to be a part of this persons life, and hopefully it is for the better. If not, this station will be the hardest to move through before you continue on your journey of life, without somebody always by your side.

The Benefits of Parenting

Parenting is one of the most important things we will experience in our lives. It is not just about providing your children with a roof over their heads, food in their mouths, and clothes on their backs. Parenting is also about how we mold our children to become the people we want them to be. You cannot think that your children will just raise themselves; that is like the blind leading the blind. They need help and guidance from an active parent or parents. Active parenting requires being present and involved, but still letting your children learn from things like natural consequences; you cannot do everything for them.

Children benefit from parenting because they are able to learn from example. They see what their parents do and, if they look up to their parents and think what they are doing is right, they want to grow up and become just like their parents. That is why it is so important to instill our values into our children, so that way they will grow up valuing what we think is important. Not to say that they cannot think for themselves and decide on their own what they want to value, but it is good to give them a solid jumping off point by showing them what we value. After that all you can do is continue to uphold those values and hope they choose to do the same.

Parents also help to prepare their children for real life. They teach them things like how to save money, pay tithing, budget, work hard, cook, clean, and many other skills that will make it possible for them to live on their own. This is what my parents did for me. Like I mentioned in an earlier blog post, my parents taught me so much about working hard. I have been able to get great jobs that are willing to work with my schedule because my parents taught me the value of hard work. If it was not for them I would not be as good of an employee as I am, and my bosses would not be as willing to make accommodations for me in order for me to want to keep working for them. I also would not be debt free, with ample savings, and a car if they had not taught me money management skills.

The thing is, it is not just parents that teach their children. I know it is a cliche, but children really do help to teach their parents. Children help parents patience and humility. Raising children is not easy and it takes stepping back and realizing that taking care of children requires time and effort. You also learn new things, or perhaps relearn things you forgot you knew, as you teach your children. When they need help with their math homework, you will have to remember how to teach them long division, even though you do most math now with a calculator. You will also have to remember how to ride a bike, so that way you can teach them. They also show you how to be a kinder person and that sometimes you have to put others needs ahead of your own.

I am so grateful for my parents and all that they taught me. I am the person I am today because of them and I cannot wait to be a parent myself one day so I can teach my children the same values my parents taught me. They might even help me learn a thing or two that I did not know about myself.

The Power of Dads

Fatherhood is a lot harder than people make it out to be. Many may think that dads have it easy, and that moms do all of the real work. This is true in the fact that the mom takes care of the baby, but then who is supposed to take care of the mom? That's where the father comes in. It is his responsibility to help with the dishes, make sure the mom has time to take showers, cook/order takeout, and many other things the mom used to do, but can't anymore because she has to take care of the baby. Not to say the father can never do things like wake up in the night to help with the baby; if it just needs a diaper change or a soothing, he can get up. The problem comes when the baby needs to be fed and mom is the only one who can do that. So the father must step in with other responsibilities to allow the mother time to make up for lost sleep.

However, it is important to note however that if the father cares for the mother too much he may end up resenting her and that is not a good things either. The dad still matters and deserves respect too. It is important to make sure that he is still a part of decision making and raising the baby. He should not be pushed aside and replaced by the grandmother in the raising of the baby, which is not an uncommon occurrence. The father helped to create the child so he should be allowed to have a voice in raising it as well.

This is why it us so important for the father to take paternity leave. He does not need as much rest as the mother does and the baby will not depend on him as much as it will depend on her, but he still needs to help the mother with her own needs. Also, if he is away at work, there will be no time for him to be able to bond with the baby. Another advantage of paternity leave is that if the father is present, it is much more likely that his voice will be heard.

This is not to suggest that if you do not take paternity leave you will be a terrible father. My dad was unable to take paternity leave because when we were born he and my mom were very young and could not afford that much time off. However anytime he came home from work, no matter how tired he was, he would ask my mom what he could do to help. Often times she would have him take us and keep us occupied somewhere else so she could clean, cook dinner, or even just regain some of her sanity.

For the longest time my mom and dad would divide up responsibilities in a traditional way; my dad would go to work and earn money, while my mom took care of things around the house. However, recently my dad has been taking some time off of work so he helps out around the house a lot more. This has lead to him being a lot more present and has lead to a happier home.

My dad definitely helped around the house before this, he just helps a lot more now because he is less stressed and has less on his plate. I think that this is important to note; when you are stressed you are a lot less helpful than you are when you are not stressed. So if you want a happy family, not just "happy wife, happy life", work to create a low stress environment within your home.

Hard Work and Money Management-Keys to Success

Up until the last few hundred years, families spent a lot of time working together to build a life. Farming was the typical lifestyle, so the dad and sons would work out in the field planting crops and taking care of animals, while the mom and daughters worked inside the house doing laundry and preparing meals. Then the industrial revolution came. Men would go off to work in factories, so a lot more responsibility fell on the women of the house. It did not help that often times children went off to work in factories as well, so there were even less hands to help around the house.

Nowadays, children do not work in factories, but they tend not to help out a whole lot around the house. However, this was not the case in my family. In my house we all have chores. We have to clean our room, make our bed, bring down our laundry, tidy our bathroom, and clean up our areas around the house everyday. We have kitchen jobs that rotate every week. So one week you unload, the next you load, then you vacuum, the week after that you set the table, and finally you clear the table. In addition to these jobs, every day you have another area of the house to clean; from vacuuming a room, to cleaning a bathroom.

Even with all of these jobs, we never got paid. My parents called it "free on the job training". They said that they were teaching us to work hard so that way we would be good employees when we grew up and got part-time and full-time jobs. That is exactly what happened. I started working at Panera Bread three-and-a-half years ago, and I got my two younger two brothers a job there as well. There is now a standard at Panera that "The Snows" know how to work. Before the younger of my two brothers started working there, my bosses kept asking me when he would be old enough to start working so that way they could have another great worker. Then, when I asked how he was doing, my boss said "you can tell he is a Snow".

My parents did not buy us a lot of "extra" things. We did not go out to eat a lot, we got toys on Christmas, and we did not have fancy clothes.They provided what we needed, but not always what we wanted. And I could not be more grateful for that. This lead to us working hard to find ways to make money so that way we could go out and buy fun "stuff" for ourselves.

Not only that but it taught us to be frugal with our money. They taught us to give 10% of our income to tithing, put 40% in savings, and 50% in spending. This has made paying tithing and saving money easy since I have done it all of my life. Since I knew how to be frugal with my money it was very easy for me to make a budget in my money management class a year ago, that I still use on a regular basis today.

I am so grateful that my parents taught me everything that they did about the importance of hard work and money management. If it was not for them, I would not be on my fifth semester of college, with a car and a credit card, completely debt free. I am so blessed that they taught me everything that they did, and I hope that I can pass that knowledge on to my own children.

Communication: A Great Foundation For Any Relationship

Everyone knows that good communication is essential to a good marriage, but many people do not know how to communicate properly in order to have a successful marriage. They think that just because they talk about their problems, they will be fixed, but this is far from the truth. In order for you to properly communicate, it is good to use the five secrets of effective communication.

The first three steps all involve empathy. To begin, use a disarming technique. Find one true thing about what they said to you, no matter how terrible the things that they said to you were there is bound to be some truth behind them, and acknowledge that they are right about that part of what they said. This helps you become vulnerable, and in turn helps them to put down their defenses and become more vulnerable too. Next you want to express empathy. Show them that their thoughts and feelings are valid, by saying that you understand what/why they are thinking what they are thinking, and feeling what they are feeling. Then you want to ask inquiring questions. This allows you to get more details about why they are feeling this way, not only so you can better understand the situation, but also so you can show that you really do care since you are asking to know more.

The next step involves assertiveness. Now that you have acknowledged what they are feeling and heard their side of the argument, it is your turn to give your side. However, this does not mean you get to have a turn at being aggressive. You spent all of this time creating a safe environment, and you want to continue to have one. No matter how cliche it sounds, the best way to do this is through "I feel" statements. However, this is more that just telling them how you feel. You want to say "when" this happened/happens, "I feel/felt" an emotion, "because" of these reasons (thoughts), "so I would like" for this to happen in the future (hope, desire). By expressing yourself in this way, you make your feelings and thoughts clear, without hurting anyone else in the process.

Finally you want to show respect for the other person. You do so by using a technique known as stroking or affirmation. You make sure that they know that you are listening to them when they are talking, and not simply waiting for them to be done talking so you can talk again. Convey that you think that their feelings are just as real and important as yours. Actions speak louder than words, so be sure to have positive and friendly body language and tone. Finally be kind to the other person and make sure they know you respect and care about them.

All that people really want in this life is to be heard. They want to know that people understand what they are feeling and that their concerns will be addressed. I know in my life there have been a lot of times where I really just want someone to listen to what I have to say, even if they can't do anything to help solve my problem. Of course it is ideal to talk to someone about your problems that can help you fix them, but if you can't find that, it is great to even just to have someone there listening to what you have to say and telling you "that sucks". If we can all just do this simple task of making sure that people's voices are heard, we will all be a lot happier.

Coping with Stressors

We all experience stress in our lives. However, many people think that stress is a bad thing, when it is actually a good thing. It makes you stronger, like putting weight on your muscles and bones when you walk. It becomes a problem when stress turns into distress and you start complaining about your problems because you cannot handle them. If you use stress to grow and develop, it makes you stronger, but if you do not grow from it and instead you let it consume you, it will destroy you.

People often times allow these thoughts to overtake them; the main culprit behind this is overthinking. Dr. David Burns came up with the concept of "The Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking", where he defined ten things that cause us to have thoughts that consume us when we face a crisis. The first is all-or-nothing thinking which is where someone thinks that because they did one thing wrong, they are a lost cause. Something else that causes this is overgeneralization which is when someone thinks that because something was an outcome once, that will always be the outcome. People may also experience a mental filter which is where one negative event is all that they can think about, and their life becomes defined by this single event. Another form of twisted thinking is discounting the positive. This leads to people thinking that even when they did a good job, they could have done better, so they ignore the fact that they did do a good job. The next way someone may experience twisted thinking is by jumping to conclusions, which is when you assume something is negative when it is not true. This is then split into two other categories: mind reading and fortune-telling. Mind-reading occurs when you assume people are thinking negative thoughts, but in reality they are not. Fortune-telling is when you assume that something bad is going to happen. 

Magnification is when you make your problems huge and your accomplishments tiny. Emotional reasoning is when you think that because you feel a certain negative emotion, that determines your reality. Another tool people use are "should statements". You think back on a certain situation and think about what you should have done instead of just accepting that what happened, is what happened, and that it is going to be OK. When people label, they tell themselves over and over that they are something negative (a looser, worthless, a jerk) instead of saying that they did something negative. Finally, personalization and blame is when you say that something is all your fault even though it is not. You take all of the blame, even though you only deserve a little blame, if even any.

I have found myself using these forms of thinking in my own life. One of my major stressor is the fact that I will go over conversations that I have had with people to see if I said anything I shouldn't have said. I will use should statements and think I should have done something differently. I will feel guilty about something that I said, so I will label myself and say things like "I'm the worst". If something goes wrong in a situation I will blame myself and say that it is my fault that it went wrong. Even if I said a lot of the right things, I will only focus on the one dumb thing that I said. When I say all of these negative things, my worldview becomes negative and I can often times be consumed by this. Finally, the biggest things I am guilty of is jumping to conclusions. I always think that I know what others are thinking during our conversations (mind reading) and do not say things because of how people will react (fortune-telling).

I did not realize that I did all of these things until I read this article. However now that I realize what I do, I can work harder to stop myself for thinking this way so I will not feel so much distress.

Infidelity: Not Just Adultery

Many people believe that infidelity only involves cheating on your spouse physically, but it can be so much more. It is also possible to cheat on your spouse emotionally and this is perhaps an even worse form of cheating. Cheating on your spouse emotionally can come in two forms: attached and detached. Detached emotional cheating involves fantasy; the cheating spouse will look at other people or images of other people and desire to be with them. They will not act on any of their thoughts, but this causes them to become distant from their spouse as they long for the fantasy and not reality.

Attached emotional cheating is probably the worst form of cheating. It involves another person whom the cheating spouse actually knows and spends a lot of time with. They become incredibly close with this person and start to go for them for support, advice, comfort, and other things that they should be going to their spouse for. Now this does not happen all at once. It is a slow process, but one that takes place on a very slippery slope. It typically starts out with the cheating spouse befriending someone of the opposite gender. They may do so through work, church, school, Facebook, etc. They may have met this person before or after they were married. It really does not matter how, when, or why they are friends with this person, what matters is that they spend alone time, or perhaps text regularly, with this friend of the opposite sex and begin forming bonds that really should only be shared with their spouse. After all, isn't that how must marriages begin? With two people talking and getting to know one another, one on one, in person and over text? Your spouse is supposed to be your best friend, whom you share everything with, so having someone who is not your spouse filling this role, is emotionally cheating on them. Even if you do not realize it.

That is the most dangerous part of emotional cheating; often times people do not even realize they are doing it. It is not so obvious like adultery is. When you are doing physical, sexual things with someone who is not your spouse, you are bound to realize that this is wrong. However, when you go and get lunch, one on one, with a coworker of the opposite sex, you may think you aren't doing anything wrong. You may think they are just a friend and it does not mean anything, but to your spouse it absolutely does. They deserve your undivided affection and emotional support.

Now the question is, how do you avoid emotional cheating when most of the time it is not obvious? The first step is to build your marriage on loyalty and commitment. If you are loyal and committed to your spouse and nobody else, you will not find yourself vulnerable to cheating. You also must love them with all or your heart, might mind, and strength. Someone who is totally and completely in love with their spouse would not even consider cheating on them and so they would be more aware if they were to find themselves emotionally cheating. Better yet, they would not find themselves in such a situation to begin with. Finally one of the best things, albeit also one of the hardest things, you can do when you get married is cut out all friendships with those of the opposite gender. If you have no friends of the opposite gender, there is no vulnerability to having your friendship with that person become stronger than your friendship with your spouse.

Your marriage should be the most important thing in the world to you and if it is, you will not be afraid to do everything you can to avoid not only physical, but also emotional infidelity.

Don't Blow Your Life Savings on a Wedding

People very often think that weddings have to be a grand affair. You have to spend a ton of money to have the perfect dress, venue, food, music; the list goes on and on. This is the beginning of the rest of your lives right? Shouldn't you start it out with a bang? In my eyes, this is a very common misconception. Sure it is fun to have a big wedding, if you have the means to do so and that is what you really want, but the problem is that people will make a lot of sacrifices just for this one day.

The first thing people might do is wait to save up so that way they can have a really big wedding. So they will stay engaged for a really long time until they can save up enough to pay for their big day. It may seem like this is not a big problem, but what can happen with some long engagements is that the couple will start to cohabit. I already talked about a lot of the problems that can arise from cohabiting last week, one of which is that people get comfortable where they are at. They get used to living together but separate (living in the same house, but with separate bank accounts, problems, etc) and when they do eventually get married they may not blend their lives as much as they should to have a strong marriage.

If people do not want to wait, but still want to have a big wedding they will go looking for the money in other places. One of these places is a bank. The problem with going to a bank to get a loan for your wedding is that you start out your marriage in potentially crippling debt. This means that right from the beginning you will be fighting about money and working constantly to try and pay off your debt. This is no way to start your marriage. You should be spending time together, building a life together, not constantly fighting and working.

Another place, and perhaps an even more dangerous one, is to go to either of your parents for money. Now this creates a lot of problems. First of all you are forever indebted to the parents that lent you money. They get first priority when it comes to whose house you go to for holidays, who you will live closest to, and perhaps even what you name your kids (depending on how much then spent on the wedding). This is because if it was not for them, there would not be a wedding, so they get to dictate much of your married life. That also means that they get a big say in a lot of the wedding decisions. Now this is especially dangerous because wedding planning should be a bonding experience between the husband and wife, not the bride and her mother. It is the first big test of how they will work together as a married couple and if they do not go through it together, they will start out their marriage with a wedge between them. Finally a big problem is when you are married you are supposed to be independent. So the longer you rely are your parents, the longer it will take for you to gain that independence and really build a life with your spouse.

Overall, you should focus on saving up and using your money for things like buying a house, not a wedding. A wedding is just one day, but having a strong foundation for the rest of your lives is critical. You can still have a great wedding even if you do not spend a ton of money on it. There are plenty of ways to save money and have an inexpensive wedding. I promise that if you do so your marriage will do just as good, if not better, than if you spent a fortune on your wedding.

Modern Dating and Its Pitfalls

Dating has changed a lot over the years; it is way different today than how it was even twenty-five years ago when our parents were dating. These days people do not go on dates with people unless they think they might like them, instead of going on a date to figure out if they like them. They are too afraid to ask people on a date until they "know them" when that is what you do on a date; you get to know someone. Before this people would go on lots of dates with lots of different people. Then once they found one person they really liked, and they could potentially see themselves marrying that person, they would court them, or start dating them exclusively. Then, once they progressed enough in their relationship and decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with that person, they would get engaged. After that they eventually got married.

Now this is not to say that we do things completely different nowadays, we simply tend to combine steps or completely skip some steps altogether. People will go on dates with just one person and then after a little while they decide to start exclusively dating that person, even though they have yet to date anyone else. The problem with this is that they do not know the qualities they really want in a spouse, since they have yet to look at the qualities of anyone else. Another thing that can happen, and is even more common in the Later Day Saint Culture, is people will get engaged without even dating that person first. They will get to know a person for a few weeks, get engaged, and then start going on dates once they are engaged. The steps of dating, courtship, engagement, and then marriage don't exist just to be inconvenient, they are there because they help create long lasting relationships.

Something else that is very common is online dating. People will meet someone online and sometimes meet up in person and explore the relationship further. However quite often what will happen is they will experience their entire relationship online until they get engaged, and then they will meet up in person. Quite a few problems can arise from this. People can very easily lie online. They can tell you things about how they act, look, their beliefs, etc., and it could all be completely untrue. Now this can also be the case with face to face dating, however it is a lot easier to lie in person than it is to lie online. You can never truly know someone unless you have met them face to face. One of the other issues that could come up is deciding where to live once you are married. If you date long distance like this you may think that it is only temporary, which it usually is, but then you have to come to a decision of who is going to uproot their lives in order to eliminate the distance. This kind of disagreement can very easily end a relationship.

Another common practice nowadays is cohabiting. People think that they should see how they well live with their partner before marrying them to test their compatibility. However the problem with this is that cohabiting life is not equivalent to married life. When people cohabit they still have two separate lives instead of sharing a life together. They have separate bank accounts, separate bills, separate responsibilities, and separate problems. Then once they finally get married (if they do end up getting married) they are used to living in this way, so they will keep up a lifestyle of having separate lives. This created distance and contention between them and tends to lead to a lot of problems, often times even divorce.

None of the statements or situations stated are hard and fast rules, they simply are very common occurrences in our modern society. So the best thing we can do is try to avoid the situations where these problems occur, or try to change the trends that occur due to these situations.

Men & Women: The Importance of Their Differences

Men and Women are extremely different from one another. To begin, women are more relationship oriented, while men are spatially oriented. One way this is shown is in how they give directions. I used to get rides home from people a lot and whenever I would tell people how to get to my house, I would tell them I live over by Little Ceasars. They would then start driving in that direction and I would direct them from there. However, my dad always says you go North/South on I-25, or similar a instruction, whenever he directs people. I always found this very confusing when he would tell me where to go, because I had no idea what he was talking about, since he was using spacial orientation instead of relationship orientation, which makes more sense to me.

Another way in which me and women are different is the fact that men tend to put all of their focus on one thing, while women tend to focus on a lot of little things all at once. I see this a lot in my parents. My mom always has five or six different projects going at once. She is currently redoing our house and she is fixing the stairs, building a bench, and putting up our patio cover, while also working on two or three sewing projects. Anytime she gets stuck on one project, or another one takes a higher priority, she just stops that one and moves on. My dad on the other hand likes to have one thing going at a time; especially during tax season. When my dad is working on doing our taxes he does not do anything else for about three days.

The last big difference I want to discuss is the fact that women are much more expressive with their emotions than men are. When I said goodbye to my parents the first time I came up to college I cried for a good fifteen minuets; even this semester I cried for a few minutes when they left. However my brother, who got dropped off for the first time this semester, just gave them each a hug and went off to Get Connected. I could never imagine going and doing something right after saying goodbye.

Although men and women are clearly very different from one another, it is important to note that these differences are what make men and women so compatible. Sometimes you need to be comforted by your mom, but if you are always coddled and you never receive a firm guiding hand from your father, you will not have thick enough skin to survive in the real world. Your boss does not care if you were tired and that is why you did not finish your work. They just care that your work gets done and if it does not get done, you could get fired.

The fact that men and women are different allows them to divide up responsibilities based on strengths. For example, my dad mows the lawn and he taught all of my brothers how to do it. My mom sews and she taught me how to do it. My dad is the main breadwinner of our house and my mom mostly stays home to take care of us kids. It is necessary to have people who can do different things.

Finally different situations may call for different approaches to solving a problem. What I mean by that is, that one persons method of doing something might work sometimes, but it is good to have someone who does things differently in case the first way does not always work. For example, my dad and mom both ties shoes differently. This was very helpful growing up because I could not figure out how to tie my shoes the way my mom did, so I just did it my dad's way.

In today's society it is quite common for people to try and belittle, or even get rid of, the differences between men and women, but I feel that we should celebrate them.

Familial Culture

Culture is a way of life that is passed down from generation to generation. It is something that exists within families due to the fact that the traditions associated with a culture are taught by the parents to the children. My family continues to perpetuate the culture that is associated with being members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints because my parents taught us the things that members typically do. For example, we go to church for two hours every Sunday and once a month, on the first Sunday, we fast for two meals in order to show our faith. We also pay tithing because we know the great blessing that come along with doing such a thing. Some other cultural traditions associated with our religion include celebrating Christmas and Easter. I would not do most, if any, of these things if I had not learned them within my own family.

This method of passing pieces of our culture from one generation to the next is very beneficial for a lot of reasons, one of them being that it allows people to decide which parts of their culture they want to keep. If you like a part of your culture you keep that aspect "alive" by continually taking part in it within your household. However if you do not like something you simply stop doing it with your kids, or you just don't teach them it at all, and then it is no longer a part of your culture. For example, when my family first started out, we always went to my grandma's on Christmas because that is what she always did growing up, so we were expected to follow suit. However, my mom did not want to spend Christmas with our extended family, and us kids agreed. Going over to grandma's meant changing out of our pajamas and leaving all of our fun new presents behind. We just wanted to sit around and have fun all day, not have to go to grandma's and watch the adults exchange their presents and be really bored the whole time. So one year my mom decided enough was enough and she told my grandma we would spend Christmas Eve with everyone, but Christmas Day was ours.

I was really glad that we got rid of that part of our "culture", but there are still a lot of traditions that I would love to keep. Speaking of Christmas, one of my favorite traditions I have in my family is eating Fruit Loops with Eggnog. I know, it sound weird, but it is actually delicious; we add some milk as well so it is not as rich and thick. This is a part of my culture that I really want to perpetuate, which I will do by eating the same thing around Christmas time with my family. Another tradition I would love to perpetuate is the tradition of doing puzzles together as a family. Since I have such a big family, there is not a whole lot that we can all do together, but doing a puzzle is something we can all do together. So I would love to try and get my kids to like puzzles so we can continue this tradition.

One of the traditions that I myself would like to set aside is the tradition of eating a lot of leftovers. I totally understand that for my current household this is what works for us, but personally I really like cooking. So my hope (although we will see how realistic this goal really is) is that if I am a stay at home mom I will have time to cook a few times a week so we will not always just be doing leftovers, or having kind of a free for all when it comes to dinner time. I also want to set aside the tradition of playing a lot of video games. I do not see anything wrong with playing video games, but I think that it is also important to spend time as a family doing things like puzzles, board games, and card games. So my goal is to try and replace video games with other things we can do together as a family.

Family "Rules"

One thing that I have never really thought about until this week is the idea of unspoken family rules. Often times we do not realize the "rules" that we follow within our families, but if we do not follow these "rules" there is bound to be confrontation. For example, in my family we have assigned seats in the van. Mom and dad always sit in the front seats (usually with dad driving) and the two oldest kids get the two big seats in the middle row, with the very oldest in the seat right behind the drivers seat. The youngest kids sit in the back row with the oldest of them behind the seat on the passenger side, the youngest in the middle, and the middle child of those three sitting behind the seat on the drivers side. Then if there were ever more people than that in the van, the youngest two would double buckle in the back seat on the drivers side. If anyone ever tries to sit anywhere else, people fight. This was especially a problem when we started learning to drive and my mom would come and sit in the back. She would often times just take the spot of the person who was learning to drive (typically the oldest), but if she ever did not everyone would fight over who got to sit by her and who got to take the oldest kid's spot instead of her.

If there is not confrontation as a result of these rules being broken, but instead the rules simply change, there is bound to be confusion. For example, one of the rules in my family is that if you are cold, you put on a hoodie, socks, a blanket, etc and then if you are still cold, you can go and ask dad to turn up the heat. I was so used to following this rule that when my dad told me how I could turn up the heat in the basement if it got too cold, I was shocked. I was so used to not being allowed to turn up the heat, or having to ask him to do it if I did want it turned up, that I did not know what to do when I was allowed to do it myself (especially because I had no idea how to work a thermostat since my dad always did it himself). It took me a while to get used to this adjustment to the "rule" and it was even harder because the original "rule" still applied to the top two floors, so I had to be used to two different ways of living, just one floor apart.

Another thing that stood out to me this week was the idea of symbolic interaction theory. In this theory people will often put meaning behind others actions, even if that meaning is not what that person really intended. For example, when you hold the door open for someone you could just be trying to be polite. One person may take it that way, but another may be insulted and think that you are implying that they cannot hold open a door for themselves. How people will interpret an action, as well as the actual meaning intended by an action, can vary from person to person and situation to situation. Due to this, we need be more careful about how we interpret others actions because the reality is that they could have a totally different meaning behind what they are doing than what you may think. If people could try a little harder not to assume what people are thinking, we would all be a lot happier and there would be a lot less conflict in the world.

Current Family Trends:Less Does Not Equal More

There are a lot of changes occurring in our society today regarding the family, and many of these changing are the result of other trends shifting. For example, a lot more women are working full time jobs. This causes them to wait longer to get married, which means that they typically wait longer to have kids.  Due to the fact that they start having kids later, they have less kids. Then in some cases, even if they do have time to have a lot of kids, they will not have a lot because they are afraid of the risk of divorce. Since divorce rates are so high, people do not want the risk of being a single parent and having to support their kids on their own, so they just do not have as many. Both of these factors result in household size and fertility rates going down. This poses a very big problem for our society today. 

If people are having less kids, then that means that our population is shrinking. Some people may think that this is a good thing, but it really is not. Lower population means less people that can work. We need people working because without them there is no one that can help support those who are not working, otherwise known as retirees living off of social security. Also, more people working results in more food being grown and produced.

A really good example of why lower population is not such a great thing can be found in China. For the longest time they had a law that made it so that families were only allowed to have one child. However, in their culture boys are seen as "more desirable" than girls, so many families would keep trying to have their only child be a boy. This has created a huge problem because now there are not enough girls for them to be able to maintain a sustaining population. Not only that, but people have become accustom to having only one child and do not want the extra expenses that come with more children. 

The irony in this logic is that the people that do not want to have more kids due to the "financial burden" that come with them, actually have the means to support more than one child. They would just rather invest a lot of money in one child rather than investing a reasonable amount in multiple children. Now there of course is always an exception to the rule. Some people cannot have more than one child, find it hard to adopt one, have specific reasons (usually health related) as to why they do not wish to have another child, etc. These are all totally acceptable. It is those that "just don't want to", but are fully able to, that are ironic in this case.

The fact of the matter is the Earth is fully capable of sustaining all of us, we just have to be smart about our resources. An example of this comes from the book "Cheaper by the Dozen", which is about a family with twelve kids that was able to be efficient with their resources and managed to fully support themselves. They did things like bathe quickly and efficiently so that way they did not waste water. 

People think that we need to have less people otherwise we will run out of resources, but then they go and use exorbitant amounts for just themselves. If we spread our resources around and were not so frivolous with them, we would be able to have a lot more people living healthier and happier lives.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my blog! Here you will find some of my thoughts on Family Relations in our society today, but first a little bit about myself. My name is Emily Snow and I am currently attending BYUI up in Rexburg, Idaho. I am majoring in interdisciplinary studies, with an emphasis in catering and event planning, and a minor in home and family studies. I love to cook/bake, sew, and crosstitch. I am very interested in how different interactions within different families, affect those families as well as the rest of society. I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts on this subject, and I also look forward to hearing yours!