Class and Family Cultures Play A Huge Role

It's amazing at how impactful social class status and individual family cultures play in our families and to us as individuals. How we're raised, and the environment that we're raised in, very much affects us and how we think, function, and raise our families. We had to watch a video for our class this week and it was really eye opening. It was about a woman named Tammy and her family. (You can go here to watch the video: Tammy's Story) Tammy is a single mom raising her kids. She never went to college and is in the low class. She works at Burger King everyday and walks 10 miles everyday to get there. Her oldest son is embarrassed with the life that he has. He wants to go to college and get up to middle class and actually do something with his life. Well in the second video of Tammy's story, she's still working at Burger King and her son's plans don't work out. He actually dropped out of high school with 6 months left and is basically still in the same life style that he grew up in and wanted to get out of. And one of the reasons he wasn't able to was because he didn't know how. Growing up, how he lived was all he knew. He didn't know how to make the short term goals that would help him accomplish the long term goals.

This also affects those who are in middle and upper class as well. For upper class lets say that someone owns a family business and wants their son to carry on the business but the son doesn't really want to. Like in Horton Hears A Who. Our class definitely plays a huge role in a family function.

Now for family cultures. These vary and change from family to family. What usually makes them change is from what happened in someone's family while growing up. So lets say that someone grew up in a family where they had to do a lot of chores and they absolutely hated it. So they decide that their kids will never have to do chores. Now you can say, "Well that's their choice if that's what they want to do." That is true. It's their home and their family. But it does also greatly impact their kids. Their kids won't know how to do a lot of basic things that they'll need to know when they go to live off on their own. And that will carry onto their kids and so on. So family cultures greatly affect each individual differently and depending on how they take that, will either keep or change those and then change how their family culture functions.