Week 5

Preparing for Marriage

I got engaged! My life seems to be following the course of this class quite nicely haha. I love learning about all the things that will help me in my future life. I definitely don't expect anything else in the class to follow the course of my life right now...no kids for at least a year or two...but everything we've learned about so far applies. 

Before I got engaged, a few important things had to happen. First, I had to meet my fiance, Tanner. I met him on the way home from school one day. He almost ran into me when I stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk. After we met, we had to talk and get to know one another. We found an unclaimed list of get to know you questions in his apartment that helped us with that. Our dating life didn't start out like a dream...in fact, he cancelled the first date hours before it was supposed to happen. We rescheduled, but I was certain I'd never hear from him again. I was surprised when the date actually held, but disappointed when it barely lasted an hour and the only thing we did was eat lunch together. After that things started to pick up and we were a little bit more creative with our dating activities. 

Speaking of dating activities...dinner and a movie can get REALLY BORING when that's all you're doing every week. Don't get me wrong, I love cuddling and watching movies together, but when that's the only thing we can think of for a date, something might be wrong. So I enlisted the help of Pinterest and put together a jar full of dating activities to pull from! The best part is that if the date isn't completely free, it's really inexpensive. Perfect for the poor college students that we are! A date is the most fun when you can laugh and build memories with someone you love. Just a couple of ideas...

• Watch a movie neither of you have seen. Mute the TV and make up the dialogue.
• Play opposite of strip chess/checkers/scrabble and each time you lose, put on an article of clothing until you can barely move. 
• Have a chopped competition to see who can make the best dish out of items in your fridge.
• Make a Christmas countdown chain together. Even if it's in the middle of March...(Yes, we did this. Yes, our roommates all think we're crazy. No, we don't regret it.)
• Go for a walk and climb a tree.
• Go M&M or Skittles bowling. Draw a color before each turn. Each color represents a different way you have to bowl...for example, yellow=backwards, red=left-handed, green=eyes closed, etc. You can even draw multiple colors and mix them.
• Paint each others nails...yes, it's okay to paint your date's nails. You might want to have nail polish remover handy so his friends don't make fun of him...
• Play blindfolded pictionary. 

Greek is cool, right? We learned about the different forms of the word "love" in Greek. There are 4 different words for it:
Agape: Charity
Eros: Romantic love (intimate, sexual, passionate, etc.)
Philia: Friendship (brotherly love...like Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love)
Storge: Family, parent/child love
Each form of the same word is so different! Too bad English doesn't have multiple forms of the word "love." 

Week 4

Gender and Family Life

Sex is biological. Gender is social.

Boys and girls are different. Sometimes it's okay to treat them differently. In fact, all children are treated differently because none of us are the same. I have 4 younger siblings, and being the oldest, I've often felt like the guinea pig, or trial and error child. I've talked to my parents about this and they always assure me that each of us is so different that they have to do different things for each of us. All of my siblings are guinea pigs in different ways. No two children are the same.

When I was about 4 years old, my little sister (age 2) and I had a bunch of friends, girls and boys. One particular family had a girl who was my age and a boy who was her age. We would play together all the time. One of our favorite games was dress up! Her friend would play with us as well, even though he was a boy. His favorite dress up was the Minnie Mouse dress. This definitely didn't make him a female though! Just because young boys do girly things doesn't mean they're feminine and should be transgender. If his parents had switched his gender, I can't even imagine what his life would be like! Boys are definitely boys, even if they do girly things sometimes.

Male and female brains are very different. The actual tissue inside the brains is different. Women can think about so many different things at once while men generally only have one thing on their mind at any given moment. If you have a few minutes, watch this video, A Tale of Two Brains! It's hilarious, and you can find it at this address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XjUFYxSxDk. 

Week 3

Social Class and Cultural Diversity

What is culture? Traditions, inherited or learned patterns of behavior and belief. "Are all cultures equally valid?" A question posed by brother Williams in class. What exactly is the definition of valid? Valid means legally acceptable or well grounded in truth or logic. So I guess one could say that in it's specific geographic area where the culture is accepted, it is valid. However, many cultures may seem strange and even wrong to us. Does that make their culture invalid?

Because people are different at different times and in different places, there are many many different cultures. Some are normal to us. Others are strange and immoral. Those cultures that are immoral in our eyes may be completely normal in the eyes of the people living in them. Our culture may seem immoral to many people looking in from the outside. 

I don't believe all cultures are equally valid. I don't even believe that everything about our own culture is valid. There are some things about all cultures that are valid and morally right, but there are also things that are wrong. 

Marriage is often different in different cultures. In ours, cohabitation before marriage is becoming more normal, as is sex before marriage. The age at which many people in our culture marry is older than it used to be. In some cultures, marriages are arranged by the families of the young people. In some cultures it's normal for a young girl to marry an older man, in others, the couple is much closer to the same age. 

All cultures mean something to the people who believe in them. Not all cultures are equally valid, but as long as what is happening in the culture isn't morally wrong, it's okay. 

Week 2

Understanding Family Dynamics and Theories

A theory is an explanation of something. Family systems theory looks at the family as a whole and their relationships with each other. Each family has a different set of "rules," the invisible background to their lives. In my family, some of these unspoken rules included eating dinner together, going to bed each night with a clean kitchen, and dad does the dishes. Every family has its own set of unspoken rules that they live by. That's why when a child grows up and moves out, it's often hard for them to adjust to living with different people. The mix of different family backgrounds is hard to get used to, and the new division of household chores is usually different from what each person is used to. When a person gets married, there's a whole new set of unspoken rules that gets set up. Usually it's a mix between the husband and wife's family of origin and new things the couple decided together.

When one thing in a system changes, the other parts of the system are affected. for example, there are probably systems in the room you're sitting in right now. In schools and industrial buildings there's a sprinkler system that is set off by a series of other events, all interconnected. Just as the events prior to the sprinklers going off, family systems are influenced by series of events. When a child leaves the home, the rest of the family is affected. When the child comes home to visit, the family has to readjust. When one person in the family is sick, the rest of the family is affected. Each person is of value. Each person is loved and needed by the rest of the family even if it doesn't always seem that way.

Week 1

Social Trends and the Family

During the past couple of weeks I was on tour in the Midwest with BYU-Idaho’s Sinfonietta. Over the course of two weeks we traveled from Rexburg to Wyoming to Kansas and Nebraska, then on to Missouri, Iowa, and finally Illinois. Each night we stayed with host families, and I learned so much from observing each of the different families I stayed with. I actually stayed with 3 different families that had 9 children each. 2 were older and most of their children were grown up, but one family was younger and had all 9 children under age 15...and a 10^th on the way. It was cool to see how their household functioned and how things worked really well for that family. I feel like if I had 9 kids I would go crazy! But it was really cool to see that families that large do exist in the world still, and they function quite well.  

I also stayed with a single mom family. There were only 2 children, and it was crazy to see how differently these families were raised. The family with only 2 children had a lot more freedom, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. They also had a completely different view on family. In the stronger families I stayed with, I could tell that family meant the world to them. Even if they didn’t necessarily have 9 children, family was still of great importance. 

In my current family I have 4 younger siblings, and I grew up with family being an essential part of my life. They guy I’m currently dating, Tanner, grew up in a very different family. He has 8 siblings, but his father was divorced and remarried twice, so many of the siblings come from different marriages. It’s really complicated, and neither of us want that for our future families. by observing different types of families, we can learn a lot about how a family can be successful.