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Marital Challenges: An Opportunity for Growth

  Hey friends! So, I know I told you last week that was the last time I would be blogging. Until about three days ago, that was the case, but there was some slight confusion on my professor’s end about when the last day of the semester was. So now that that’s been sorted out, I have the opportunity to write yet another blog for all of you wonderful people (and hopefully bring my grade up a little more before the end of the semester, so no complaints here)! Just so you’re all aware though, this one will be the last blog post for the foreseeable future (for reals this time).   I basically said my formal goodbye in my last blog, so I won’t spend too much time doing that again here; it has genuinely been a lot of fun writing these and I hope someone out there has found my ramblings to be useful. Anyways, lets get into this thing! This week we only had one discussion, since our final was scheduled a class period early (which was fine since now it’s out of the way). Our topic for ...
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5 Universal Needs and How to Meet Them

 Hello everyone! Another week has gone by in my family relations class which means I have another full week of thoughts and impressions to share. As far as I know, this is the last blog I will be writing for this class, as it is already the end of the semester. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly 14 weeks can pass as a student. Since it's the last blog, I want to say a few things about my overall experience from taking this class. It's definitely been an eye-opening experience for me. From my first blog, I discussed how I felt that many of my assumptions about family and relationships were being challenged, and that it was a refreshing experience. I can now say that those feelings have carried through the entire class. I think what's made it so refreshing is that this class taught me things that let me replace my previous assumptions with better knowledge: something much closer to the truth. I know a lot more than I used to know, and my own life and what I want for my f...
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Fatherhood and Minimized Masculinity

 Hey everyone! another week has gone by and that means it's time for another blog post. This week we focused more on the role of fathers and finances in family life. This is an interesting topic in these times, since masculinity in and of itself has had a bit of a negative view in society recently. The idea that masculinity is "toxic" and unnecessary makes it hard for the idea of dedicated fatherhood as something important to keep traction in today's world. Earlier in the semester we talked about how having healthy marriages and families are unnatural, or are something that you have to work for. Our professor compared this to the animal kingdom and other mammals. For most mammals, the males are there to provide protection and to reproduce with the females. Child rearing is left entirely up to the mothers for most mammals. I think society's view of the male position in the family has started to mirror this line of thought: that males aren't very useful to the f...
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Communicating: a Lost Art

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've made a post here. Life has been getting the better of me lately, and unfortunately my consistency with this blog and some of my schoolwork have fallen as a result. Now I'm back and I've recommitted to do these consistently through to the end of the semester.  This last week we focused heavily on communication. More particularly, on the problems of communication. While I was sitting in class, I felt myself being drawn into the discussion. I could tell others were as well, and if any of them were like me, it was because communication is something we all struggle with and want to be better at. I find this interesting, since most of us have been communicating in some way or another since we were born, most of which has likely been actual verbal communication. Why then is it the case where we feel like we have such a need to be better communicators? I know that, like me, many people in today's world grew up with the resources to...
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Dating, Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage: An Alternative Approach

 Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've written one of these. I missed a week so I guess that means I have a lot I can talk about. These past few weeks we've really focused on dating, courtship, and engagement.  This topic is a pretty interesting one for me, since I'm at about that age where these things are (hopefully) right around the corner. Most people my age (at least those around me) are concerned with this topic. Our discussions these past few weeks have proven to be very enlightening for me, since it helped me realize my previous assumptions about dating, courtship and engagement were wrong and that is a better way. I always think that things that encourage me to flip my way of thinking on its head are very interesting, especially when those around me typically have the same ideas as I do.  In recent times, we have strayed from a more intentional approach to dating, courtship, engagement and marriage to a more casual, sliding approach, where the boundaries b...
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Masculine or Feminine?

      Hello everyone! Another week has gone by and thus I return with what will hopefully be an entertaining and informative blog post! This week we touched on the topic of gender and gender typical behaviors. That can typically be a fairly touchy topic for some (and I personally hope to avoid that to some degree today), but I think its also a topic that is fairly popular in this day and age. Well, let's get right into it!     We started our discussion in class this week by thinking of some typical gender traits for both males and females. Some typical things showed up on our list, like "aggressive" and "competitive" for males and "nurturing" and "emotionally expressive" for females. There were lots of other traits we came up with for each of course, but hopefully you get the idea. These traits are fairly general in nature (hence why we call them "typical" traits), and depending on our culture, we may associate other things to be ty...
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The Plasticity of the Family System

  Hey everyone! Another week of the semester has flown by, and so here I am again with another blog post. This week we touched on the effects of culture on family relations. As a general subject, there is far too much we could discuss, but we tried to narrow it down by reading about a study focusing on the changes in family relationships within the families of families immigrating to the United States from Mexico. A lot of what was shared and discuss actually hit home for me. I served a mission for my church for two years in Northern California among the Hispanic communities. I lot of the people I talked to and tried to help were going through many of the difficult changes in their families as they tried to adjust to their new home.  I think I learned a few things from this little exercise we did in class and from my personal experiences on my mission. I think that any major change in the family affects everyone in that family, but I also think the family system as a whole is ...
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