Smashing Assumptions: One Class Discussion at a Time

     Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! If you had told me that I would be writing a blog a few months ago, I likely wouldn't have believed you. If I'm being honest, I'm here because it's worth 35% of my Family Relations grade, but who knows? Maybe I'll come to like it! In the meantime however, I hope you'll bear with me. This blog isn't meant to give you folks a dull synopsis of what happened in class, but instead give you a look into my thoughts as I move through this semester, so let's see how I do. If any of you have any of your own commentary or questions, I'd love to hear them in the comments, so please feel free to send some my way. Without further ado, let's get started!

    The first full week in my Family Relations class was great, although not like anything I was expecting. Most classes tend to go something like this: after getting through the syllabus and introductions, you jump right into some textbook and get things going. You know the drill. However, that is NOT what happened at all. We ended up discussing a rather interesting topic, which really ended up challenging what I had previously thought. We discussed the issue of population decline and how it is affecting families.

    Again, I told you that I didn't want this to be a re-write of my class notes, so I'll give you the short version so that we can be on the same page. Basically, humanity as a whole is losing population because fertility rates are at an all time low and family is being marginalized by societies everywhere. This is happening due to a number of reasons: a focus on a successful career first and rather than family, a lack of resources and an increased cost of raising children, etc.. One comment from a documentary we watched on the subject has really stuck with me this week. One man said, according to Darwin, any species that doesn't have more births than deaths has something wrong with it.

     Ok, my short synopsis is done now; hopefully it makes sense. For you smart people out there, maybe this wasn't surprising at all and you already knew all about it. For me, it was not the case. I grew up in a family of five: my parents, my two brothers, and myself. My parents come from larger families: my dad with six siblings and my mom with four. I love my family, but from the discussions we had in class this week, I realized that I may have picked up some ideas that family isn't important, or at least ideas that family is LESS important than other things like school or a career. I also had no idea that we had a problem with the population going down. I feel like I've always heard the opposite. That we had too many people, not enough stuff and that was that, and I just accepted it.

     What surprised me the most about all of this is that it challenged what I had previously thought and totally flipped it on its head. This was the first I was hearing about this decline in population and it really made me think: what else did I believe and accept that might not exactly be true? This was a new feeling for me, and I've decided that it's a good thing. Have some of my assumptions been smashed? Yes. Do I feel bad about it? Nope. If I've learned anything in my life, it's that sometimes we have to learn that we're wrong in order to move forward and grow. Considering that the other discussion we had in class this last week had the same affect, this might be a long semester, but it's going to be a good one. My inner skeptic has woken up, and it has lots of questions. I am excited to see what else I have to learn!

    If this writing this blog post has made me realize anything, it's that I feel that this week is likely a precursor to all of my posts that follow. I am likely going to learn how lots of my assumptions are wrong, and that's actually a good thing, because every one of my beliefs that are questioned give me the opportunity to refine the truth that I know.