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 very resilient, and families will always find ways to make things work.

In the case of Mexican immigrant families that we studied this week, there are lots of difficult changes they experience. Often times, families will decide to move to the United States because they believe it will provide a better opportunity for their kids. Unless the family is well enough off to pay for the trip all together (which isn't very often as its VERY expensive and dangerous to cross the border, especially as a family), one parent will often come to the states by themselves to try and build a life there and send money back to their family. This causes a variety of difficult circumstances on all members of the family. Without a father in the home, the roles within the family still in Mexico get mixed around. Typically mom becomes the boss of the family, and dad plays less and less of an important role. 

While the family stabilizes to continue functioning, this is a major change for these families. I would see this constantly in my mission. Even families that got back together would have a difficult time changing those roles back to the way they were before, although I have seen it. What I would often see is that even though the family would be reunited, the father would spend less time in the house and more time working, since he then needed to make more money in order to support his family in the United States. 

That's just one example of how a family might change through the process of immigrating to the United States, but there are plenty of other ways that families change. While these changes were often drastically different to their family lives back in their home countries, the families I encountered were doing the best they could in their circumstances and were doing their best to make things work. Many mothers would take up cleaning jobs or selling food on the corners to help their families, and many children would learn English and would have to help their parents with official documents. While their lives did have to change to their new circumstances, I think that the ability to adapt shows that the family unit is plastic, and will change in whatever way it needs to in order to keep things together.

While I never had to move with my entire family to another country, I can think of how my family sometimes would have to make changes depending on the situations we were in. Perhaps you can think of times your family had to make changes due to difficult circumstances. Were the changes good or bad? I think it's something that's good to consider. Let me know your thoughts and experiences down in the comments!