Ruminations and Reflections of a Marriage and Family Studies Major

 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...

      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...

  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 ...

       Hello again everyone! If you're new to my blog, welcome! If you managed to get through last week's blog and are here again, welcome back! Last week marked the debut of my blogging career, and since I'm here again, it's safe to assume that I've made it another week without too much trouble. This week was another interesting week, with lots of new and surprising things learned and WAY too many notes to fit into one blog. If I'm being honest, I still don't know exactly what I want to do with this blog, but just sharing my thoughts and reflections on what I learn during my Family Relations class seems to be working for me so far. Anyways, let's see what I come up with this week.     If you were here last week, I shared that what I was rather surprised to learn that I had some misconceptions that were untrue. I had no idea I was in the wrong, and having my beliefs challenged actually wasn't as uncomfortable as I thought; rather, it was quite freein...

       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. Yo...