Late Night Family Thoughts

Hello everyone! This is a bit of a bittersweet blog post. It will also be my last time making a post on here (at least for now). It's been an awesome ride being able to talk to you all and make these posts. And through my own research I've been able to confirm for myself how families are so important.  It is very sad how in today's society, families aren't seen as prominent or as important as before. Prophets throughout all of time, have warned us about this the danger of this. In the family proclamation, it reads, "Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets." We see this prophecy unfolding in our day. We live in a world where broken families have been somewhat normalized. Divorce runs rampant. Children are even discouraged. When people have a dispute or disagreement, one of the first thoughts now, is that they made a mistake. Maybe I marrie...

 Hello everyone! Hope everything is going good with you all. It's been a pretty good week here with me. As someone who is not yet married, and doesn't have a family, I try to prepare myself as best I can for when that time does eventually come. Because when it does, I want to be ready to raise children of my own effectively. I've studied a lot of different good parenting techniques that will help when eventually raising children.  There is a common misconception that being strict is important in raising children. This isn't necessarily true and can even mislead parents into raising children in a way that is not healthy. What's far more important than strictness, is being consistent, confident, and constantly showing warmth. It is very important to remain consistent in our behavior. If we tell our kids not to do something, and then we do that same thing multiple times, our children are more likely to break that rule because the parent is not being consistent in their...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all are having a great time this week celebrating Thanksgiving and everything. I know I am. And I wanted to put a focus on that for a little for this blog post.  Something that I have always been grateful for, and I think a lot of people will agree with this, is my family. They've done a lot for me, and I don't know where I would be without them. I'm grateful for both my mother and my father, and they are a huge part of who I am today.  I've heard it been said that a mother is the only truly necessary part of a family. A father isn't as necessary or important as a mother. However, I don't necessarily believe that it is true. Sure, the world would like to make us believe that fallacy. In fact, the further in the future we go, the more and more it seems like they promote this belief all over television. I mean, how often in movies is the father made out to be the goofball. The complete buffoon. Men are being depicted in movi...

       Hello everyone! Welcome to another post here on my blog. I hope everything has been going alright with you all. Commnication is a HUGE part of our everyday life. We used it all the time, every single day. It's crazy how much communication has evolved over time. A couple hundred years ago, people would never have guessed that you could send people messages with the click of a button instantaneously. However, despite the new advancements' technology has undergone, there are still unique challenges that we face due to these evolutions.      When you're talking to someone, a large chunk of your message, about 51%, comes from your nonverbal communication. This includes things like body posture, movement, and body language. 35% of your message comes from the tone or inflection of your voice. Lastly, only 14% of your message is actually from the words that you say. This was really surprising to me. I thought that words were super important for conveyin...

 Hello everyone! Welcome to another post here on my blog, hope you all are doing good. There are a lot of things that I have learned this past week. Something I haven't really thought about before is how important coping is in our lives. I kind of always just assumed it was just about hanging in there, but it's actually a lot more than that. We want our coping to set up and maintain the boundaries around ourselves. It keeps us safe, both the inside and the outside.   It is also very important, in a relationship, to have your spouse become your best friend. This means now going to other people outside of the relationship if you're dealing with something. If there are worries, talk it out with the spouse. I used to think that it was weird to just leave everyone behind when marriage came. To leave all of your friends who are girls behind, like they don't even exist anymore. It was a hard concept to completely wrap my head around, because I thought that I would still be abl...

Hello everyone! Welcome to another one of my blog posts. There have been a lot of different things that have piqued my interest this week during my studies into different topics of research. To begin this post, I'd like to start off with a story. It was given by one of my professors at BYU-Idaho. His name was Mr. Williams. I won't go horribly in-depth on every little detail that was said, but I want to at least paint a picture in your mind.  He told a story that took place during his time as a therapist, when a man came in to see him. I won't say exactly why he was there, but he felt like he was on the verge of committing adultery, and he didn't want to do that. He didn't care if he did everything else instead. He just didn't want to take that step. Mr. Williams then gave him a visual to ponder on. He told the man a story about when he was young and he wanted to go to the river to look at the fishes, even though his parents told him not to go near. Yet he still ...

Hey all, I hope all is well! Welcome to yet another post on this blog!  I've talked about a lot of things these past few weeks. I wrote a post about dating, and about best practices when going on dates with other people. Today, I was going to go along those same lines; however, this time taking it a step further. Dates are fun opportunities to see what we want in a relationship, and in a spouse. And when someone finds a person they feel like is the right one for them, they naturally want to spend the rest of their life with them. It leads them to marriage.  Once marriage comes, everything about life changes. You're no longer by yourself, and you need to get used to living with someone else now. I'm not married myself, but I can relate to living with random people and getting used to the way that they do things. It happened a lot during my mission. I met people from a variety of different backgrounds who didn't do things the same as I did. Sometimes it would even lead to...

 Hello everyone! Hope everything is going well for you all. Today I'm going to talk about a pretty relevant subject, especially concerning the younger generation. I wanted to talk a bit about dating. Now, I admit, I don't have the most expertise in this area; however, there's a lot that I learned this week which I would like you share with you.  It's interesting how blind we tend to be while in a relationship. There are different explanations for why it might be that way. One of the explanations if that someone might have a Misattribution of Arousal, where they mistake the feeling of adrenaline or the feeling of having their heart pumping, as a sign that they are attracted to someone. A study showed this where they surveyed people just after they had gotten done with a rollercoaster; and on a scale from one to ten, it was polled that people rated the person two points higher after they had ridden on the rollercoaster. There are other explanations as well for why people ...

Hello everyone! Welcome to my fourth blog post here on this blog. There have been a lot of things that I have learned so far in class. Most of what I learned was focused on how the different gender roles and responsibilities both complement and support each other. We have been created on this Earth for specific purposes in mind. Adam and Eve were given life and were commanded to create the first human family. I especially love what God says after he had created man. In Genesis chapter 2, which reads, "And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him."  I love this scripture and how it exemplifies that neither the woman nor the man could ever take on the responsibilities of both of the parents. They need each other. It is a divine calling. James E Faust taught this same principle when he said that "Being a father or a mother is not only a great challenge, it is a divine calling. It is an effort requiring consecration...

 Hello everyone! Welcome to my third blog post so far, and it's crazy that we're already into the month of October. There have been a lot of different, new and exciting things that I have been learning so far in class. One thing that I loved learning more about was how important culture is. At first, I attributed culture mainly to describe a larger group of people, such as Hispanic culture or American culture. But as I learned more about what that word really means, it could also be described in smaller groups of people as well. Culture also exists inside families, with friends; it's the overarching word to describe the customs or characteristics of any type of social group.  The way you act within the walls of your home, the way you interact with you family members, that is the culture inside of your family. Each individual family has their own unique culture. I have one inside of my family, and you have one as well. For example, one thing that my family and I do every yea...

Hello everyone! Welcome to my second post so far on this blog. As I have been in the Family Relations class, I learned a lot of things that I didn't really understand before. I didn't realize how complicated the structure of a family could be, and that was one thing that surprised me a lot during class last Thursday. There is something called Family Systems Theory, and as I learned more about it I became fascinated in this idea. To simplify it, the Family Systems Theory is basically a theory that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Every member of a family has a specific purpose or something to contribute, and it is a lot more complicated than meets the eye.  To draw a comparison, I really liked the analogy that was used during class, about if we take an air conditioner for example. Or the lights. Each of those systems have multiple parts to it. All of those parts do nothing on their own; but when you connect them all together, they create this wonderful system that...

 Hello everyone! Welcome to my first post on this blog, hope you enjoy what you read.  As I read through all of the many different studies conducted on families, and how different variables can have long lasting consequences, it amazes me how different they are sometimes. Prior to this class, when I would read something online, I normally would presume it was true. It looks like research was done; different people were interviewed, observed, and monitored; therefore, there must be some sort of factual basis to be seen. However, I've learned throughout the past week that it is not always the case. Yes, there are so many studies conducted throughout a variety of subjects, and there has been research involved in each of those studies. But does that mean that all of it is entirely true? Not necessarily.  So now, instead of taking things point blank, I've learned that maybe I should do a little questioning and research myself. Cause there are a variety of ways a particular res...