Cultural Differences that affect Families

Last week was very interesting We learned a lot about how families from different cultures are stronger in some aspects and weaker in others. Our books compared everyone else to "white" families- it made me giggle. I know that trying to classify white people from all over the nation with different religious beliefs is very difficult because we all view families differently. As a mormon, I believe that families are central to our reason for being here on earth. Essentially, they are the meaning to life. We talked about other cultural differences like how Hispanics and African Americans are more family oriented and yet they have higher unwed birth rates than any other ethnicity. It really interests me to see what "family oriented" really means to people. Something that is very important and portrays our beliefs quite eloquently is "The Family: A Proclamation to the World". (http://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation)

We talked about social classes. In America, we all say that there aren't social classes. Yes, we aren't living in a caste system where we can't associate with people outside of our social class, but we definitely have social classes that define what are how we can do things. What this is typically defined by is our family income, and where we grew up. Isn't that annoying? As we grow up we are categorized by something that is outside of our control. I think that we are too judgmental of those around us when they aren't "up to par" for us. I think we need to let a lot more of the social pressures go and see people for who they are rather than what they were or weren't given.

I taught English in China last year for 5 months and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I adore the children there. They lived at a boarding school during the week and went home on the weekends. Some students were there on scholarship because of how well they tested. They thought of me as their mother. They would hug and kiss me and let me play with them as well. But even as children, they knew that some children were in the upper class, and some were in the lower class. They treated them differently. This broke my heart so  I did my best to make sure that they knew that I didn't care how much their parents made. This made teaching them all the better because they took to my learning better. This changed my view of social classes drastically.