The Importance of Family

Family! We all have family members whether they are direct family, step family or friends we have adopted as family. Like many social relationships, strong bonds with family members can have great benefits for individuals and society. This article will discuss the importance of family and how to strengthen your relationship ties.

Why is family important?

Family structure is important. It help builds a solid future for our children and provides family members with a strong support network. While we can’t choose our family, we can choose how we treat them. These choices can allow us to strengthen family ties and build better releationships.

So why is family so important? Let’s take a look.

Family provides a feeling of belonging

The family unit can also contribute to your safety needs. When you are a child you are dependent on your family for protection from the elements, your personal security to keep you out of harms way, stability and freedom from fear.

As you grow older your parents can teach you how to manage money, save and learn how to identify unsafe situations.

After physiological and safety needs have been fulfilled, the third level of human needs are social. These needs involve feelings of love and belonging. Being part of a family unit gives a sense of belonging to all members. Having a sense of belonging enables family members to develop a high self esteem. While these relationships can be built through various channels such as friendship and community.

Family can provide a foreground to fulfill our loving and belonging needs. The social needs in Maslow’s hierarchy include the drive for emotional relationships such as love, acceptance, and belonging.

I personally could not move past this stage of the hierarchy until I married my Husband Garrett and we started our own family. My greatest unconditional loving support came from my Aunty, Uncle, and Cousins. I believe they are the reason I had the confidence to find and marry my husband. To me, it was the only home I always knew I was welcome in. I will always be grateful to them and they all hold a special place in my heart.

When I moved in with my husband it was the first time I have ever lived in a strong family unit. Two years later I began to see an increase in my self esteem. Not only an increase but execution of life actions that someone with a good self esteem would take. For instance I was able to remove toxic and abusive relationships in my life because I knew what it was like to be treated well.

Conversely, the lack of interactions, human relationships and the sense of belonging may result in depression or loneliness while an abundance of love and community often sustain people through difficult times (Maslow, 1987, pp. 20-21). This is one of the painful double edged swords of depression. You want to be alone, yet the lonlieness can delve you deeper into your depressed state.

Personally, I have lived with Major Depressive disorder for well over a decade. It is only just now with the support of my family that I have begun to get my life back. Before the depression hit, I was a social butterfly, once it hit I never left the house. Its been that way for a decade, although over the last few months I have wanted to leave the house. That is a game changer for me!

The healing power of the family

If the healing power of a family can have such dramatic results on an adult imagine what providing love and a sense of belonging can do for your children as they continue to grow over the years.

Families provide a setting for personal growth. A family is the first school in which a child receives the basic values of life. He learns good manners, morals and values from this very unit. These early adoption of beliefs and values learned in the family become our guiding force. They make our character and lay the foundation of our thinking.

Importance of family in child development

As well as the point discussed above there are many more reasons why the importance of a strong family unit is important in a child’s development.

A family is the first school in which a child receives the basic values of life. Children learn behavior, morals and character in their early stages of life from their family members.

The most common way children learn is by observation of everyday life. A child’s learning and socialization skills are mostly influenced by their family since the family is the child’s primary social group.

This puts a heavy emphasis on the primary caretaker of the children. Traditionally this is the mother, but this can vary in different family units. Knowing that I am the leading example for my child’s learned behavior and development makes me want to be the best version of myself.

Coping Skills

“Parents model how to handle emotions when they react to their own feelings,” says Heidi Smith Luedtke, a psychologist in northern Virginia and the author of “Detachment Parenting: 33 Ways to Keep Your Cool When Kids Melt Down.”

She advises that “parents can teach kids about emotions by giving them specific emotion words to describe their feelings. Studies show that labeling feelings with words helps to decrease distress and makes it less likely that an angry person will act on his or her anger. Words help us make the shift from reacting to responding.”

I am beyond surprised with how much my toddler can understand. His vocabulary is small yet he can understand so much of what I am saying to him. I had read so many books and blogs about how you need to talk and explain situations to your toddler when they are upset but I thought it was all a bunch of hogwash.

Toddlers understand much more than what you think they do!

At 20 months of age some of Harrisons vocabulary included water, mummy, no more, daddy, car and baby. I asked Harry to go ask Daddy for some water and then bring it here to Mummy. I have never asked him to do anything before so I had very low expectations. To my surprise he went and knocked on the bathroom door, yelling Daddy. (Daddy was in the bathroom). Dad opened the door and he asked for some water. Dad got it for him and went back to shaving. Harry brought me the water. I was gobsmacked and proud as punch.

Ever since that day I have taken the time to explain things to Harrison. We had a dramatic improvement in our toddler behavior that week. Harry now helps me clean up his mess that he makes. Consequently, he has been throwing his food around the house less. Yay!

The key takeaway is that I need to lead by example no matter the childs age because they are learning more than what you realise off you!

Relationships

Children learn how to treat others from the way they see their role models treat others. This also means that I need to be a role model for my children on relationships. They will learn what is right and wrong, nice, normal and not nice behavior from their main social influencers. Which in the early years is the family unit.

A perfect example of this in action in our family is hitting. Harrison went through a hitting stage, which I was able to nip in the butt pretty fast. How you may ask? I was reading the book “The not so selfie. An Empathetic approach to raising children.” In the early chapters it talks about how can we teach children hitting is bad if we ourselves spank them. We are sending them mixed messages.

At that stage in our parenting my husband and I would give Harry a little tap on the butt if he was being really bad. He also began hitting us. After reading about this learned behavior I stopped. I spoke with my husband and asked him to stop too. But he still gives the occasional spank on the bum. Consequently, Harrison will walk up and hit Dad in the face all the time and thinks it is hilarious. He never hits Mum. Why because he has learned that it is acceptable behavior between Harry and Daddy, but not Mummy and Harry.

We need to remember that nurturing family relationships lay the foundation for all other relationships your child will have in their lifetime. These early lessons pave the way for satisfying personal relationships later.

The Importance of family values

As we begin to understand how relationships and the way we treat each other in the family unit can dramatically affect each other, you can see why being on the same page with your family values is a must.

Why? Family values guide what is acceptable behavior which stems from our belief systems. Now that I have my own family I can see why families with the same strong religious beliefs have a stronger and smoother family unit. They have the same beliefs and core values, which avoids clashes on what is ethical and moral behavior. They have the same expectations from one an another.

My husband and I are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Our marriage has not been easy by any means what so ever. The clad that held us together through the hard times is that we hold the same values, belief systems and morale code.

Values can also come from culture and the type of family we were raised in. When it comes to culture and learned family values my husband and I are worlds apart!

As children grow their social cirlcles begin to expand. This means the number of influential people in their lives will expand. Children may be confused by the different value systems that other families or social circles implement.

Parents need to talk about their family values and why these particular things are important to their family. They also need to help children learn to respect the values of others.

A good way to implement a family value system is through a family mission statement!

Continue reading this article: Part 2. The Importance of Family Values: