Family Unit

Image courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
The Impact of Family Stories and Conversations The stories told and the conversations we have in our childhood homes hugely influence our identity and how we view the world. Through listening to these stories and participating in family conversations, we learn what’s good and bad, polite and rude, acceptable and unacceptable, fair and unfair. In fact, without even knowing it, these stories and conversations provide us with a foundation of values, attitudes, and beliefs as we grow into adults. Then, should we have our own children as adults, we pass these values, attitudes, and beliefs on to them through the re-telling of these stories and involving them in similar conversations. Although there are many factors that contribute to our identity and culture, these are important ones. It’s like the telephone game, where one person passes a story on to the other until the last person to hear the story shares the final version. If everyone plays the game properly, i.e. no one intentionally changes the message to be funny, and if everyone hears the message correctly, the basic idea of the story usually remains the same, but often the details change as one person tells the next person. In the same way, that’s how families – and cultures – pass on values, attitudes, and beliefs from one generation to the next. It’s why Irish families stay Irish through the centuries, why Chinese families stay Chinese, and Iranian families stay Iranian. Not only are the plotlines and details of the stories and conversations particularly Irish, Chinese, and Iranian, but they’re chock-full of the values, attitudes, and beliefs of those cultures, too. Whether you were aware of this or not, the stories your parents, grandparents, and relatives told you as a child contained many family and cultural values, attitudes, and beliefs. You listened to them because that’s what you were exposed to. And, over time and as you grew up, a lot of them seeped into your identity. Of course, you may have rejected some of them, but – without even knowing it – many of the latent values, attitudes, and beliefs become a part of you. They become a large part of your identity.

The Family Unit This is the reason why so many scholars and experts believe that ‘the family unit’ is the single most important contributor to a people’s culture. It’s the family that passes on society’s values, attitudes, and beliefs; not our schools, governments, or our media. We could go back further in time. Our parents learned a lot from their family-unit when they were kids. And their parents (or our grandparents) learned a lot from their childhood family-unit. And on and on it goes, back in time.

Image courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
The Family Unit and Historical Thinking In fact, given that generations occur roughly every 25 years, you could look back in time and figure out how many generations you are away from historical events. For example, let’s say you are a young adult in the year 2015, wondering how many generations you are removed from World War I. Sure, it was 100 years ago, but it’s likely that this young adult would only be four generations removed from World War I. How many transfers of family values, attitudes, and beliefs took place in that time? Thinking back to the telephone game, we know a story doesn’t change that much after four people pass it along. So, with this in mind, we know that the stories told and conversations had in the childhood home of the young adult in 2015 – stories and conversations charged full of values, attitudes, and beliefs – are not going to be that far removed from those in the WWI family homes. This is why cultural and social changes occur so gradually: for every 25 years that pass, there’s really only one exchange in family values, attitudes, and beliefs. To submit family stories, go to: http://fraserjourney.ca/forum/topics/family-stories