Episode 3: All Sorts of Models

Hey friends! Sorry I missed the last couple of weeks. Things got pretty crazy. Now we have many things to talk about. First thing is to talk about family dynamics. One dynamic is a diffused boundary. A diffused boundary is a sort of boundary but not really. Like the pirate code, it’s not really a rule it’s a guideline. An example is a house with empty arches rather than locked doors. This is the family that’s very open. The parents who have an open door policy. The extended family that lives all on the same street corner and visit without calling first, all the time.

           Next class we did a role play of a family moving from Mexico to the United States. There was a father, mother, son, and daughter (that was me). They were the ideal family. The ideal family looks like this: 

The husband and the wife have their own kind of subsystem and the family is the system. Then there was a grandma, grandpa, cousin and uncle. The father was going to go to set up things for the rest of the family. It was only supposed to be six months that he was there without them but it ended up being three years. After all that time away from the father the family dynamic wasn’t the same. After all that time apart the family dynamic looked more like this:

The husband and father became cut off from the family and the wife depended more on the extended family. After the family was all together in America it was never the same between the family.

                The next class we talked about gender and the differences between them. The main reason there is difference is so there is balance between them.  Here’s a table of differences:

There was a study that found that within weeks of birth girls will form their mouth and “talk” to their parents whereas boys do not. Also, fathers tend not to feel close to their infant until the child interacts with them. For example, if the child will coo and smile in response to something the father does, he will find a better connection than logically know the infant is his offspring. However, The mother is immediately bound to the child because of Oxytocin. Oxytocin is the chemical that creates bonding. This chemical flows in women while they are giving birth and nursing.

                The next class we discussed why certain men become gay. I know, you’re going to uproar and say “no they’re born that way!” I’m not going to spend time arguing, here’s and article: http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/identical-twin-studies-prove-homosexuality-is-not-genetic  Anyway, we talked about femininity and the definition being “emotionally sensitive, loves clothing and fashion, pitch and tone of voice, delicate, nurturing, creative, and compassionate. Now this list describes the guy that would show up on your “gay-dar.” However, when Bro. Williams asked the girls of the class if we’d like a husband who is each of these things we raised our hands for a majority, if not all, of them.

                We talked about the “Exotic Becomes Erotic” (EBE) Model which is basically showing the path one goes down before deciding homosexuality. It basically starts with them being different.

If we factor in that they are different than the average bear and their temperament that starts the wheels. This is how things tend to go I’m not making an official statement about how people’s brains work.  However, research shows that boys tend to need a stronger relationship with their father and that lack of relationship is often a factor. What I’ve learned from this information is that I need to urge my husband to develop strong relationships with my sons, no matter what age. 

               That's all for now folks. Tune in later this week for a mini episode about dating!

Episode 2: Trends are Not So Trendy

Hello friends! So this last week we only went to class once and so I'm going to talk about last week a little more.We talked a lot about trends.One of the useful website we looked at was this website.

Some trends of the worlds today are: premarital sex, delaying marriage, out-of-wedlock births, living alone, cohabitation, birthrate decreasing, household size decreasing, more employed mothers, and increase in divorce. Can you point out one that correlates with another or one that starts a domino effect? Let’s talk about each individually.

Premarital sex tends to related to cohabitation. Some people might say that if you’re giving the milk for free, what’s the sense in buying the cow? A lot of people see it as an unnecessary step if they are already living together. Studies show that couples who have sex before marriage are more likely to get a divorce. I don’t know if they’re thinking “I’ve had better” or what but that’s just what statistics say.  

 Premarital sex is also related to illegitimate births. If you’re unmarried, have sex, and get pregnant, it’s likely that you will bear an illegitimate child. Then, to care for this child a mother must get a job and thus there is one more employed mother in the world. 

Also, premarital sex and cohabitation have something to do with delaying marriage. More and more people want to do a “trial run” of what marriage will be like when they move in together. Because of the delay in marriage people have started their careers and create goals of getting promoted before raising children and by the time they are to that point they’ve missed the prime time to conceive. This decreases birthrate as well as household size in one blow. 

Can you think of any other correlations I haven’t addressed? Comment and tell me which ones I’ve missed.

So let’s define some things here:

Population is the total number of human beings in whatever area you are finding the population of.

Birthrate is the number of births per thousand people and this is decreasing greatly.

Fertility rate is how many children a woman has within her life. That doesn’t mean how many of her children have grown to adulthood but how many she has birthed. Studies show that access to soap and clean water greatly increases the number of children who will grow to adulthood.

So, if you haven’t figured out by the various terms I just defined, the number of children to adopt is going down with every passing year. Now, a little backstory for me, when I was going through treatment for brain cancer they had to radiate all my female plumbing because the cancer had spread to my spine. That left me very unlikely to ever conceive or bear children. Whenever I bring this up people always, without fail, say “you can always adopt.” I knew the waiting list for adoption was long but I didn’t know that eight or nine years on that wait list was the norm! And it seemed to be getting longer all the time. So needless to say, after that day in class, I kind of felt like a gutted pumpkin. I had just had a rug ripped out from under me. I was now hearing that the thing I was counting on for me to ever have children was being ripped away too. I know that seems melodramatic but that’s how I felt. 

Then our teacher started talking about foster care and how there are 500,000 children within America every year. I’d always kind of shied away from foster care because I’m afraid of becoming attached to a child then having him taken away from me. I also fear having a child placed in my care who is older and knows that I’m a “temporary parent” until their parent shapes up or they get moved somewhere else. You always hear the stories of children moving from one home to another when they are in foster care. I know that’s not every case but those are my fears. 

The last class I went to we talked about various kinds of theories. A theory tries to explain phenomena.

Systems theory is looking at the whole system and not just pieces. For example, family is a system and is a whole, not just pieces.

Conflict theory is that some systems have more power than others. Like, certain classes are wealthier than others. Or like faculty has more say over how the school is run than the students do. Conflict is inherent, it’s going to happen no matter what. However, conflict isn’t always argument, it’s just decisions that must be made that both parties don’t agree on initially.

Exchange theory is that we want to get at least as much as we give. This explains why I broke up with my boyfriend; I was putting an immense amount into our relationship and was getting bubkis back and believed I deserved something back.

Symbolic Interaction Theory is that everyone interprets various actions or “symbols’ differently. Going back to that relationship, I was giving him all these different symbols of what I interpreted as hints of what I wanted in return and he might of seen it as “I’m doing all right if she still invests all this.” We must share the things we know, not just what we think, feel, and speculate about it. 

Well that’s all for this week kids. Come back next week for Episode 3!