Sept. 4th 2007 "Families"

Question- What you are doing in this post is honing your ideas and thinking about "families". What does one of these statements/or all of them make you think/wonder? This is a free write let yourself wander, but also ground these wanderings in specific ideas. Remember - try and answer for yourself - WHY do you think/believe what you do?

Today in our group we decided not to look at one of the quote specifically but all of them to form different ideas about what we thought was the meaning of family. Ari, Clay, and Becca (my group) discussed how we've all been brought up in typical homes, where our parents are married and we have siblings and pets to fill our house with company. This brought us to the beginning of our pondering. After discussing our own families, we truened to family structures of famous people, sociaital villians to be specific. Hitler, we knew, was brought up in a broken home where his father was much older than his mother and abused his wife and child due to a problem with alcoholism. Voldemort, from Harry Potter, was also the product of a broken home where violence plagued his early childhood. Both real and fictional villians that we discussed had the common thread of being from families that weren't functional or loving. To this point, I think that families have shown in the past and continue to show the beginning of a healthy child. Having loving parent/parents, in my opinon, is a key factor to the success of each individual. The reason i believe this is true is because I've seen, more often than not, that people in real life and novel characters are better people if they have the influence of a good, loving family.

At the end of your post, skip a line and ask a question. For example "blah, blah, blah... What is the relationship between carrying on our family's legacy to finding my own way through life"?

I think this question could be answered a number of ways depending on the time period and the place an individual lives. Carrying on a families legacy means everything to some cultures and very little to others, so the basis for this answer is variable. In my opinon, I think its more important to find you're own way through life than to carry on the family legacy. Family legacy does have its upside, like a safe job and future, but more unfourntatly, it can lack passion and drive. My father works as a brand evaluationist doing work I can't begin to comprehend and my mother is a market researcher with studies that don't interest me. They both adore they're jobs and I too want to enjoy the work i will eventually go into, thus family legacy doesn't carry much weight in my path through life. Therefore, the relationship between the two is relitive to the individual family and the culture they thrieve in.