Family
Family is a double-edged sword — it nurtures us but also imposes social duties on us; family is also a two-way street — it cares for us but also needs our support. In our formative years, family molds and shapes who we are. It has enormous influence on our health, temperament, values, beliefs, attitudes, education, class, culture, choices and aspirations. Even for those of us who rebel against our family, we are still rebelling against the particular structures and constraints provided by our family.
Family affects us deeply and intimately during our formative years as we discover the world and explore our self identities (more in Groups > Group Conflicts > Identities). Because familial relations are so vital, binding and intricate, we feel a host of emotions towards them. Many adults avoid family to avoid dealing with these emotions. Relations with family is also a complicated matter, and not every relative in a family is created equal. Parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles and aunties, cousins, spouses, children, nieces, and nephews… they occupy different significance in our lives depending on our relations to them, amount of time we spend with them, how well we get along with them, and the stage of our lives.
One thing is for sure: family, whatever form it comes, provides us with the earliest and most essential foundation of love and security. Lack thereof could be extremely detrimental to our abilities to form loving relations in our lives. Psychologist Harry Harlow’s famous 1932 experiment ▶️ with baby monkeys demonstrated that “nursery-reared infants [who are devoid of motherly love] remained very different from their mother-reared peers. Psychologically speaking, these infants were slightly strange: they were reclusive, had definite social deficits, and clung to their cloth diapers. For instance, babies that had grown up with only a mother and no playmates showed signs of fear or aggressiveness,” according to Wikipedia. See a related discussion in Groups > Group Conflicts > Attachment Styles.
Family in the 21st century
It is true, to a certain extent, that we cannot choose our family: we cannot choose our blood-relatives and we generally have little choice over who we grow up with. However, as adults we gain greater control over choosing our adopted family. RuPaul famously says, “…as gay people, we get to choose our family. We get to choose the people we’re around.” I think this applies to us all, gay or nay. For a sublime dramatization of this process, watch the Netflix series POSE 🎞️.
Urban adults of our time have more freedom to choose how close they keep their original family, unlike in the past or in some parts of the world when/where we must live within a large extended family pretty much forever. Rise of individualism and the disintegration of the extended family in modernity have encouraged urban adults to not rely too much on our families. Adult children who live with their parents are generally made fun of in developed countries. There’s also strong tendency for urban adult children to escape the “old-fashioned” influence of their parents’ generation by keeping a distance.
As a result, older generations of our time constantly find themselves alone in their old age when they need care the most; meanwhile, adult children may find that they have no support system when they struggle in a city far away from home. As the world’s developed countries age, elderly isolation is becoming an epidemic. At the same time, I have friends who find themselves completely burnt out in a remote city after years of living alone and searching for a soul mate, only to realize rather late the need to move back home for the nurture of their family. Too much family can overshadow ourselves, too little family can isolate us. Future communities should consider and remedy this double-jeopardy in modern society. For example, new communities are popping up in North America and Europe where elderlies live with unrelated younger people — the former provides affordable housing and wisdom to the latter and the latter provides companionship and care to the former. Win-win.
Kids are future human beings who we choose to bring into our families. Some of us don’t want to bring kids into our worsening world; others want more time to develop their careers. Women especially have a hard choice to make: “…fertility data tells you that probably the safer choice to have kids on the earlier side. And the career data implies you might take less of a hit if you have kids later, which is a little frustrating,” [15:58] video journalist Cleo Abram comments ▶️. I think we should respect individual choices about having kids, despite what Pope Francis says, and focus our efforts on improving the wellbeing of the 7.7 billion people already alive. Also, as the developed world ages and number of global refugees soars, adopting orphans in war or disaster-stricken zones is a sensible and ethical option of bringing up the young.
If you do decide to have kids, you need to be ready to give them all your love and support. Treat them as you’d like to be treated and provide for them what they need, as much as you can, to live in the future. The world is changing fast; it is more important to prepare them for the world that they will overtake from us rather than having them fulfill our soon-to-be-outdated aspirations. Further discussions in Self > Human Basics > Our Needs and World > Systemic Anti-bullying > From Generational Conflicts to Generational Inequality.
Recent research shows that people’s political views affect their patenting styles. Hidden Tribes confirms that, for example,”…people’s tendency towards authoritarianism―that is, their support for strong leaders and strict social hierarchy―is linked to their views on parenting style… people who deem it more important for a child to be ‘well-behaved’ than ‘creative’ are more likely to endorse an authoritarian ethic.” 5 distinctive parenting styles ▶️ , namely, authoritarian, permissive, authoritative, neglecting, and over-involved, mold children’s lives.
It used to take a village to raise children but with the prevalence of the nuclear family, kids only get to rely on one or two parents. One neglected aspect of family in our times is our extended family: grandparents, in-laws, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews… It’s a good idea to keep these relations close and maintain a mutually-supportive familial network (unless a particular relationship is toxic). At the same time, governments and companies have a responsibility to make child care more accessible and affordable. These are future humans of our societies after all.
Lastly, pets are animal companions living in our homes and are of course part of the adopted family. I believe they should be treated as our equals, not abused nor spoiled.
For more stories about what future families can be, look no further than HumansofNY and StoryCorps.
Friends
Contrary to social media convention, friends are not people who give you 👍 and social validation. They are peers with whom we can play, learn, grow and generally explore the world with. Meeting friends of different backgrounds from us is extremely rewarding, especially when the encounters happen in real life. Research finds that even shallower acquaintances, dubbed weak-tie friendships, “can boost happiness, knowledge and a sense of belonging,” journalist Ian Leslie writes.
The great thing about friends is that we are relatively free to associate with them. Take a leaf from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 📖: rather than being like the Granfalloons, “…who appoint significance to actually meaningless associations, like where you grew up, political parties, and even entire nations”; be more like the Karasses: “people we ‘find by accident but… stick with by choice’ cosmically linked around a shared purpose,” [3:44], suggests Ted-Ed.
Like siblings, who are probably your oldest friends, friends could be people we compare and compete with. That’s where the concept of “frienemy” comes from. While checking in with the goings of your friends is a great way to stay in touch, and while their experiences might inspire you or at least keep you in sync with reality, there is really no need to compare yourself to friends (or for that matter, random people you follow on Instagram). More importantly, there’s no need to feel bad by comparison. I don’t remember who said this, but if you compare your real, everyday living with every shiny moment that every other person on social media chooses to highlight with tons of unseen filters and deceptive embellishments, you are bound to plunge into the deepest of depression. It’s hard to know what another person is really going through. Take a personal example: none of my friends knew during the lowest point of my life that I was depressed (mainly on account of my hiding the fact from them in shame). The cliché is true: we are in a marathon not a sprint. And you know what the amazing thing is? Everyone is running a different marathon, as portrayed in this life-affirming Japanese commercial.
Run your own marathon, alongside friends whom you celebrate and in turn celebrate you.
Read about other relationships in the 21st century:
- Self
- Romance / Sex
- School
- Work
- Communities
- Social status
- Consumer groups / Economies
- Political Systems
- Memes / Ideologies / Religions
- Humanity
- Environment / World
- Universe / Beyond Our Universe
Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!
