What I'm Learning About Family

  Hey everyone! Once again, I have been blown away this week by the eye-opening things I have learned that I had no idea about! This week we talked about providing for a family, with a lot of focus on the important role fathers play. Many families make the decision to have the mother start working because of the benefits they believe will come from having a second income. However, what I learned this week about the costs versus the benefits will probably surprise you just as much as it surprised me. Our professor illustrated the point he wanted to make by telling us about a case study of a family that was done in which an accountant came in and added up all of their expenses and determined which ones came as a result of the mother working. The family they chose had a pretty average income. The father was making about $42,000 a year working 45 hours a week, and the mother was making about $21,000 working 35 hours a week. Some of these expenses, like childcare, were obvious, but a lot of

  Hey everyone! I’ve got some really great things to share with you today! In class this week we talked about communication which is something I think we could all use a little help with, haha. It’s crazy to think how many factors can go into us interacting in a way that we misunderstand or are misunderstood. My professor shared a quote with us, (sorry I can’t remember who said it, but I wanted to share it because it really rang true to me) “In marriage and family it’s not enough to communicate clearly enough to be understood. We have to communicate in a way that we cannot be misunderstood. ” I feel like it’s very rare to have the type of communication where misunderstanding is not a possibility, but imagine how many hurt feelings and how much heartbreak could be saved from it! Generally the people we seek deep relationships with are good people with good intentions just like us, but we sometimes end up feeling frustrated or sad because of those relationships. Why is that? I think it h

  Hey everyone!  I cannot even begin to express how much I’ve appreciated learning the things I have this week! I feel like I’ve had a total change in perspective. We talked about different types of stressors families experience and how each family seems to respond a little differently. We ended up talking a lot about individual stress and hardship which is what I want to focus on in my blog today! I feel like I am a pretty positive person naturally, so putting a positive spin on things to not let them get me down comes kind of easily to me. I have such a hard time knowing what to tell people when that’s really hard for them to do, because I don’t really know what it’s like to be in their shoes. Of course I don’t want to tell people to just think more positively and that it will solve all of their problems, that’s not very helpful at all! This has been a big reason I’ve doubted I could be a good therapist or counselor. I know how to be happy and think positively myself, but I feel so c

  Hey everyone! Wow, I learned so much this week that I had no idea about! I am seriously so grateful for this class and all that I am learning about marriage and family because I know it will really help me if I apply it. There is just so much I am not aware of that I feel like I really should be! Things that can really change my perspective and help me to gain understanding. We talked about intimacy and fidelity in marriage this week. I had a huge perspective change with fidelity. The way I saw it before was that of course you don’t want to spend lots of time alone with someone of the opposite gender if you’re married, or do things that might lead to you developing feelings for that person, but I didn’t think there was any harm in having friends of the opposite gender or spending time with coworkers of the opposite gender. I thought that if your love for your spouse was strong and you both trusted each other that those types of things were fine because falling in love with someone wa