Children are the Greatest Tresure

My feelings on kids. How do I describe them? To say that I love children might just be the understatement of my life. I cannot explain what it means to me to play with my nieces and nephews. When I was in high school, I babysat for a family that had triplets. They were some of the funniest little boys with whom I have ever played. I thought that it was super interesting whenever I got to be around them. Those little boys were always together, so they shared many things in common (like they loved to jump on me and be swung around). Yet, they were different from one another. I remember that one of the boys loved music while the other two were not as interested. I once held a music recital and while I was playing he was waving his arms as if he were directing me. I feel like this difference was not caused by anything to do with a difference in upbringing, but a lot to do with how we were before we came to earth. God created us to be different from others so that we can all contribute something our mortal experience. 

In our class we talked about the importance of how we raise our children, emphasizing the question of nature or nurture. Any parent can attest that most of the time, a girl will want to play with the dollies and play house while a boy will be more rough and tumble. This, I believe, comes from our divine nature as male and female. I believe these traits come from before we were born. To get a little more in depth about this belief, you can visit this link: The Family: A Proclamation to the World. There are some people in the world that would say that we all need to be equal or that we must all be the same. I do not believe that if should be this way. If we were to all be the same, how in the world could we ever enjoy the wonders or genius that come from different styles of thinking? We need variety. The world needs variety, and we should give everyone an equal opportunity to search out what it is that makes them different. However, when we speak in terms of men and women, we can be equal without being the same. We need to celebrate our differences.

I love my family. I really do. They make up my entire life. Everything that my parents taught and all the torture that all my older siblings inflicted on me has made me who I am today. Now you feel bad, huh, Rebecca? Just kidding, I've forgiven you. But in all seriousness, I loved and still do love being with family. We've had some great times together and I wouldn't trade them for the world.
All of us come from different families. We all have those things that we love about our families. For me, one of those things is that we spend our Sundays together. My parents really took the time to emphasize the importance of family time and that families are forever. Now that I do not live near relatives, it just makes Skype and phone calls just that much more precious. I want that for my future family. There are a lot of things that I learned as a child that I want to include in my own family. Things such as being active in church programs, or that we looked for different opportunities to serve others. I love that I got to do it. At the time, not so much, but now I get it. Mom and Dad, do you hear that? I understand now why you made me do good things, so thank you for making me go. Keep up the good work!
But we all know that there are some things that we do not want to perpetuate once we start families of our own. These things might be super personal. Or they might just be that I want to teach specific things to my children that I do not remember being taught myself. The class that we had this week made me reflect on certain things that I found helpful in my own family and that I want to change. And it just makes me excited for the future.

Family Patterns

Have you ever thought that your family is so different and crazy and dysfunctional that no one really understands what it is like? Or is your family the polar opposite, that everything is cookie cutter perfect and just right on the dot about what a family should be? Maybe you fit in the middle, where your family has their crazy times, but still has their moments of being the picture perfect family? Well, it just so happens that all of our families, be them perfect or perfectly dysfunctional, have patterns or rhythms with which they work. One family may have a pattern of holding a little meeting to work through conflicts while another family may have the pattern of avoiding it altogether. One family may have the tradition of family dinner every night, or another could have both parents working in which dinner is a different sort of affair. I am not here to say which ones are right and which are wrong. Keep in mind as you read that I have very little experience with families beyond growing up in my own family. *Quick sappy insert: I love my family. They truly are my greatest heros, and I aspire to make them happy.

Really, what does that mean to you and me? So we have a rhythm to the way we live, big deal. But what about to those people that want to change how they live. Sometimes the ways in which we live are not healthy, or they cause excessive amounts anxiety or stress. *Side-note: Not all stress is bad, stress and hardships can keep us going. To see the point more beautifully illustrated see link here.  These repetitive ways of dealing with a problem in family life might just not be working out. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we believe that the family is the most important unit in society and that we must guard it as faithfully as possible. The problems that arise in a family should be worked out; we should seek understanding and love when solving a negative tradition. We discussed in class the importance of understanding others and coming to understand their point of view of the situation. In the LDS faith, there is a document titled The Family: A Proclamation to the World, in which the leaders of our church have outlined how we may best come to understand others in our own families and resolve misunderstandings and hiccups that happen.