Insights and Perspectives

 Hello Everyone! This week I have had the opportunity to learn more about parenting. I do not have children and am not even married so you may take what I have to say with some caution. But I have enjoyed what I have learned and do think it could be beneficial to know for when I am parenting my future children.  I learned this week about the concept of 5 needs that children and even us have. The first need that a child has is the need for contact and belonging. It is so important for a child to have safe and healthy physical contact as well as emotional contact in a family. We learned of a story of children that didn't have the opportunity to receive much physical contact in an orphanage many years ago due to short staffing and overpopulated facilities. This lead to the development of those children's brains. The influence that loving contact can have on a child is amazing and so essential. We learned that often when this specific need is not met in a family the child may tend

 Hello Everyone! A question that I have had is, how do we measure success in a family unit. Is there some sort of achievement or event that measures the success? Can you succeed in a family and then later on fail? These have all been thoughts that I have had in the last few months and I have slowly been coming to a conclusion that is bringing peace to my mind.  First of all, I do not believe there should be some sort of expectation of material achievements that measures success in a family. In my opinion that puts significant amounts of stress on the people who are striving to achieve those goals. What achievement in this world could measure the success of multiple people in a family that would be reflective of all of their lives? I cannot think of any award or achievement that could fill that description. One thing that I have learned this past week, that supports my previous hypothesis of the failure of materialistic achievements bringing success, is that money doesn't necessaril

I have always heard people give the advice that "Communication is Key" in relationships. But what I have found from the relationships in my life that I observe or am a part of is, communication is so complicated and difficult. It seems that to fully understand what someone means, we have to go through a sometimes long process in our heads to decode their messages. There are three parts of communication that seem to play into this complicated decoding process that we all take. I learned this week that the actual words said in interactions with others only makes up 14% of the communication between two people. 35% percent of communication comes from the tone that the words are expressed in and the remaining 51% of communication comes from non-verbal communication. I can see the importance of being fully present when we are striving to communicate with others. Because so much communication is not coming from our words, we need to be consciously aware of the other parts of communi

Our thoughts that we have matter!  Thoughts are an interesting thing to me. They are things that are in our heads and have always been there. Some people's thoughts are more self-centered but others can tend to have a more outward focus with their thoughts. This is such a powerful thing. We can have thoughts running through our heads all the time. We can also have them expressed all the time if we choose to. So something that I learned about in my class this week was how our thoughts influence our lives and the lives of our family and people we encounter.  The effect of thoughts on one's self:  I can remember growing up how often I thought negatively about myself and others. I would say that high school was the peak low for my thought negativity. I was constantly comparing myself to others and never thought I was good enough. This concept of never measuring up was a combination of school grades, sports, religious efforts, and much more. I was not seeing my value in the unique c

 Hello Everyone! This week was great to learn about topics that seem to be more common each year. The topics that I learned about were pornography and infidelity. I have heard more in the past few years about people in my life who have found out about infidelity or pornography in their marriage. It is always so sad to hear about and honestly makes me nervous at times to take the step into marriage. Many stories I've heard talk about how marriage was good in the beginning and then infidelity crept in or pornography was introduced with one of the spouses. When we think about our world today, it isn't super surprising that infidelity and pornography are such big issues now. Most every movie or tv show has romance and those relationships often can start with one person being dishonest and starting a new relationship with another person. There are also relationships that often end and never show the positive aspects of becoming more serious in a relationship and progressing toward m

 Hello everyone! This week I learned more about the transitions that can happen when a couple is married. There are specific adjustments and steps that often happen in the first few months of marriage. Those adjustments, whether expected or unexpected can also happen one year into the marriage as well. I am not married but I imagine that throughout major milestones and changes in marriage, there will be adjustments that need to happen. One major milestone in a marriage could be a child entering the family. This has the potential to completely change the dynamic of the husband and wife because of the new commitments to the child. When a child leaves the home it may take adjustments for the husband and wife as well. Some examples of adjustments that have to be made during the first month of marriage included: sharing the same space, eating habits, budgeting, sleeping habits, cleanliness, spirituality, communication styles. There are many more but these were specific examples that I found