Insights and Perspectives

 Hello everyone! I learned some things this week about divorce, remarriage, and blended families that I had never heard of before. I come from a family where both parents have stayed married throughout my life. I understand that this is not always the case. If anything it is more common for families to be blended in some form.  I wanted to share some of the information that I learned about divorce this week. Divorce can come as a result of many things. Couples can often just be unsatisfied with their marriage, and infidelity can be a cause which I believe also includes pornography addictions. When it comes down to it, divorce happens because two people are unable to see themselves continuing in the situation that they were in currently. But many people don't even consider the effect that this divorce may have on themselves and their children. Something that I found interesting was that infidelity is not the most common reason for divorce. Often times people who have had infide...

 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 neces...

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 un...