Essential Family Roles

 

Throughout the week in my class where we are learning about family relationships, we spent an entire session focusing on the different roles that each family member has in the family. What surprised me is that I didn’t even know that there were any roles that families, including children had in their families. For example, some of the roles that the families have are different, parents are meant to provide and keep a safe place for their children to grow. Children are only meant to grow, enjoy, and learn while growing up in that safe place for them. The children in those families at a young age, may not realize that they already have a role that helps and contributes to the family.

Speaking from personal experience, my only role as a young child, my role was to do well in school, make sure I help out at home with whatever my family may need, keep myself clean and responsible, and enjoy myself by having fun with friends or family. Of course, throughout time, roles can change depending on the circumstances of each family member. For example, recently, when I moved up to college, my family had to rearrange the way they do some of the things at home and together since I am not there to help them when needed.  But when circumstances change, the roles could change as well within families. They help each other.

We may not realize it, but when families work together, contribute, and fulfill those roles that they have together, it makes a big difference and has a lot of meaning to others in the families as well. When we think about it, we see the roles that the parents have to help contribute and provide for the family, the roles that the children play to help them at home, can prepare the children when they grow up and the time comes for them to provide for the family that they will have in their future. Those roles help prepare the children to take on new responsibilities when the time comes around for them depending on the circumstance they are in involving school, work, or anything that may come their way growing up. The roles that each family member has is essential for many things in the family. As long as they work together, show love, and strengthen each other, the roles they have can be fulfilling.

These days in society, with the idea involving family or even having a family is becoming more bitter among people, it is becoming increasingly more and more difficult to provide those roles to family members that helps their children prepare for the next part of their lives. Many families are becoming less involved with each other in fulfilling those responsibilities and working together to help them fulfill them. More families are now more used to doing their own things and spending less time together and not contributing in their roles to help each other. Our generation is going farther away from families and its values, but that also means that they are moving away from its values and benefits that come from families and the roles they have as well. If that keeps up, it will bring consequences for the current generation and the next generation to come.

Roles that come along in our lives are should always be essential, not only to the family or whoever provides those roles for the individuals, but for the person who has that role to fulfill. The children should always be taught how those values and roles involving families are more essential to them than they think and how it prepares them to take on bigger roles that will come into their lives when the time comes for them to grow up.