Family!

You should never abandon your rights! It takes a lot of guts to do it but you need it for good reasons! 😉 Welcome back friends from the US, Philippines, France, Canada, and the UK 😉

Erika was so excited about her new family. She kept telling us about the new house they were moving to, and the members of her family who would be living with her.

Renee raised a good question, although she used a lower voice as if she didn’t want Erika to hear what she was saying. She said: “Is this a family?”

I thought about it all the way home: why did she say that? What was wrong with the structure of Erika’s family? Why did Renee express her opposition for considering Erika’s family as a family?

Is this how you think about a family?

. The family definition now or in the past has a relative meaning. It is different from one place to the other, and from one person to the other.

. Your family’s construction can be one parent and one child, a grand father/mother with a child, or two siblings living together, it is still a family.

. In the past, your family consisted of a father, a mother, and children. Then it changed and became parents and children whether yours or adopted. Then it changed again to include any elements living together: your uncle and his cousin, same genders or opposite genders, children with adults, or any other combination.

In brief, when Erika stated that her grandma, her sister, and herself were getting a new place of their own, she said that she was moving with her family to Sonoma in Northern California.

Those people were her family. For her, that was her own family. She believed in that, she lived by that, and we should respect that! What do you think?

For Renee, she had a husband and a baby, and for her, the family was her husband, her baby, and herself. That was the right definition for a family in her own mind.

And you know what? Both were right, but they didn’t realize that any shape of a family has become possible. The family’s unit no longer depends on the close/far relatives or the gender of people, or age any more.

Now, the family is any number of people any gender living together in the same house, even if they were not relatives.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the era of the nuclear family, with a dad who went to work and the mom who stayed at home, has declined to the point of no return. The big question is: What is replacing it?

How do you feel about that? Do you think that it is better to go back to the old structure? The age of the nuclear family has ended by your new community’s beliefs.