From personal experience, I know that parents can become very busy in their daily lives and thus not be able to keep an eye on everything that happens in their children's lives. Being mindful of what’s going on in a child’s life can make a large difference in the way that a parent or other family member treats that family member. Things that happen at school such as bad test grades or bullying can carry back home to a family and have negative effects. The child can become distant, they can lash out in aggression, or in a worst case scenario a child could self-harm. In a report done in Finland, there was a study done on the factors that cause adolescents to self-harm. Some of these factors were whether or not their parents were together, whether they had a poor relationship with their parents, or if they had a poor relationship with their siblings. The final conclusion drawn from this study was that two-parent households where there is a poor relationship with the parents and siblings had the highest prevalence of self-harm (Hintikka 2009).

Hintikka Jukka, et al. “The Prevalence Of Self-Cutting And Other Self-Harm Among 13-   To 18-Year-Old Finnish Adolescents.” Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology 44.1 .2009): 23-28. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Apr. 2013.

School

School is a good example of how there are multiple responsibilities for children, including being at school and doing well in school. In my life, I always struggled with grades, but I knew that was due to my own laziness. Attendance on the other hand was something that I viewed as compulsory due to the way my parents taught me. While there was no correlation between the different households and the respective GPA of students in those families, attendance in school is a different story. As one study puts it, “[…] this means that the null hypothesis was rejected, with the conclusion that the number of times students were absent from school was related to the type of household in which they lived” (Ferrell 69).  The study showed that single-parent households had a lower attendance in school than two-parent households. Attendance is an important fact to consider because as opposed to GPA, where arguments of intelligence being a variable in the study can be made, attendance is a behavioral issue that can be affected by family dynamics and attitude. Thus the responsibility is on the parents to make their charges go to school regularly.

Ferrell, Ronald T. The Effects of Single-Parent Households Versus Two-Parent Households on Student Academic Success, Attendance, and Suspensions. Lindenwood University, 2009 United States -- MissouriProQuest. 15 Apr. 2013. 

Possible sources

After choosing this topic I thought I would have plenty of available studies and reports to choose from for research, but finding them has been a bit troublesome. Finding new wells of sources or information has been rare and tiresome.

Family dynamics is a popular topic, which is evident through most conversation in the media that talks about different family types and remarrying and stepchildren and mixed families and the list goes on and on. Finding interesting and relevant topics is not as easy as all of that would make it seem though. The majority of my research has therefore come from dissertations and studies I have found through databases.  I hope to find a few more to use for my final analysis paper.

Working out ways to utilize information that is not blatantly relevant will be a challenge, but I also plan to use the few sources I have found efficiently in my paper. There are a number of different dissertations in databases that could be of use if analyzed properly. The search for other blogs that pertain to my subject is ongoing however and I hope to find at least one to use as reference in my paper.

Healthy Families

     Mealtime in society nowadays is a group event. We go out with friends to eat, families eat dinner at 6:00 pm and talk about their day, and we sneak a friend away from school to go grab a burger for lunch. These are the times in die when we can refuel and reconnect with others in our lives. Does what we eat and whom we eat it with affect our lives at all. I think that a family that has home-cooked meals at a set time with every member of the household is a stronger family than one that does not.

     I've been on a few different sides of this spectrum personally. I've had family meals for years straight where every night like clockwork, we gathered around and shared our days and watched a little Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy or whatever stuff was on the television. In 2013, it's a pretty common fact that what you eat effects your health. In a family dinner environment, the control of ingredients and meal choice is a lot higher than that of restaurants. As a family, it is a responsibility of the parents or guardians to make sure their child is eating nutritious meals because the adults are in control of the budget, groceries, and when they eat it usually. No one can expect an 11 year old kid to know what to eat or how to eat or how to be healthy, all they can think is "How can I make ice cream for dinner?". A huge responsibility of parents now is that they teach their kids about nutrition.
     Another form of dinner excludes the whole family and can either be a portion of the family or completely solo dinners. If one parent works at night and can't be home for dinner, it makes family dinners less of a whole experience. Being from a family like that myself, it is tougher to bond together as a family and communicate effectively.There are certain situations where that is unpreventable however. The worst situation you could find yourself in is eating your dinners alone. This can cause disconnect between families and make for fuzzier communication between members of the family.
     Currently, with my adoptive family, we do not eat family dinners on a nightly basis. When mom is home on the weekends, we instead go out to restaurants and eat and chat there. This is pretty nice because there's no hassle in the cooking and no one has to fight over who does the dishes, but before we used to do full family dinners. If you missed that dinner, you better make sure you had a damn good excuse or else you would get an earful for missing this bonding time. Eating out on a consistent basis has two glaring downsides. One is that the control of nutrition is severely hampered. It is possible to eat right by ordering intelligently, but  you cannot go and create your own thing in the kitchen. The feel of a home-cooked meal environment is very different too because you feel closer to your family when it's at home and cooked by the family (ordering pizza doesn't count).
    Overall, I have found that eating dinner as a family has certain psychological benefits that other forms of dinner. This can improve communication across the family and can be a fun time for everyone!

College Pt. II

In my last post, I talked about my sisters and their respective college situations. The main points I focused on were the homesickness my sisters felt and how that affected me. Speaking more about college, I want to talk more about how college life has affected me and my responsibilities to my families. 

     My adoptive mother travels nearly every weekday. Everywhere from Texas to Canada to California, she is gone most of the week. Her son Kevin and I have the most responsibility for taking care of the house while she's gone. We make sure dinner is ready for Karly and Kyle, the younger siblings, and that they do their homework.  We also make sure Kyle gets to lacrosse practice and that Karly gets to swimming practice. His grandmother Gaga takes care of the grocery shopping, though she is getting too old to consistently drive and do that, so Kevin and I have begun to take charge of that as well. We also have a dog and three cats, so taking care of pet food and uh, "business". Add a college workload to that and you have a recipe for a full plate of things to do for the week.

     This has given me a few things aside from a headache, and I think the biggest thing it has given me is a wider skill set for actual living. Being only 19, it's really nice to be getting a feel of what actual life is like, in the sense of going grocery shopping and doing housework and the like. I have fixed my share of toilets and washed my share of stains this past semester and a half. Being so busy makes it hard to get find time for a job and keeping money is more of a challenge with gas and personal amenities It's hard to find a perfect solution to everything, but working hard and looking out for family has been more important lately.

College

     My mom and dad never went to college, but growing up I never really thought of not going to college as an option. I also never thought of myself going to college in family terms either, but I have tried to step back and take a better look at how my school life effects my family life. I find that due to studying and assignments that I have less time to spend with family. This is while still living at home too. My sister, who's 21 and goes to Lycoming College in Pennsylvania, complains nonstop of being homesick and I never really understood until I visited her for the first time a few weekends ago. She does not have a roommate, so while that may seem glamorous to some, I think it would get extremely lonely very quickly. I also was not even too excited to visit her for the weekend anyway, I thought, "Hey, I've spent the better part of 15 years living with my sister, why do I have to throw another weekend on top of that?". I was surprised at how excited she was to see me though. She showed me off to all her friends, bursting with joy that her little brother could come see her and see where she lives and what she does etc. I started to understand that though I'm going to community college and I can kind of pick and choose when I want to hang out with some of my family, my sister is a couple of states away and does not have that luxury. It made me appreciate the visit more and vow to see her again in the near future.
      My adoptive sister Katie goes to Virginia Tech and she also is feeling homesick so her brother Kevin and I are going to visit her this weekend. The previous visit with my sister taught me that these family visits mean more because we hardly get to see one another anymore so I take it as a sort of personal responsibility to make my sisters feel better about not being closer to home. I think that's a responsibility of families as a whole to support one another when there is obviously a lot of sadness in the direction of certain family members. Homesickeness can even cause measurable emotional stress on college students as you can see in table 6 of the attached link. 

http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=75d9c106-b006-4ace-bc10-cf38e104339a%40sessionmgr14&vid=6&hid=27

WOOSLEY, SHERRY A., and DUSTIN K. SHEPLER. "Understanding The Early Integration Experiences Of First-Generation College Students." College Student Journal 45.4 (2011): 700-714. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Holiday Time

     Holidays are a classic time for families to get together and spread cheer and do things together, as we all know. November through January are a hectic time with Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, but growing up with my mother, father, brother, and sister, we never but a lot of time or effort into celebrating extravagantly. We did the whole dinner at Thanksgiving bit and presents on Christmas, but nothing too fancy. Once I began to live with my friend Kevin and his family when I was 15, holidays became a much bigger deal.

     For starters, I was always the youngest member in my own household, so I was the focal point of certain holidays like Halloween and Christmas. In my new home, I have an 11 year old sister (Karly) and a 16 year old brother (Kyle), so the focus totally is shifted towards them. Holidays are taken much more seriously in this home. Halloween is Karly's favorite holiday. With mom gone from on business trips so often it falls to me and Kevin, my friend whose family i live with, to take her trick or treating or to make sure everything is going smoothly for her day. Thanksgiving is when older sister Katie comes home from Virginia Tech to spend time with the family and cooks Thanksgiving dinner for a family of 7 people. Christmas is easily the most hectic time, as I'm sure it is for most families, for the household. Mom is always big on family time and togetherness and so is Christmas, calling for the need of perfect holidays. This was a far-cry from the lax holidays I had become accustomed to, and in the beginning I was a mixture of put-off and annoyed at the extra effort needed to spend time with family. However, as I spent more and more time around these holidays and their new found prominence in my life, I began to appreciate more the fact that I was a part of them. Anyone who sees the family around this time can easily see how the holiday mood affects them. Everyone is much calmer in a usually more frantic environment, the lazier members of the house find themselves contributing more, and everyone seems more intent on keeping the peace. These kinds of environments have had a positive effect on me as a person overall because I feel much happier throughout the year and have more to look forward to than just food and presents.

     This type of attitude contrasts with what I had grown up with. The holidays I were used to did not have extra meaning to them so the environment of the house never saw that type of emotional upswing that was the norm at Kevin's house. No one gave a damn if it was September 25th or December 25th, there was a way things were done and just because the holidays came around did not mean that the rules suddenly changed. The reprieves the holidays have brought have become an important part of my life.

     The effects can be seen taking place on Karly and Kyle too, which is most important because they are the ones who are most easily shaped by what they see. So while it's nice I have gotten a chance to have a new experience, it is even more crucial that the younger ones now know what successful family life during the holidays looks like. 

     The different ways for adults to manage less stressful holidays is included in the link below. 
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a122441d-32bd-4d25-ac45-732a79e74cd4%40sessionmgr10&vid=5&hid=27

Richardson, Whitney. "Stress Less" Holidays." Country's Best Cabins 17.7 (2012): 6. Associates Programs Source. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

What's Successful?

  This type of topic is something that needs not only a scientific eye to look at social experiments, but a more caring and personal viewpoint as well to fully understand the effects on children. A parent or adult figure is needed at all ages in life, whether you're an infant that needs help with everything, a toddler that keeps crawling into danger, a wide-eyed child going off to elementary school for the first time, or that cocky teenager full of raging hormones and bad ideas. Someone needs to be there to change your diaper, to guide you away from those electrical sockets, to hold your hand and introduce you to your teacher, or to ensure you're going to become a responsible adult that functions well in society. It is my belief that no one can grow up successfully without an adult figure to help out through life. If that's your birth parents, then great! If that happens to be your adoptive family, more power to you! Your favorite teacher, caring coach, best friends parents, someone, as long as they are a positive role model, has to guide a young spirit through those grueling first eighteen years of life.
   How do we define a positive role model? Well, someone who can lead by example. We don't ask hobos, thieves, or inmates to come talk in to teenagers about life after school. It's those adults who understand life, who work hard for their goals, that we want to influence these kids. As for me, I spent part of my life surrounded by those who could not provide those qualities needed in a great role model, so I chose to spend my life with someone who was. This choice allowed me to begin to understand was needed for a teenager to begin that ascent into adulthood. I contend that the nuclear family is no longer a necessity to foster a safe haven for children, but that extended families, single parent households, and adoptive families can manage just as well, given the right people at the helm. The parent is the captain of the ship (house) and needs to look after the crew (children) of their ship. I have included a link to another blog that touches on the same subject here, but from a different viewpoint.
http://timetoloveyourself.com/blog/wise-parents-teac/
   

Introduction to navigating family

Coming from a non-typical living situation, I think that I've found success in continuing my education after high school and I have begun to wonder if this a normal thing or if kids and teenagers give up hope when things happen that are out of their control. I hope to find reason to believe that anyone can be successful, regardless of their situation. The circumstances that one cannot control should not control their fate and I want to show that it is completely possible to do whatever you want to do. I don't think there is a perfect formula to growing up with family, but I can find certain elements that everyone needs and that they have the power to contribute with.