My Understanding of the Family

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MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE FAMILY Oleksiy P. Baydala Portland State University Abstract Family is one of the greatest things that a human being could’ve ever created. People make stories, write and sing songs and make movies about it, simply because it’s a great feeling being a part of the family. One human is nothing without a family, comparing to the one who has a family. Technically, humanity wouldn’t exist if not the union of the man and a woman that we call a family. In this paper I described my understanding of the family and what it means to me. Also I shared the structure of my family and short biography. Communication between the members of the family is the most important aspects that help maintain happy relationships in the family. The Roles in the family is another important aspect of the happy family. Depending on the role that the person plays in the family, he/she would behave and communicate accordingly. There is a saying about the family that I really like, which says “I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich.” I originate from the land of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and my parents grew up, got married and had kids in that not-easy-to-live time. In Slavic culture, it’s a norm for people to start forming their own families at the age of eighteen to about twenty-five years old, and if they didn’t that was considered strange. I’m not an exception to this unwritten rule, as I got married last summer at the age of twenty-two, even though I was not following the culture rule. The only reason I got married is because I found that one girl that I couldn’t imagine my life without. The traditional definition of family, provided by French social anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1956), fits my understanding of the description of the family. He defines a traditional family as: “(1) it find its origin in marriage;

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