How Come Grandpa Always gets the Comfy Chair?

Rules? The Clockwork of Family Dynamics

Have you ever noticed that every family is different and runs by different rules? You often don’t know what these rules are until you break them. They’re never explained or written down, just understood. Some of these rules can be quite interesting. This week I tried to discover some of the unspoken and unwritten rules of families I know. We spent a good deal of time discussing this in class, I talked it over with my wife, and I interviewed a couple of close friends about it too and I heard some interesting rules throughout all of this.

“Don’t touch mom’s food or she’ll bite your fingers.”

“If grandpa is staring at something at the dinner table, pass it to grandpa. Especially if he looks up at you!”

“If mom sees you, she’s going to ask you to do the chore.”

“Don’t dish out what you can’t take twice as bad.”

“If you get into a fight while mom is gone, whoever gets to her first avoids punishment.”

“End every sentence with, ‘you hear me?’ because dad is deaf.”

“Dad says no, mom says yes.”

            None of these rules are inherently bad, but it can be an interesting and healthy exercise to look at our families’ unwritten rules and see if any of them need to be changed.

            Some of our family rules could even be classified as traditions (an inherited pattern of behavior). For example, my family has pizza every Friday night. It’s become so recurrent that it’s expected, and it’s become a whole family ordeal. All my siblings and I would get involved in making the pizza (at least with the toppings) and afterwards we’d all sit down and watch a movie together. The rule with this tradition was that if you didn’t help make the pizza, you couldn’t complain about the kind of pizza that you got.

            Some family rules can be quite beneficial! My wife and I have a rule, if we’re mad at each other, then we must talk about it within an hour of becoming mad. Another one that we have is that we always have a date night at least once a week (sometimes date night is eating popcorn and watching a movie together). What are some rules that you have in your family that help you love each other and strengthen relationships within your family?

Roles? The Bread and Butter of Family Dynamics.

            There are many roles that exist in the family system. For example, there’s the Executive, the Peacemaker, the Caregiver, the Comic Relief/Family Clown/Middle Child, the Spoiled One (AKA the Baby), the Responsible One (in Hispanic cultures, often referred to as ‘la Mamita’), the Black Sheep, the Athlete, the Bookworm, the Pack-Mule, the Errand Runner, the Grocery Getter, the Chef, etc., etc. There are a lot of roles and we could probably make this list a lot longer, but that’s not the important part. Each role has its own importance and opportunity to improve the others; however, there are a few key roles that I’ll discuss in a bit.

These family roles are something that we all have and are subject to. It is very difficult to change our roles within the family. For example, I left home for two years and had very little contact with my family during that time. In those two years, I changed a lot. I no longer fit into that role when I returned home. However, my family was used to a different me and I felt a lot of pressure to change back. Eventually (through a mixture of compromise and stubbornness) we settled on a middle-ground-me, which I’ll admit is a better me than I’ve ever been. The pressure wasn’t in a verbal or direct way, it was subtle, like a joke being made that I used to laugh at or my siblings trying to spend time with me in ways that I used to enjoy. You could describe this process as me receiving negative feedback from my family about different aspects of my ‘new’ role and receiving positive feedback about different aspects of my ‘old’ role. This type of occurrence makes it difficult (but not impossible) for people to change.

No matter what, there must always be an Executive within a family. The role of the Executive is to lead the family in all areas. Sounds like a tyrant, right? Well, ideally there is an Executive Subset. An executive subset is when there are two leaders who work in close harmony. They each take turns leading situations and each of them brings different solutions and opportunities to the table when they do so. This executive subset is ideally the parents’ role. When a child grows up in a home where mom and dad work well together, the child feels more safe and secure in that home.

“By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation” (The Family: A Proclamation to the World, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

(P.S. If you want to know more about either Family Rules or Family Roles, let me know in the comments and I’ll make another post about this topic next week)