This week in my Family Relations class we talked about roles played in the family. During our lecture, my professor invited three volunteers to do a little role playing for the class. We had one man, playing the role of a dad and two women, one playing the role of mom and the other playing as the daughter. During this role play, Brother Williams invited us to observe the roles that each volunteer naturally took over. In this situation, the daughter was having an asthma attack and the mom was naturally taking the head role of how to fix the situation and the dad was just kinda there for support or to help gather materials needed to fix the problem.
A while later, we switched up the topics to general system theories inside the family. there were four theories that we discussed during this class discussion. They were Conflict theory, and this is basically Power=Influence. To dive a little more into this theory, sometimes, maybe siblings aren't getting along and they fight for the power in a situation. To prepare for this class I watched an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. In this episode it was Ray's dad's 65th birthday. Ray and his brother were competing with each other to give the best gift and to win their fathers approval. This was a really great example of the conflict theory and what it looks like competing for power and attention.
The second theory was exchange, this one is basically trying to get the most out of a relationship. The ones that stood most out to me, was the systems theory and the symbolic interaction theory. The systems theory is when members of the family take over roles, and sometimes some members of the family give more than others. My mom always used to tell me, that yes my dad was the head of the family, but she is the neck and the neck moves the head. I used to always laugh at that. Looking back at it now, it makes more sense, that family needs to work together for it to run smoothly. We touched a bit during our lecture that if the parents of the family have a strong foundation and things are running smoothly with the parents, then the rest of the family will run smoothly as well. I've seen this in my family too. Whenever my parents would be troubled by something, it would affect me and my brothers also.
Symbolic interaction, this is when every action symbolized something. I know we all have the "look" in our family that our mom gives us when she doesn't approve of what we're doing. When I was younger and me and my brother Ethan ( my partner in crime) used to play a super fun game called, Let's brake mom's ceramic flower pots and watch them shatter.... Even though it was fun at the time, we got the "look" when mom got home and found all of her flower pots were broken on the sidewalk.
I'm really loving this class and learning more about the family! The family is one of the most important purpose of us being here on Earth, I'm so incredibly grateful for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the opportunity to be with my family for time and all eternity.