Family Bonds
When you experience the first feeble jitters indicating towards the weakening of your family bonding, it’s time to reassess the values and visions of your family. Unless you have well defined values and vision, you can never enjoy a cohesive force that keeps the family together and you will all be like individuals simply sharing a house without any bonding. Now that is surely not what you can call a family, where you’ve got hardly any communication or a feeling of concern between the family members.
Values are the building blocks for the character of our children, providing them with a scale to assess their decisions and there blunders. Every family has certain values whether clearly defined or not, such as you have rules about food, friends, outings, religious beliefs, socializing with people and so on. The problem begins usually when most of the values are dominated by one single person’s thinking or when every member is not properly communicated about the values of the family.
We all as individuals have the right to decide on our own values, however when we’re talking of family values we need to arrive at something which is mutually acceptable to all in the family. Also, your family values must change with changing time to accommodate the new generation thinking, or else the new generation may feel suffocated with your existing family values. And that’s usually when kids begin to retaliate and your family bonds begin to fall apart.
The next important pillar of family bonding, that we mentioned earlier, is family vision. Vision can be simply be understood as the food for your soul, that is what kind of an emotional atmosphere exists in your house and what kind of feelings are you trying to cultivate in the minds of all the family members. It is important to identify how each member of the family should relate with the other members of the family on a one to one basis. Every member of the family must be aware of what are the expectations from him or her and how each one must take care of everyone else in the family.
Values are more confined to the do’s and don’ts, whereas vision is more focused on the emotional aspect, but unless both these tools are used simultaneously you may find it difficult to build up strong bonds in your family.
