Families

I loved the points Bellah makes about families, about the importance of them and the ambiguity as well.

Being the daughter of a social worker who works in family social services (as well has being a social work major myself), I've been raised on the importance of relying on your family, being there for your family, and, just like Bellah talks about, eating with them. I think he was spot on when he said attentive families breed attentive children. It goes right back to de Tocqueville and the development of habits. If we form good habits of attention in our families we can not only improve our private lives (such as in marriages) but also our public lives (i.e. volunteering and joining organizations).

This class may be called "democratic vistas" but I think the underlying theme of the class may truly be "get involved and stay involved". De Tocqueville presented this in a very formal manner based in our government and Bellah and Putman have kind of joined forces to advocate for personalized involvement. By personalized involvement I mean finding an association you can be passionate about and that inserts you if governmental affairs isn't your cup of tea.

Circling back to the idea Bellah presents on families (I know, this is very disorganized and I feel like most of my blog posts are. I should work on that but I'm just so focused on getting my thoughts down before they vanish), I was able to connect his claim that creating "normal standard" for families is a historical mistake to one of my other classes.

Currently, I'm enrolled in Courtly Love in the Middle Ages and last week one of our readings had to do with day to day life in medieval times. One section the book talked about focused specifically on the ambiguity of "families" at the time. Medieval France didn't even have a real name for what we think of as family (which, in the case of my history textbook was blood relatives who live with you). They didn't have name because the word they used, familia, refereed to everybody who lived in that household; blood relations and hired help alike. To make things even more complicated, children, especially boys, rarely lived with their real parents. They often went to live with the maternal uncles or religious institutions (usually by the time they were 8) to receive their education. I think this goes to show us that it's awfully hard to have a standard now when at any point of time in history there wasn't one to be had.