Emily McCaleb Family Relations

  These days the role of fathers is being attacked. There is a saying from the sixties that a woman needs a man as much as a fish needs a bicycle. Fathers are viewed as unnecessary in the parenting process.  This is incredibly sad to me. The woman needs the man as much as the man needs the woman.  People are convinced that we need two incomes to support a family. This has become a more popular trend in recent years. However there are more studies showing the negatives of both parents working. One study showed that housing prices went up in neighborhoods and cities where women were working. Another study showed that a family's expenses went up so much that the second income actually hurt their original income. They had to pay for another car, childcare, convenient food, and other expenses. The average second income only ends up really being $1 an hour after all the expenses. This study represents the typical family with a second income. Some people have said that we should...

  Hey everybody! I hope you had an amazing week! This week we will be talking about, in my opinion, one of the most important tools that we have as human beings. That topic is communication. It is happening all around us whether we realize it or not. Communication in its simplest definition is the sharing or exchange of information. When we are communicating with other people, we are trying to share our thoughts and feelings with another person who also has thoughts and feelings. This can become a very complicated matter, especially when peoples thoughts are different from each other. We communicate through a process called encoding and decoding. When we have a thought that we want to convey, we encode it or convert it into a coded form. For example, I might want to better understand how a person was feeling that day because I care about them. So I might ask, “How was your day?” In my mind I asked them how they were feeling that day because that question was in the context of my th...

  Hey everybody! I hope you all had a fantastic week that wasn’t filled with this week’s topic. It is something that we are all very familiar with. It is stress! It is a major part of our everyday lives. We feel it when we have a big test coming up, when we are late to work, or even if there is conflict within the home. Stress can be a good motivator to get things done. However, if we have too much stress in our lives, it can be harmful to us and our relationships. Within the family, everybody deals with their stress in a different way. This can lead to conflict if misunderstood. For instance, when a woman needs to deal with her stress she will often try to talk it out. When a man needs to deal with stress he will often find something that will help him focus on something else. These are very different coping methods that can be misinterpreted by the opposite sex. The man might think that the woman is blaming him for the problems. The woman might think that the man is ignoring her ...

       Hey everybody! This week I am going to be talking about something that most people tend to shy away from in today's society. That topic is sexual intimacy. In Genesis Chapter 1 Verse 28 it reads, “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Our Father in Heaven wants us to multiply ,or in other words have kids, while we are here on earth. We do this through the sacred act of procreation. Sexual intimacy is a good thing in the eyes of God if used within the bonds of marriage. The world tries to tell us that having sexual relations outside of marriage is accepted and has no harmful effects on a person. However, this is not the case. Many studies have shown that people are much happier and report satisfaction within their lives when they only have one sexual partner that is within the bonds of marriage. If one has sexual relations outside of marriage with multiple people, there is the risk of sexual diseases,...

 Marriage is such an important part of life. It creates loyalty, unity, and love within the family. It promotes stability, security, compromise, conflict resolution, and many more positive attributes. Marriage can be traced back to the beginning of the world. It is the foundation for the basic unit of the family. However, more recently marriage has become less and less common. People are opting for “the single life” or  cohabitation (in other words living together outside the bonds of marriage.)  There are many reasons that we are seeing these current trends. One reason people gave is that “ you lose your individuality when you get married.”  My family relations professor is a family and marriage therapist and has said in his many years of experience he has never once had a couple come in with marital problems and express that concern. Another reason is that people want to “see how they work together.” In my personal opinion, I would want the guarantee of a commitmen...

       Hi everybody! This week we learned about the concept of dating and preparing for marriage. This is a topic that has changed its meaning over generations. In the olden days “seriously dating” was called courting. In order to court someone, a man would have to ask the father permission inorder to court his daughter. It was a much more serious affair then it is now. These days it seems that everybody has their own definition of what dating means. When I asked one roommate what it meant to her, she explained that it is when you go out with someone for a non-committal activity. When I asked another roommate she answered that it is when you are seriously committed to one person and only go on dates with them. For the purposes of this blog entry, I am defining dating as going on dates and seriously dating or courting as a commitment to only date each other.  In the last few decades, dating has taken a significant decline in frequency. People are no longer asking...

  Hello everybody! I hope your week is going absolutely fantastic! This week I am going to be writing about Christ’s example and gender roles. Gender has become a very sensitive subject in the modern world. It has become a very relevant issue in politics and in social interactions. In fact, it is still being brought up in current politics as they are trying to decide the next supreme court justice. I believe that it is a subject that we should all be able to openly talk about without judgement on either side. If we are able to see others with love and compassion, we can discuss these sensitive subjects openly.  A person's sexual attraction has been widely discussed among social science workers. Is it biological or a choice? Does it have to do with a person's environment or their personal experiences? The answer is that there isn’t a definite answer. Like most of the social science studies, there isn’t one definite answer to the question because there are multiple factors invol...