Intro Blog

    I am excited to be blogging my experiences and knowledge I gain while studying the family in my family relations class. We have only had one class period so far, but we learned about the value and challenges of family science research. At first I wasn't super excited about the class or the idea of blogging my thoughts, but as we talked about the family and discussed the reasoning for the blogging I became more excited and I hope my thoughts will help my readers with or without families to see the importance of relationships within families and the importance of families in general.

    As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, we believe strongly in the importance of the family and as I have grown up (I am currently 20 years old) I have come to know the importance of the family in my life as well. During our class I was touched when our professor shared a story of a young lady he had in class whose parents did not support her being at BYU-I,  but she wrote her blogs both in english and her native tongue so her parents could read it, as they read it they starting seeing the importance of the topics she was discussing, but the end of the class her parents fully supported her being at BYU-I and said they would pay for her tuition to continue attending. I was also already saddened hearing stories from students in my class with family members changing beliefs or with their parents split.

    After class I read a section of our reading from Lauer & Lauer. I was not necessarily surprised by the stats I saw because I knew families had been declining but seeing it in a book showing the declines of family and such made it more real for me. One of the terms I was almost angry about was one called cohabitation. Lauer & Lauer defines cohabitation as: "living with someone in an intimate, sexual relationship without being legally married. Humans are starting to care more about fulfilling their sexual desires than having a family, along with cohabitation people are getting married later in life. Between 1950 and 1970 half of the females married were married by 20.5 and 22.5 for the males. Based off a study in 2007 the ages are now 26 for females and 28 for males, for males and females the age increased by 5.5 years! 

    One of the challenges we talked about in class about families is that it can be kind of a controversial subject, we all have our opinions about families, at what age we should marry, if sexual relations are okay outside of legal marriage. In this blog I am going to share what we learned in class and my thoughts about the family. I hope this challenge will not be a big problem for me and my blog, I respect others opinions and I expect the same respect from you, my readers. A quote from our prophet Russell M. Nelson says: "The home is the great laboratory of love. There the raw chemicals of selfishness and greed are melding in the crucible cooperation to yield compassionate concern and love for one another." I agree when he says the home is the great laboratory of love, when we go home we should be able to talk to our siblings and parents as friends and be the same friend for them, our families are there for us and want us to succeed. 

    Another statistic in Lauer & Lauer showed that the average size of households has gone down, in my family I have four brother and my parents, I am so grateful for the support I receive from them and hope that as you read my blog you will find motivation to either start a family, or grow the support system within your family.

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