Keeping in Touch With Your Parents

When we get older we get busy and we begin to forget about your parents. This is especially a problem for people between the age of 30 and 40 where they are now independent and have the busiest lives. After the age of 40 and children the parents seem to become more important because the children take precedent and our lives slow down. Keeping in touch with parents is more important than simply making our elders happy it is about grounding the next generation.

Family traditions are formed through the important relationships of family members. We learn the history of where we come from, what it means to be in your particular family and where the family's strengths come from. When we have cut off our family members we have in affect cut off our origins.

Family is more important than our fast paced lifestyles would have us believe. Family is where we come from and where we will go to. To not know your family and your origins is to not know who you are. In such cases you are simply a small snapshot in time and this damages your self-esteem and your self-perception.

Those who have no family history (i.e. orphans, etc.) often have much more difficulty living a good lifestyle. They are prone to believe in all types of negative ideologies that might be destructive to their future. The more you know about your history the more responsible you feel towards your own life.

Children can also be damaged when the extended family relationships are not strong. Children will not feel the same love and affection when other members are in their lives. They will feel isolated when compared to other children and have less people to rely on during their lives. Their memories will be cut short by the selfishness of their parents.

One of the declines in family relationships has result from the high mobility of our society. A hundred years ago many family members lived within a few miles of each other. They owned farms or small businesses and didn't venture far from their hometowns. However, as cars became popular it became easy to move around the country. Likewise there was an overall migration from the low paying lifestyle of the farmer to that of the industrial worker.

With all of the competing interests families are more important now then they have been in the past. The country has dissolved many relations in its desire to change old time values into modern culture. We had the sexual revolution, we had the sexual values revolution, the information revolution, the post World War revolutions and the diversity revolution. With families living hundreds of miles from each other they weren't able to maintain any similarity in bonds.