The Importance Of Family Essays - Letter To Khodorkovsky

The Importance Of Family The Importance of Family It has been said that It takes a village to raise a child. I guess the trick would be to find a village of people you would want to help you to raise your children. It would require a group of people with values and standards similar to your own. It is possible to find such a group in a church, if you belong to one, or among your friends, if you have a wide enough circle. However, an extended family is the village that has been responsible for the raising of children for generations in the past. My extended family includes my mother, two sisters and their families, my husband's parents, five brothers and their families. My daughters have four uncles, five aunts and twelve cousins living in California. An extended family, if you are lucky enough to have one, usually shares many values and is willing to help see that these values are passed on to the children. Some of the values my family holds in common include a strong work ethic, respect for other people, the value of education and modesty in dress and action. My father-in-law is a great example. He has had two careers and is still working. He retired after 20 years with the Air Force, earned a Master's Degree in education, taught school and worked in junior high school administration for 20 years and is now a Master Teacher. He supervises new teachers as they fulfill student teaching requirements for their credentials. He is also a successful (selling) artist with work in a cooperative gallery as well as an usher at the Sacramento Community Center Theater in his spare time. He has been married to the mother of his sons for 44 years. He passed on his values to those sons. They all have successful careers in technology, management or entertainment. Most have one or more degrees and a happy marriage. These values are being passed on to the grandchildren as well. They are expected to do th eir best in school and follow rules about the clothes they wear, where and how they spend their time and whom they spend it with. When my daughters complain about our rule that they are not allowed to date until they are 16, I tell them to call any of their cousins and check with them about what their rules are. There are several advantages for us, as parents, to maintaining close family relationships. There are the obvious advantages of built-in babysitters and people to ask for advice. Less obvious advantages include reinforcement, edification, perspective and a wide pool of life examples. Our extended family members share our standards and values and reinforce the lessons and rules we set for our children. My mother-in-law has a great sense of fashion. She has helped my daughters develop good judgment about dress and make-up. They are modest in the clothes they choose to wear. It is a relief, as a mother, to be spared a fight with them over what they call hoochie clothes. When they go to their grandparents' house after school on Thursday, my father-in-law, Papa to them, supervises their homework. They have to complete it before they are allowed to watch TV or play video games. He makes sure they do a thorough job of it as well. There is never any doubt where their priorities should lie. Much of the strength of our family relationships is based on an elusive concept called edification. Edification, in this context, is the building up of one person by another. When our daughters were growing up, we showed respect to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and made it clear that they were to do the same. We demonstrated that their relatives had value in our lives. We often asked my in-laws for advice and let the girls know that we were doing this and following some of what we were told. We were asked for advice as well, so our daughters saw that our opinions were valuable to their grandparents. When the time came that our daughters started to challenge our authority and question our standards, we knew we could count on our relatives to reinforce us