Life is full of adventure and triumph, but sometimes the grass is not greener on the other side. Sometimes many sacrifices must be made in order to accomplish our own goals. We may all have duties that we have to deal with just to make it by, but we can acknowledge them through our personal experiences. Responsibilities are more important than Rights. Everyone has rights and responsibilities. Rights are things that people are allowed to do. Responsibilities are things that people are expected to do. In today society amongst all young adults and teens are pregnancies and the responsibility of taking care of a child. As many people know being a parent is one of the biggest responsibilities they will have in their entire lifetime. It requires much time, especially during a child’s adolescence. Being a good parent is loving your child for one part, and other qualities that must be taken up to be a good parent are but not limited to supporting them financially and emotionally, not putting them down, letting them have some independence, and communicating well with them. A good parent also lets them talk and doesn’t talk back. Kids now need to be heard instead of just being lectured, and not being able to talk and voice their opinion about whatever it is they’re talking about. So this brings me to a responsibility which I feel is one of the biggest to me as a young adult and that is family values.
I believe strongly in passing down family traditions from generation to generation so the younger generation knows exactly where they came from, and how their family tradition made an impact on how they live their life and how their upbringing made them into the person they will soon become. Family values sound as if they are internal beliefs held within a family unit, only this isn’t what they are in the least. They are ideals conveyed to the masses through media, marketing, economics, and educational institutions. Family values are ideals so completely elusive and indefinable that at some point they became coming from a non-point source, impossible to control. Was it a goal for these views to become so rigid and widely held, or did we lose sight of what is truly valuable in a family? Current views of American family values should be what one personally values for their family. This is unfortunately not the case. So where did we as the younger generations go wrong in keeping these views alive? Well it can range from a variety of things from the music we listen to all the way down to the way we want other people to see us on the outside. Most people are mainly focused on how other people see them they tend to lose focus on the tradition values which they are mostly recognized for. Turn on the TV or pick up a popular magazine and I am sure you will find the pages filled with beautiful women with glowing complexions and flawless features. But how many of those photos depict real beauty? I have seen the truth myself in this class and the truth is that most of the images we see are not real at all, but are in fact a fabrication of what society thinks is beautiful. So, what does society tell us is beautiful? Tall, thin, large breasts, round butts, all while maintaining a very petite waist. Those are just a few of the descriptions that come to mind. All of this pressure from society as a whole can lead to many women who lack these physical trait feeling upset with themselves and living life with identity conflicts and/or spending enormous amounts of money on unnecessary surgeries to satisfy society or what they believe the society wants to see. That’s why I feel it is important to have strong family values and traditions in place to encourage and support children, especially teenagers. They need to feel good about themselves and their accomplishments, they need their parent’s approval and they need to know that someone is proud of them. If a child is raised to love and accept who they are and what they look like, they will be less likely to strive to fit into society’s unattainable standards. Another equally important environment that I believe can have an impact on young people is school; especially Jr. High School. This is the time when most young people go through the trials of puberty. As the body begins to change this is the crucial time period where many adolescents become preoccupied with how they are view by society. To make perfect sense of the point I’m getting to is just saying that in our social life, each person has one’s own roles and responsibilities, attitudes and values. Since every individual is unique and distinct compared to one another, these elements that construct our individuality are not always similar. Similarities and reflection of our values make us belong to a group, but the differences are barriers that stop ourselves from being recognized as an indivisible part of it.
Belonging and identity are inseparable; nonetheless, there are distinctions that create a world of difference between the two. Belonging is not only about to whom we incorporate ourselves the way we perceive it, but also how others recognize our relationship with that group. Therefore, it can be forged; since we can control our approach to a group, we are able direct the people’s opinion about ourselves. This is because most people observe only what is visible and that is our belonging. Our absolute and real identity remains imperceptible; this is because it is not only about how others recognize us, but also how we identify ourselves as complete individuals. Sometimes belonging comes undesirably and not few deny their relationships with groups which they are born to belong. Even when one’s relationship is not genuine it can still create an impression of belonging, at least for those who are unable to perceive the integrity of that connection. From this pseudo-notion our roles and responsibilities emerge; at this point, belonging and recognition (both personally and socially) dissolve although not completely combine, into a single entity that fits in a considerable part of the identity puzzle as a whole. Hence, in a sense, one can hardly associate and not identify with a group to which one belongs. So as time goes on hope one day we will see those traditional values resurface to instill an importance of family values to our next generation of society, because in the end the impression it leave will withstand until the end of time.