All About Status

 

Hello fellow learners. Hope everyone had a great week. This week we handled many heavy and interesting subjects in my Family Relations Class. So, this week I’m going to talk about social status or statuses within families and how that might affect relationship and the success of a family.

First, I want to start out by asking what is status? Why would it be important to a family? Well, as much as we as American’s don’t want to admit it, there is asocial class within America. There are ranks within our society. These could be based on the amount of money you make, or even the people you associate with, your job, and so many other contributing factors. Look back at when you were in grade school, there was definitely a social class, was there not? There were the jocks, the cheerleaders, the nerds, the music kids, and the social outcasts. Depending on what group you belonged to, the more friends or attention you received. The same can happen with current American residents. There are the famous movie stars that everyone can recognize, the politicians, the businessmen, the retail workers, and food and service workers. We here about the fancy houses that rich people own, and the biggest and best of the social gathering of the year. However, there are so many people that float under the radar, these people hardly ever make into the news, they are good kind people, but have nothing “special” to them, according to society.

So, what does this have to do with marriage and family relations? Why do we care about the social class and status of others? Don’t we only care about who we love and the families we make? Well, in theory yes, we do. We must understand, however, that there can be riffs in families because of social class. I can speak to this from my own experience. I grew up pretty poor, my family always received government help and my mom worked really hard to provide for us. Other than the monthly child support, she was the only one helping around the house, working, and caring for us children. When I was young, I didn’t understand our circumstance, I did not see how hard my mother worked. All I wanted was to be like the other girls, I wanted to dress nice and fit in. I would get angry when I couldn’t have new clothes or when my mother made our clothes. When I got into my teenage years, I began to resent my mother for our way of living, I wanted her to work harder or take better care of her money.

Thankfully, my opinions have changed dramatically. Now I look back and I thank my mother for all her hard work. However, it changed our family dynamic and now all three kids, including me, seek to have something completely different that how we were raised. I seek to have the best within my means. Both my brothers have worked really hard to do better financially than our parents. So as much as we do not want to admit it, social class does effect families.

Another thing we discussed were social classes within marriages. When courting and trying to find the person we want to marry, we often seek for people similar to us. Generally speaking, if you made more money, you search for someone who makes or appears to make decent money. It does happen, but often, you see couples marrying within their social class. It can cause serious marital strife if you marry someone from a different social class. If you marry someone with different expectations about price of wedding, or what type of house they want to live in, or even their choice of profession could cause contention. If you marry within different social classes, it’s just important to keep an open mind and love each other for what they offer in a marriage instead of what they don’t offer.