Sam's Family Relations Blog

 My final blog post is going to be on divorce and how it effects people. Now I don’t know how qualified I am to talk about this because I am unmarried and my parents have never divorced, but because I want to go into the therapy field, I figured I’d talk about it. Divorce is not an inherently evil thing, in fact in some cases I think it’s necessary. In cases like domestic abuse, I don’t think therapy is going to fix a majority of that problem and the other person may have no other choice but to leave. My grandparents on both sides of my family have considered divorce, each for their own reasons. One of my grandparents filed for divorce a little over a year ago, he ended up living with us during the entire process and I don’t blame him. I won’t get into their business, but they didn’t have a happy marriage even when my mom was a kid. I think that for them it was necessary, due to some mental illness, I believe it was only a matter of time. Mental illness can play a huge factor in a ...

Today I’m going to talk about parenting do’s and don’ts as well as my upbringing. There is a very specific parenting technique that I want to talk about known as gentle parenting. There are a lot of people who think that the process of gentle parenting is not punishing your kids when in fact it’s the opposite. Gentle parenting focuses on your child’s needs rather than your reaction. Say for example your child broke a lamp with a ball they were playing with in the house after you told them not to play with it inside. A reactive parent would most likely yell at their kid and take away the toy or send them to their room. With gentle parenting, the first initial reaction should be to check and make sure the child is safe and away from the glass. The next step would be to have the child help clean up the mess and teach them about natural consequences. It can be hard to do gentle parenting because as children, most of us learned to be reactive from our parents. It’s a cycle that needs to be ...

There is a topic that is starting to become more and more controversial in family dynamics, and that is the discussion of finances. Whether you are married or not, if you are living with your partner, a very big discussion that needs to happen is how to take care of things like debt. Now hopefully you won't have to experience much debt in your life, but if you have an accident and you end up having to pay for things like medicare and a hospital stay, it can easily get pricy. Things like this can put a lot of strain on a relationship, and it makes sense when couples fight about it. Assuming we are talking about everyday finances, if you are in a committed relationship and you are living with the person, it's wise to have joint finances. Things like bank accounts and credit cards would be a good thing to work out together rather than having separate savings and spending. There are many benefits to this, one of the most notable ones is that it just makes life easier, especially if...