While unique to each of us, a collective reality that we all experience is that of family. We all have a birth mother and a family, no matter what that looks like, that started us on our journey through life. Our personal reality learns how to survive and hopefully thrive, absorbing our family’s dynamics as well as its culture and belief system. In the process, we participate in the collective reality of our family learning the collective knowledge of all its generations, passing its knowledge on to succeeding generations. Each generation is trying to make the best possible life for its children nicely summed up by the quote, “There are at least two lasting things families can give their children – one is roots and the other is wings”, Henry Ward Beecher.
When we look at the realities involved, the observation that there is “you, me and us in this relationship” can be translated to two personal realities and the collective reality of a family. If we choose to raise children then the personal reality of each child gets added to our immediate family. If we look at our extended family then it’s the personal realities of our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, etc. and their participation in our family collective reality. We tend to think the primary collective behavior of a family is to raise the next generation of children but a broader view would be that family is the fundamental collective reality that bands us together for support as we navigate through life.
As children we are dependent on our family to provide food, shelter, safety, love, education and emotional support so we can grow, play, learn and hopefully thrive. As adults we are providing for our children and ourselves, as well as the previous generation as their abilities wane. Family is the collective reality that underpins all of our experiences as we journey through life. How aware and involved we become is unique to each of us and is generally the basis for our life plan. Effectively we are handed a family script, setting up our expectations about our future experiences and the path that we should be navigating.
If we think it through, our family script is not just about how we personally fare as we grow up but how we work competitively and cooperatively with others, how we express our love and empathy as we connect with others and more generally how we treat others. We learn the fundamentals of business, as our family bands together to produce income and keep our households operating. We learn the fundamentals of communities, managing boundaries, conflict, rules and regulations keeping us safe so we’re able to survive and thrive. Potentially packaged in a culture or religion, we learn about supporting others through life’s transitions as well as the fundamental value of strong connections. Ultimately we learn the collective reality of how our family works and how well our family is able to adapt and learn.
There’s a lot going on and unless we become aware and actively decide to change our family script, we navigate by default the same path that we learned from our parents and look for a family dynamic that matches the one we learned as children. We tend to marry at the same age as our parents with the same age difference and have an expectation of having the same family size. The desire for our children doing better may lead to increased economic and social position and perhaps living longer but overall our expectations and behaviors really don’t change much unless we consciously decide and act on taking a different path.
With over half of all marriages ending in divorce, it’s probably safe to say that a lot of the family scripts and dynamics being passed along could use some work. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to affect change. Often based on our gender and birth order within our family, as well as the culture, religion, etc. that our family follows, roles and expectations are assigned that tend to lock us into the path that we are following. And then, say that we come to grips with making a change, what are we going to change to and are we really better off? Understanding that a dynamic or script is not working so well is a good first step but gathering enough experience and knowledge to choose a new direction is seldom clear and we often find ourselves relying on our intuition to point the way.
Taking a deeper dive, a physical, personal and collective reality (PPCR) lens helps sort things out. Living together in a family as a collective reality, the physical reality of food, shelter, safety, etc. gets shared between the personal realities of the family members. Each member’s personal reality spends a portion of its day, operating as an agent of the family possibly shopping, cleaning, cooking food, producing income, taking care of other family members, etc. It’s a division of labor that can lead to conflicts and potentially push up against our beliefs of fairness and equity. Ultimately some level of acceptance and cooperative behavior has to get worked out or the family simply cannot function. The family dynamic that gets worked out is unique to each family and is part of the knowledge that is learned and passed from generation to generation.
At a primal level our family dynamics follow that of other species of animals especially when it comes to procreation and raising children. We court, we mate, mom gives birth, we nurture and eventually wean our children off to navigate their own path. In the process we provide food, shelter and safety for our children, setting boundaries and teaching them how to provide and learn for themselves. Through history, physical reality has forced the issue of survival, generally causing males to genetically evolve physically stronger and more dominant. This has led to males tending to play a larger role in protection of the family from the dangers of physical reality. As we became more “civilized”, the male was written into law as head of the family, in many cultures effectively owning his wife and children. Technology is changing all this, reducing the threats from physical reality and making some of these learned behaviors obsolete.
When you understand how similar personal realities are, whether male, female, parents or children, the concept of ownership, dominance or control of another human being doesn’t make any sense if we are trying to build collective realities where we and our children can thrive. The basic idea of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” kind of makes the choice pretty clear. Do we want to be owned or subservient to some master? Do we want our children to be owned or subservient to some master? If there was spousal or child physical, sexual or drug abuse in your family growing up, do we really want to pass that on to our children? We may have to do some work on ourselves to affect change but very simply, “might does not make right.” We need to be aware that we are teaching our children by example all the time and how we treat others is part of the script we are passing on to the next generation.
In regard to male versus female, we need to think about our beliefs from the perspective of nature versus nurture. Yes genetically there are differences between male and female bodies but there is no real difference in how our brains function. However, the difference in how our brains develop is based on our experiences and what we have learned. As we are nurtured by our families and their beliefs, differences between males and females are taught and can effectively become fact, but that’s a choice we, or our families have made. If we choose to treat our children equally and expose them to the same experiences there is no real difference in the capabilities that they can develop. For our children to thrive we want to cultivate their natural abilities regardless of gender. Sexism is a cultural systemic problem, along with many others, that needs to be addressed by families as they parent their children.
Family is a primary connection and as we grow up we develop in-depth connections to the personal realities of our siblings and parents. These are the initial connections where we learn and develop how we treat others. Basic concepts of love, trust and respect, as well as their counterparts, get established as we play and develop physically, mentally and emotionally. These initial connections enable us to understand and model what is going on in the personal reality of another human. They effectively form our moral compass, providing us with our personal beliefs of what is “right” and what is “wrong”. When these connections and what we have learned help us later in life, we think of them as roots or assets. If they are hurting us or holding us back, we think of them as baggage.
As we grow up and wean off our immediate family, the baggage we bring can sometimes be immense, threatening our relationships and how the next generation develops. While each generation naturally adapts and learns, it’s the severity and our awareness of this type of conflict that typically drives how much we learn, making the changes in behavior that are needed. Technology creating and exposing our laundry list of systemic problems just adds to the urgency of generational learning. As children we need to please and get the acceptance of our parents so generational learning starts with our parents perspective and happens as we gain experience and manage our assets and baggage. It’s also a continually adapting conflict that humanity needs, enabling it to learn and move forward. Bottom line, we each have our own understanding that we have learned of what is “right” and what is “wrong” or even acceptable. We need to own that and understand that it’s okay to change and not feel bad about it if we think the change will make things better for us and the next generation.
Building the awareness and understanding to edit our family script strengthening our assets and dealing with our baggage, gives us a fairly clear path to navigate forward. In our personal reality we need to work out what is our family script, separating out what does and what doesn’t make sense both personally and in our roles in our family’s collective reality. What have we been taught by our family and what have we learned from technology and other cultures and families? We need to take the time to educate and learn, a huge task when you include humanity’s systemic problems. We need to gain the perspective to sort out what makes sense and what doesn’t, both for us personally and our family collectively, and thus humanity.
As we attempt to edit our family script we also need to understand our family’s membership in its collective realities of culture, community and religion. It’s important to respect and understand the often hard earned collective knowledge, being passed on. At the same time we need to understand that technology has made our collective realities fundamentally more intelligent and they need to adapt and learn from our exponentially growing store of collective knowledge. Understanding that what we and our family individually learn is also the basis of what our collective realities are learning adds a whole other level of complexity. We need to be careful to keep what makes sense in our collective realities but in the same breath have the courage to move on from what doesn’t make sense.
A family’s culture, community and religion provide support as the family navigates through each generation. It celebrates births, graduations, marriages and mourns when people die, to name a few. It is both giving and supporting its member’s life plans which comes by default in the family script it is passing along. As technology has augmented its ability to collectively think and manage physical reality, families need to understand that learning and change is inevitable and desired. Family is not just roots but it is providing wings as well. It wants to encourage editing of the family script which generally starts with supporting each member, as they potentially edit their life plan.
Back in medieval times with life expectancies of 30-some years, it was kind of clear that if you wanted to have kids, you have a short window to make it happen. Much of society and life expectations were setup around a limited timeframe making our life plan pretty clear. Today with life expectancies of 70 or 80 years and expected to go higher, there are a lot more navigation options available for when and size of families if at all, professions, retirement, second careers, health and quality-of-life. Lots of options for what we want to do while we are on the planet. Simply put, the life plan that came with our family script probably needs some work if we are trying to navigate our realities better.
In countries and cultures augmented by technology, the average person lives far better than the kings and aristocracy of medieval times. The concept of social status based on genetic blood lines that came out of medieval times has shifted more to accumulation of wealth and families passing that wealth on to the next generation. We tend to think of being born into a “rich” family as being a competitive advantage and assign social status to it. If we were born into “middle class” or “poor” family, we may find ourselves editing our life plan to focus on becoming wealthy assigning an inordinate amount of value to material resource. Technology is changing all this, leveling the playing field on many fronts and producing more resources in general, to the point that creating a life plan based on connection and what we do with the resources we control is far more important than the amount of resources that we possess. Humanity is evolving and our families and life plans are on the front lines.
What we come to understand from all this is that families are effectively the building blocks for society. If we reverse this out and look at it from the collective reality of society, fundamentals of equality, freedoms, how we handle conflict, quality-of-life, etc. are all evolving and being passed on by each family generation. Do we treat all our children equally? Does everyone get a turn, have their own space and own their own things? Do we teach them fairness, friendly competition and resilience learning to strategize rather than dominate focused on winning? Are birthdays treated the same and are gifts given equally? Do we unconditionally love all our children and give them all equal opportunities? Do we encourage them to develop their own talents and interests rather than living vicariously through them driving them to meet our plan for them? Rather than attempting to control their behavior, do we give them the freedom to speak, ask questions and play within boundaries based on physical safety and beliefs that we have evaluated and deemed to pass on? How do we handle consequences when boundaries are crossed? Are they treated as learning opportunities or something to be feared with feelings of guilt and shame? Do we use corporal punishment or do we treat our children with more respect using timeouts or other consequences? Do we set a boundary at teasing or being mean? What do we teach them about safety and how to handle stranger danger, bullies and those attempting to exploit? Do we treat them with respect and always tell them the truth so they learn to trust reliable sources as well as themselves? The list goes on and on and we need to understand that we are not only creating the collective reality of our family, we are also creating the collective reality of our society, communities and humanity in general. Changing the family script can be hard to do but if we want a better life for our children it’s something we want to work through.
From a historical perspective, we are currently experiencing an evolutionary leap starting with the social revolution in the ‘60s and fueled by technology and the information age. The culture, traditions, religions and institutions going back to medieval times are all part of the leap being fundamentally more intelligent as they evolve and learn. The front line for all this change is our families so if we love our children and want them to thrive we need to take the time to understand what is going on and filter the changes through to them. I would suggest the primary source of the divisiveness we are currently experiencing around the world in 2022 is not whether a specific change has value or not, it’s whether we and our families are even willing to learn about and consider the change. Technology is transforming the world and we need to learn individually and collectively in order to keep up.
As always, I hope that I have left you thinking and questioning. Please leave your comments and feedback on our Connect page where you can also sign up to receive notifications when future posts are available. Lastly, if this all makes sense to you, please endorse the PPCR perspective and invite your friends, family and connected realities to follow this blog and take part in the conversation.
Carpe Diem