Gender

I first want to start out by saying the video we watched was completely ridiculous. I am all for women's rights, and equality but it has to be reasonable and logical. The thing that bothered me the most was that some of the women were so persistent that they lowered strength requirements for the military and fireman training. This bothers me because those strength requirements are important and if you can't meet them then you obviously aren't fit to be in that kind of position. Biologically and physically men are better at those kinds of positions than women, because they are stronger. If the women can meet the physical requirement they should be aloud to do that, but if they can't they should find a different position. Every person has different strengths and weaknesses and we need to take advantage of that. We should all get respect and everything, but not at the cost of people's safety. Like it said in the video, if you are in a fire you want to be carried out, not drug out by your heels.
Another thing with gender is that we need to accept and appreciate our gender. In the church we believe that we have always been the gender that we are now, even in the pre-existence. Heavenly Father has given us certain genders and certain qualities to help us fulfill our role here on earth. As a woman I am proud to be able to have God's children and to nurture them and love them. I am so excited to be able to do this. I think the greatest job or career that I could ever have is that of being a mother. Women today have lost sight of that and for some reason want to be more like men. They have gone into the workplace and stopped wanting to have children and be mother.
Another thing in the video I noticed was that they focused so much on wanting equality but it seemed to me that they actually wanted women to be better than men. Like the statement the woman said that boys should be raised more like girls, I think what she should have said to make her point was that children should be raised the same. Saying boy should be more like girls implies that girls are better than boys. I think that everyone just needs to calm down and accept the fact that boys and girls are emotionally, biologically, physically, and mentally different, and that this is not a bad thing. We should be happy for this difference.      

Diversity in Families

Last week we talked about diversity in families. This goes beyond the regular race and ethnic diversity, however families do sometimes have that. Most diversity in family comes from the family set up, for example my family is white and we have 2 parents and 5 children, and also education and class and things of that nature.The diversity in my family is that we are LDS, all of my siblings have a basic education and graduated high school or are working on it, most are in college or graduated college, my parents both went to college. So we are well educated. We are all United States citizens and all my family lives in the U.S. We are middle class, we have all the basic necessities of life plus some perks. Another diversity in my family is that I have a sister-in-law and two nephews. It really changed family system and how we interacted with each other. There was all of a sudden another person in our family to get along with. Every family has a culture.
In class we discussed how some cultures might be better than other cultures. In my opinion we should not judge cultures, but we should judge how people turn out from different cultures. In that respect some cultures are better than other cultures. For example in the American culture I know that we look at ourselves from the outside. When someone asks you who you are you tell them material things you have and what kind of education you have received. In comparison in Mexico they do not care what you look like. They see themselves from the inner beauty. If you ask them who they are they will tell you different things about themselves. They are not as worried about outer beauty, and material goods. I think in that their culture is better than ours. We have many eating disorders because our culture focuses so much on outer beauty and being the prettiest girl out there and having the coolest stuff. Also another thing about culture is that you can't look at another culture in the lens of your culture, because every culture is different. When studying other cultures you have to have an open mind, and not be biased. Your culture is going to be different from other cultures, it does not make yours better.
   

Homeostasis

In class we talked about subsystems theory and how all the systems in the family work together. I liked when we talked about positive and negative feedback, and how with just one look someone can know if they have done something wrong. With me it was my mom who would give the look. Just with that one look, we knew we were in big trouble. With my dad, he would always yell at us, but we could tell when he was getting mad enough to yell. None of us liked to be yelled at, so we tried harder to please dad than mom.
As for homeostasis, it depended on the person whether they would give you a look that told you you were doing something wrong, or there would be a lot of yelling. Usually it was just a look. For me if someone was doing something wrong or bad I would just give a look, and they knew to back off or get back in the norm. For a while when my brother left the church it seemed like our family was disconnected, and not in sync. He kind of made the homeostasis mechanism over heat, and it was not a good feeling. We all like to be functioning properly, and the way to do that is to not let things change to much. However the family and individuals will adapt to the changes, and pretty soon everything will be back to normal.
I am sure the rules to our family were the same for a lot of other families. However as I am getting ready to get married, I see a lot of different behaviors in my boyfriend than I do in how I was raised. His family does things differently than my family did. For example, my mom would always make us turn the TV off when we ate dinner, his family will keep it on and mute it while they eat. It was a little different at first but I got used to it. I think it will be hard to mesh our different upbringings together, but we are already working on it so it will get better. We have already discussed some different things we want in our family, I think it will work well it will just take work, as does everything in life.