As we stumble forward (or progress?) into whatever form of society we are becoming, we may not realize what we are doing to the children we are leading into that society. Like it or not, they are being brought into whatever we create. The language we use also affects their perception and their view of what they have inherited.
Most of us who are fifty years old or more have a conception of what family is about, even if our own experience of it was not good or ideal. We still have some model of what it should be, and even could be with some work, good examples and people to fill the roles needed to provide the structure for the development of stable human beings. The home was held up and normalized as being the place and source of nurture and support, and discipline when necessary. When natural family failed, someone else stepped in and filled those roles as best as could be done, and sometimes well. The goal was always, though, to strive for the model of two parents in a home to raise children.
Grownups make bad choices, or simply do bad things to each other, and families break down. They wind up with odd combinations of people in a house (perhaps making a home, perhaps not), and the children are there to grow up in the mix. So, in the efforts to make the best of the situation, those who have their best interest at heart can become their family, with all the aims and hopes of giving them what they need to be well-developed people. In other words, we can shoot for the model as closely as possible. One parent, step-parent(s)s, grandparent(s), aunts, uncles, etc. Foster parents have done amazing jobs raising kids in absence of natural parents and relatives. Yet, we still refer to them as family, and often the children do so for life.
But when we begin to adjust the language and try to change the model to fit our failings, things start to go wrong, even more wrong than they already were. Those who are raising kids may not be parents, or even relatives, but there are still times when reference to family is still appropriate. I recently read where the preferred way to address a child with a non-classic household makeup would be to refer to them only as “grownups”, as in, “Are these your grown-ups?” It sounds more as if they are referring to pets. This deprives the child the sense of family connection and cohesiveness other children have and they badly need. “My friends have parents; I have grownups.” Their parents have children; my grownups have… “small people”? To use such a distant, washed-out way to describe a family setting in the name of being nice to the child is an insult to the very idea of family. We may have sterilized our families by our mistakes and blunders, but must we do the same to the very terminology that maintains some semblance of what we want to accomplish? Doing so does not help the children. It further separates them from any identity with a family they need. Rather than be their grownups, is it not more helpful to be their family, and recognize it when possible?
buildtrustblog 