March Blog Post

  This week I found that the reading Family Bullies by Keith Berry & Tony E. Adams stood out to me more than most readings have this semester. Just simply the title intrigued me, I called my mom and asked her who she though would be the bully in our immediate family, I mostly wanted to make sure it wasn't me before I got connected to the reading and found validity in the research conducted. I was certainly relieved when she told me that I would not be the bully out of my three siblings and I. I found that the quote on the very fist page helped my understand the significance of the topic, and the seriousness surrounding it. Keith Berry & Tony E wrote 

“ Indeed, assumptions and expectations concerning family communication pervade our culture, and conceptualize family life and persons’ orientations to the family in certain ways, effectively leaving little room for variation”. My first thoughts after reading this were that I couldn't  agree more that the society I have observed, spends so much time comparing family dynamics, and family dynamics all come down to communication. 

When reading this quote over again and again I though about my childhood and how much time I spent trying to get my family to be like other peoples families. I grew up in a household with older parents and much older siblings, my siblings did not play with me and I spent much of my time using my imagination to keep myself company. I was always so envious of other family dynamics and how parents would play with their kids. Although now that I have read this excerpt I can see that a very easily avoided the family bullying dynamic because there was no one my age to pick on me. 

I couldn't help but think about our discussions on media in class, even just when we talked about Disney and how the youth receives messages and what they do in response to the media they have seen. I think that bullying is largely an act that is carried out because those behaviors have been seen by others. I think that in the same way kids watching Disney pick up on the underlying messages, and racism in films and shows. I think it comes down to kids acting out what they see, their brains are very much sponges and they attain so much of the information that they see. I found an article on the impacts of social media on children which states “it is important that parents become aware of the nature of social media sites, given that not all of them are healthy environments for children and adolescents”. I think that more than ever social media is playing a huge role in children’s lives, and simply monitoring what children see, and checking in with them to have healthy conversations could play a great role in reducing family bullying. Simply talking about healthy family dynamics, family competition. And always keeping in mind what families look like in the media is almost never an accurate depiction of what families are really like. 

Citations:

O'Keeffe, Gwenn Schurgin, Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, and Council On Communications and Media. "The       Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families." Pediatrics. American Academy of Pediatrics, 01 Apr. 2011. Web. 24 Mar. 2017. <http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/127/4/800.short>.