Family
Family can be hard to deal with when you’re just feeling out your independence. Doing anything “as a family” can seem like a chore on top of chores. And speaking of chores, they’re probably often the last thing you want to do. Who has time with all this homework, and don’t your parents know that Saturday’s the only day in the entire week you can spend with friends?
What you need to remember (and what might be hard to remember sometimes) is that your family is your stronghold. In Mormonism, the family is the basic unit of society, both temporal and spiritual. Family can last forever and every member is supposed to be concerned about every other member’s welfare.
So chores have to be done and parents have to be minded and, really, sometimes you really don’t want to and that’s understandable. Mormons believe that parents and children should be open with each other and unified as a whole. Their church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) sets aside Monday nights as family nights and families are encouraged to have daily scripture study and family prayer.
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Family togetherness is very important and teenagers tend to be a little less interested in family togetherness and more on finding themselves and doing their own thing. That’s okay. I don’t know that I’m not still doing that myself. But we should strive to make the lives of our families easier as well as our own, to think beyond our own wants and needs and more about the wants and needs of those closest to us. Your parents may be a wonderful source of knowledge—they’ve had a lot more life experience than you and may know something about the struggles you’re going through right now. Your siblings may be a source of support for the same reason, if they’re older, and you can be a source of support for the younger. Being an example for younger siblings can be a tough responsibility, but it can also help you think out some decisions before you make them. It may be easier to wonder “what would my little sister or brother think if I did this?” than to worry about what your parents will think. |
And we should be concerned about our family’s opinion, although not to the point that we don’t do good things we think they might not approve of. We aren’t quite the same people as our family, not entirely. But ever we should work to keep good relations and keep arguments down to as much a minimum as we can, acting and interacting in the spirit of love instead of the spirit of conflict. We should be peacemakers and not verbal brawlers, not with our siblings or with our parents.
When possible, we need to participate in group family activities (although, some days, participating as more than an observer is hard. All that homework) and be enthusiastic about spending time together. We need to take joy in the time we spend with our family. In Mormon beliefs, the more time we spend with our family, the closer we become to each other and the more valuable each moment spent.