Our family background shapes us

When I analyze my life from birth until now, there's no doubt that I was happiest during my childhood. I grew up in an extended family in which I was the only child so I was loved and protected from the day I was born and that gave me the courage and the integrity to pursue my dreams.

There were rules galore in my family but, at the same time, I was given a tremendous amount of personal freedom as long as I didn't take advantage of it and I made every effort not to. I often read on Facebook recollections of people from their childhoods, especially from my generation, and the memories are very similar. When I would leave the house in the summertime, the only instructions I received was to be home before dark. In my home town, that meant before the street lights came on. If I did, everything was okay; if I didn't, I was disciplined. But we all knew that ahead of time so my friends and I abided by most of the rules, most of the time.

But in addition to learning about the world from being with my friends, I learned about the world from being with my family too. We sat down at the dinner table three times a day for our meals and spent more time talking than we did eating. There was no taking your food to your room or to the living room on a TV tray so you could watch television. Meals were a social time and I learned a great deal about life from those three times a day encounters. Every day after school I would sit down with my folks as soon as I got home and we would talk about my day.

They would go through my book bag for homework assignments and grades, all the while inquiring not only about my school work but my social interactions as well.

The weekends were a special treat and although most of them were spent with friends, I also had great times with my family. The women it seemed were always in the kitchen. They were there when I got up in the morning and often there when I went to bed at night. They were either cooking, cleaning up, preparing for the next meal or canning which they did a lot of so my leisure time was spent mostly with the men of the family. When I was 12 years old, my mom and dad moved to Tulsa for a better job and I pleaded with them to allow me to remain in the only town I had ever lived in and they eventually consented. My Uncle Bill took over the role of dad and we had the best times together one could ever imagine. We played catch in the back yard every day, somedays we would lie on a blanket in the front yard and count the cars the drove by our house on old highway 64 with weeping willow leaves. I would count the cars going in one direction and he would take the other. Often on Sunday afternoons after church, he and I would walk down the railroad tracks for a mile or so and then come back, talking about whatever came to our minds.

Those were quality times I spent with my family. They gave me confidence in myself and a drive to succeed because I never wanted to do anything to let them down, disappoint them or embarrass them.

But today it seems we have more dysfunctional families than functional ones. We have absentee dads or moms, day care from first thing in the morning until all hours of the night, arguing and fighting between parents in front of their children, and parents living their lives on a 'do as I say not as I do' philosophy.

That never happened in my family. I grew up with a set of norms, values, and morals that never changed for me and that were lived everyday by the adult role models in my life. And surrounding those norms, values and morals was a pervasive sense of love that was always there.

Today we see ghettos, barrios and slums that have had high crime rates for generation after generation, regardless of what's going on in the rest of the world, and the main reason for that are dysfunctional families teaching their children bad lessons about life instead of good ones through their OWN behaviors.

We can require people to go to parenting and anger management classes but classes don't change who a person is on the inside. And unless that happens, nothing else substantial is going to happen either.

Parenting is a full time job and if you want your child to grow up into a person you and he/she can be proud of, you've got to treat it that way!