Family Values and Being

The characteristics, values, and life perspectives of a person are often associated with the kind of family (parents in particular) one has. Attitudes and life perspectives are believed to reflect how our parents have honed us. Even if there are other factors that can affect a person’s being like environment, church, other institutions, and education, family is considered the foundation and most essential.

Often, when we observe something bad or wrong about a person’s attitudes, behavior, and even inclinations (rude behavior, disrespectful, vices), most of us often automatically associate or relate these bad attitudes and beliefs to that person’s parents. Some will say, “Mali ang pagpapalaki sa kanya ng magulang niya” or “Napayaan iyang taong iyan ng magulang niya.”

Well, such notion could be applicable in most cases while it might not be applicable in some cases. Like for example, there are parents, no matter how good the values and life perspectives observed and practiced at their home, their children have failed to acquire the values (rather chose not to acquire these values).

It’s all about choice.

While a lot of people associate what we have become to the family that we belong, we cannot solely blame the way our parents honed us. For example, if you grew up in a family where your parents easily utter bad words and regularly nags at each other, if you have sisters and brothers who are very loud, if your parents didn’t teach you the concept of respect and responsibility, ah, of course, it is expected that you will have a hard time acquiring the expected good values.

Yet, as a person, you are also exposed to other environment from which you can compare your experiences at home. Provided that you have enough experiences and you have met people from different sorts of arena, you may have considerable hindsight of things that are just and proper. There you could choose what you want to become – values of your family you think you should acquire and those that you need to discard.

As we grow older, experience different things, encounter different people as well as situations, we understand things differently the way our parents taught us. Before we were already aware that we have to obey older people we simply because we have to. But later on we have learned that obeying means not just saying yes. It entails analysis of what is just and proper. Now, we just don’t follow orders but we try to understand these orders. We rationalize why we have to follow or why we cannot follow a specific order.
Same thing goes for respect. Most of us were taught by our parents to respect older people for the simple reason that they are, well, old. True enough, they are old but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they already deserve respect. Eventually, we learn that respect isn’t just about saying “po” or “opo”. It is beyond words and being polite.
Our values, beliefs, attitudes, and life perspectives are affected by our family, environment, different institution, well, the society. However, they are mainly products result of our choices.

While we observe and follow the values and perspectives our parents have taught us, while our attitudes, beliefs, life perspectives, and values are affected by different factors, what we have become is our choice from what we have observed and experienced.

We create our own being.