How to Become a Proud Family

What is a Proud Family?

A proud family is any family that takes pride in themselves as a complete unit. These families still have their problems, but they take great comfort in knowing that the members of their families provide support and love even when the chips are down. A great misconception associated with proud families is that everyone in the family is perfect. For this reason, many individuals mistakenly believe that since they or their family members are not perfect, then they can never experience having pride in their family. This is incredibly untrue, as no family is perfect - regardless of social status or income. Instead, a proud family embraces everyone in the family, warts and all.

How to Become a Proud Family

The first step in becoming a proud family is acceptance. Accepting everything from the members of your family to your current situation in the world to your home to your income is critical. Without this acceptance, you will never have the ability to take pride in your family. Regardless of the faults associated with the family, this acceptance will allow you to overlook the negatives and accentuate the positives regarding your family life. It should be known that the acceptance of family members is often far more difficult than the acceptances of outside influences that affect the family.

The second step in becoming a proud family is enjoyment. The ability to enjoy your family and its members is crucial to gaining the ability to be proud of your family. For this reason, consider instating regular family activities. In many instances - especially when dealing with children - it is far easier to find enjoyment in friends or technology instead of family members. By instating special family-only events and activities, all members of your family will be able to learn to work together in order to enjoy themselves and gain pride about the family unit as a whole. These activities can range from sporting events to outdoor activities to game nights to other forms of entertainment. When planning these activities, it is important that everyone has an equal say on the choice of activity to encourage optimum enjoyment by all family members.

Maintaining Family Pride

Just as important as developing family pride is the task of maintaining family pride. This task can often become more difficult as the members of the family grow in age. Especially if you have teenage members of your family, you may find that there is a growing disdain for parents or siblings. Remember that this feeling is often a phase associated with the teenage years and does not directly reflect the quality of the parent-child or the sibling-child relationship. Still, this disdain can be difficult to bear. For this reason, maintaining family pride is incredibly important. Strive to encourage themes of acceptance and understanding in the family. Hopefully this way, the other members of the family will be better able to cope with a transformation in behavior by one or many members of the family.