Family as creating its culture and forming the value system and attitude of its members

Every family has its own history, preserves remembrances of its ancestors, cultivates its genealogical bonds, and uses words and idioms peculiar to it. It evaluates social reality in its own way, possesses specific values, and lives up to its own norms and patterns of behavior. It has its own beliefs, political and social views, traditions and feasts, each celebrated after its own fashion. All of this creates the culture of a given family and accounts for the fact that, although families live in identical houses, provided with standard furniture and appliances, nevertheless each one arranges its own apartment differently, uses things differently, and spends its leisure time distinctly. Interpersonal contact within each family has its peculiar content and form: guests are welcomed and bid farewell in different ways; members feel their distinctness in relation to other families and the global society. For example, a Polish family has a sense of being different from an Italian family, and both sense this distinctiveness with respect to Japanese family.

Finding itself in the center of social, political and cultural transformations, the family must take an active stance, as well as with regard to different cultural groups living next door, from some groups it accepts some prevalent elements and assimilates these into its own life. Before other groups it adopts an attitude of isolation and defense in order to preserve its own cultural distinctiveness. To maintain such a position, today's family has developed a special selective function. Though this existed in the past, the modern family has perfected it and exercises it more consciously.

This selective function forms something of a cocoon which surrounds the family, isolating it from other families and from global society. At the same time this serves as a kind of filter which allows some elements of global society and various cultural groups to enter the family, while keeping out others. Because of this consciously selective function, the family accepts only certain values, norms and patterns of behavior from the many existing outside, and having accepted these it puts them into practice after its own manner. From commonly used language it takes only a few words and idioms, and introduces into its own life only those feasts and customs which can be integrated into those already practiced. It connects its history with but a few events and changes in global society and forms a family ideology in order to set guidelines for its members. Through its developed selective function, the family sensitizes its members to the fact that not everything publicly proclaimed is equally true, that not every novelty is good. It teaches them how to participate more reflectively in a continually changing society and introduces order into the many highly diversified elements which make up the individual's life environment and link one with the local ambient. It compels the individual to reflect on the changing world, thereby giving one the greater stability needed for the correct development of one's personality.

Due to this well developed and consciously exercised selective function, the family is characterized by relative isolation as well as by relative openness to the outside world. This enables it to preserve and develop its own culture without alienating itself from its environment or global society.

Possessing and developing its own culture enables the family to serve in a number of ways.

a) It represents for its members the natural and fundamental environment for the formation of its own value system, norms and patterns of behaviors.

b) At the same time it introduces them into the general culture as well as into the culture of the connected groups.

c) It moderates the speed of cultural changes in society. As a rule, this is a cultural advantage because the family does not tolerate very drastic changes in the area of values, norms and patterns of behavior and drastic changes in these spheres would arrest the development of culture.

d) The possession and development by each family of its own culture prevents the uniformity of the general culture. This has special significance when only one model of culture is being realized in a society.

Transmission of culture in families in the past proceeded in one direction: from the oldest to the youngest. The older generation introduced the younger to the fullness of its own family culture, environment and nation, to its own experiences and practical wisdom. This structure still functions, but a new phenomenon has appeared alongside it: young generations more often and in ever greater scope transmit the conquests of engineering and organization to the older ones, and impose on them new values, norms and patterns of behavior. This is most evident when the older generations adopt from the younger new forms of leisure, dress, expression and interior decoration. This transmission of culture within the same family has created a pluralism which certainly is more difficult and interesting, more conducive to reflection and to making personal choices. The family is the place for dialogue in cultural communication which embraces all generations: the older ones link the younger to the recent and more distant past, while the younger ones connect the older with the present and future. In this situation the impact of the older generation in the communication of cultural heritage has diminished. Nevertheless, for a number of reasons the family still plays the most important role in the formation of basic values, norms and patterns of behavior among the young, especially with regard to the defense of the value and dignity of the human person.

First, the family comes into being and functions on the basis of love, which enables persons to preserve their individuality even as they form a single unit. In this kind of unity each member feels that the thoughts and efforts of others are directed toward him or her. One finds oneself in the center of the family group and serves the others in that family group without asking what he or she gets for it. This giving, as well as the contact with the other person, is already a value or reward. Such a situation, existing only in the family, makes it possible for a particular person to experience that he or she is important and valuable because others make sacrifices for his or her sake, even to the degree of being ready to give up their lives.

Secondly, more than in the past, adult members of the modern family, especially parents, concentrate their efforts around the child, who is the center of their concerns. They devote much time to the care of, and to contact with, their child providing thereby a continuing opportunity for the child to experience his or her value and dignity. From the earliest days a child feels his or her worth within the family.

Thirdly, in today's family a far-reaching autonomy is given to the individual. The family is directed toward helping in the development of the child's likings and talents. This requires a common effort as well as some self-denial on the part of others. It convinces individuals of their importance and worth since others freely bear hardships and make sacrifices for them.

This climate of family culture forms attitudes of generosity, unselfishness, friendship, piety, patience, self-sacrifice, reconciliation and peace, patriotism and religiosity. These attitudes of individuals, which are then realized in their social life, result in making social life more human and in giving a greater degree of satisfaction to those who participate therein. This creative role of the family in the formation of culture is extremely important today because the quality of mutual relationships rather than institutions and organizations is decisive for the culture of any society. These relationships differentiate societies into those whose people may live in prosperity but somewhat "less humanly" and those in which people may live a more difficult life but in a more rich human atmosphere. The ideal is that societies live both prosperously and "humanly", but the realization of this postulate depends upon the degree to which the family fulfills its role in the creation of culture through the formation in its members of a sense of value and dignity with the accompanying humane attitudes.