Photo by Gustavo Fring

Max Teran writes about the importance of healthy familial bonds in Cómo procrear una familia sana and the work it takes to have a happy and proactive family.

According to Max Teran, it is a necessary part of wanting a good life to have a healthy and functional relationship with your family. In Cómo procrear una familia sana, readers will find a treasure trove of advice and ideas on how to maintain joyful and mutually beneficial relationships.

Family is a very important aspect of any individual life. It is also one of the more complex and irritating ones to deal with, especially if there is some level of dysfunction across the board–even if it’s only a little bit. Family is often a specific individual’s only source of support–and for most, family is a constant provider of comfort and warmth. With your family, it is a necessity to go through things together to become stronger and more stable–but this is also why it is often difficult to accept them since, as individuals, there will always be a measure of contradiction when it comes to perspectives, beliefs, and values. 

Either way, a good reminder is this: a functional family is one that is filled with mutual love, respect, humor, and boundaries. Perfection is a myth, and this is especially the case with your relatives. People make mistakes all the time, from parents to children, but this is not a justification to persist in going about with things the wrong way.

That’s why it’s quite important to be proactive and optimistic when it comes to dealing with your family.

As Thick As Thieves

Perhaps the biggest misconception when it comes to family is the idea that everyone born into one already has an intuitive understanding of how to engage within it. This is wrong. This is so wrong. Nothing around it is right. It is fractally wrong, as some might say. You see, as with everything in this world, family is a commitment; it is a deliberate project. 

What this means in practice is that you can’t engage with family without knowing the ins and outs of things. People have to be aware of the dynamics between relatives and the boundaries that each individual has. You have to be deliberate with your actions.

Learning to Live with Your Family

With that in mind: deliberateness and all that, here are critical steps to learning how to live with your family:

• Practice empathy. Empathy is when you understand what the other is feeling, and you share their sentiments. It is an essential skill to have when working in groups–and remember, in the grand scheme of things, family is just another group. Empathy helps you accept some things about your family that you wouldn’t be able to without proper knowledge and understanding. If you are empathetic, you are less likely to judge people and are more able to put yourself in their shoes and get a feel of where they are coming from. Having empathy means having the ability to acquire a better perspective on why people do what they do, allowing you to respond in a more compassionate and understanding manner.
• Focus on the positives. Getting caught up in the negative aspects of family is perhaps a universal feeling. This is because family is supposed to be a tight-knit group, and when there is an activity that runs counter to that assumption, you feel betrayed or greatly annoyed. Yet, if you only focus on the negatives, it becomes much harder to feel optimistic, and your bonds with your relatives weaken considerably. This has the effect of inducing negative thoughts in your head that make you more negative about your family, thus weakening your bonds with them more–and so on and so forth. It is an endless cycle. So, you should always strive to remember the positives of your family. Of course, if the negatives outweigh the positives, perhaps there are bigger problems at play.