Unspoken Family Rules

In one of my classes last term, we talked about unspoken family rules and how they shape us. I was looking back at my notes and I had written that something that might be interesting to do is ask members of a family what unspoken rules they thought their family had. Even within a family, each person will still have their own perspective. A rule that one person sees and follows might not even be noticed by their brother. I thought an interesting tie could be everything we read about the personality traits based on your birth order. We read that a first born is usually likes to be in control, a second born is independent and doesn’t like to be controlled, a middle born tends to be sensitive and goes along with whatever is already established and a last born is often pampered, a procrastinator and more “wild”. With each being pretty dramatically different, it is fairly obvious how their perspectives would be different as well. An unspoken rule in my family (from my perspective) is to never eat close to dinner time especially is someone (usually me) is in the middle of making dinner. The person making dinner for everyone is putting in the time and effort to do so, so it would be rude to eat and then potentially not be hungry when dinner is finally served. I imagine from my husband’s perspective that he thinks if you’re hungry, you should eat regardless of whether dinner is currently being prepared or not. He doesn’t do this intentionally, but growing up that was okay in his family and it wasn’t in mine. This was just something we had to compromise on. If my husband is truly hungry and dinner is not ready yet, he knows that I would be okay if he ate an apple or something small, but that it would hurt my feeling if he made a full on sandwich while I slave over a hot stove. I’ve learned the importance of being flexible and realizing that we all grow up differently. We may not always see eye to eye on these unspoken rules, but with good communication we can grow to make our own family rules that stem from our individual family rules from childhood.