How Families Impact our Communication

While the way that a child is raised from gender stereotypes impacts their communication, our early role models – our families and more specifically, our parents – impact that communication as well.

Growing up you watch your family members in their communication and learn a lot in mimicking them. Early on, we mimic their words and learn our first language. We also mimic their behavior such as walking, eating, cleaning, and so on. We then also mimic other mannerisms such as how we word things and how we respond to others around us.

In viewing our parents communication, we learn to talk to people in certain ways. Some sons see and hear their father treating their mother like she’s unimportant and learn that women are second rate citizens. They may grow up and while they may not treat their wives exactly the same, there may be an underlying implication that the wife will pick up any of the cleaning that they don’t want to do or that the wife will do all the cooking, or similar situations.

Other people view their parents as expressing anger but never resolving that anger. So, one might learn that it’s okay to express anger and there’s no need for apologies. Another person might see their parents never fighting and hence might believe that two people in a relationship aren’t supposed to fight. This could cause them to want to run from any type of conflict.

We all saw certain things as kids and may have unconsciously taken on those mannerisms of our parents. However, remember, that as critically thinking humans, we all have the ability to CHOOSE whether or not those mannerisms are the ones that we want to have. For instance, just because someone was abused as a child and only learned how to physical punishment for discipline doesn’t mean they will automatically become an abuser themselves. It means that’s what they learned but they have the ability to learn new behaviors. We all do. It’s just important to recognize that our parents had a huge influence on how we behave so that we can address it in the right way.