Tell Me About your Family Environment, I’ll Tell you About Your Romantic Relationship

A Healthy Relationship Needs a Healthy Frame of Mind

Hop & Play, Save Your Relationship from Going Astray

Relationship status: Single, Engaged or Married in your social media accounts is not all about simply having a partner. We don’t have the power to choose or parents or siblings but we have been blessed with the ability to make choices on our life partners, friends and other people whom we would like to travel with us in our journey of life. Almost none of us remember our initial 2-3 years of life but the experiences during those times might tag along with us and influence our choices later in life. Understanding the knack of getting into a healthy and romantic relationship and maintaining it is one of the key skills required by young adult to flourish in life. A healthy and loving relationship is purely based on love, problem-solving ability and without any physical/verbal violence involved between the two. The interesting catch here is that such healthy relationships exist and are influenced by the different experiences that people have had in their own respective families. 

Relationships Churned by Family Values?
How our family environment influences our romantic relationships and our social skills hasn’t been well-known and discussed until now. But we have heard enough about proverbs such as ‘Tell me your friend, I will tell you who you are’ and ‘Like mom, like son’ which show us the huge impact of the company we keep and the surrounding we grow up in. For instance, one of my close friends has a stuttering problem but it was not an inborn issue. He grew up in a hostile environment where his parents were constantly arguing and physically fighting too. One fine (or rather bad) day he started to stammer after witnessing one such fight. When the physician analyzed he came to know that the child’s mind had been tremendously affected and all the buried feelings exploded as stuttering. The environment in which you grow plays a prominent role in defining who you are and what you do. To understand the link between family environment and its effect on romantic relationships a team of researchers analyzed long-term data from more than 10,000 youngsters in rural and semi-rural communities. From them, 2,000 randomly selected people were analyzed as young adults in the follow-up research. This included 974 participants who were 18-21 years old and in a steady romantic relationship.

All the 2,000 participants were questioned about their assertiveness, engagement with family members, the atmosphere existing in the family and the impact of their parent’s discipline methods in grades 6, 7 and 9 respectively. Again, between the age of 18 and 21 they were questioned about violence levels, problem-solving skills and the quality of love they experienced in their relationship. Results showed that individuals brought up in close-knitted families that has an underlying current of love, compassion and understanding were at a minimal risk of being in an abusive/violent romantic relationship or one that had poor problem-solving abilities. One surprising find here is that neither the parenting methods nor the family environment had any impact on the amount of love existing in any relationship. But a positive parenting approach had a positive impact on the participant’s assertiveness helping them put forth their needs in a positive way and also have a smooth interaction with both the families.

This study clearly shows that children who grew up experiencing a positive family environment and effective parenting were likelier to have healthy romantic relationships as young adults. Such healthy relationships take away a great disturbance in life-stress, at least in personal life. Stress in personal life can take a toll of your health too leading to serious consequences elaborated at www.firsteatright.com. In turn, children who were cooperative, confident and well-behaved also were great contributors to a positive family climate. 

Your family is the first relationship you develop born into this world and how you behave amongst family members has a great impact on what you do with your other relationships later in life. Constructive or destructive communication, communicating in a neutral way, yelling during a disagreement or throwing tantrums are all learnt during your first intimate relationship-that is your family relationship. Other acts or feelings later in life are an extension of this. So, when young parents now realize this maybe they have an opportunity to provide the best environment for their kids in terms of kindness, love and affection to help these children grow into assertive young adults who can nurture a loving and caring romantic relationship.

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