Latest news with #extendedfamily
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
My family of 4 moved to Germany for my husband's job. We've become closer, but miss our relatives back home.
My family has always lived within driving distance of our extended family. We moved abroad when my husband's job offered him a multi-year assignment in Germany. The move allowed our family to get closer, but it's hard to be so far away from our US relatives. I was lucky to grow up in Maryland, within 45 minutes of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. This guaranteed near-monthly family birthday parties and plenty of 'just because' events to gather. After I married my husband, we moved to nearby Virginia and added two sons, now 10 and 6, to the family fun. Four years ago, we announced that we would be accepting a three-and-a-half year assignment to Germany for my husband's job. We received mixed reactions. Loved ones trusted our decision making, but were sad to see us go. I, too, was torn. Of course, I worried about missing time with my extended family. But I knew that I would gain the opportunity to take a leave of absence from my job allowing me to be more present with my kids without a commute, office drama, or other paid job stresses. I knew I had a privileged childhood and was grateful for it; therefore I had always wanted to replicate that by not working a paid job when I became a mom someday. The overseas assignment finally gave me that luxury. My mom worked part time during my school years. That flexibility allowed her to chaperone school field trips, volunteer in our classrooms, and just be there. All of my classmates knew her by name, and now my kids' classmates say "Hi, S' mom!" or "Hi, L's mom!" anytime they see me. I can easily do fun things (like attend the fourth grade class party in the middle of the day) and less fun things (like responding quickly to summonses from the school nurse). On a recent trip to Norway, my kindergartner colored in his blank comic book while my fourth grader, husband, and I tasted reindeer and whale. We debated which dishes we liked and which ones we would say "no thank you" to, also discussing after dinner plans and what activities to prioritize later in our trip. A week before Christmas, this was simultaneously cozy, ordinary, and memorable. These are things that we might not experience in America, and I am grateful to expose my children to different cultures, people, and, values. During parent-teacher conferences a few months ago, my older son's German teacher said he is so open-minded and a testament to us at home. What better compliment is there for a parent? Despite enjoying such a moment of utter content that night in Norway, I felt guilty, as I have so often since moving. That guilt was more pronounced many times: when my grandmother's health declined and I wasn't there, when my second nephew was born, and when I missed myriad family functions (including said nephew's first birthday party). I treasure the current bubble with my immediate family. But I miss my extended family, who gave me the security and confidence to try new things, like travel the world. Friends have envied the close relationship between my mom and me, and when she probably needs me the most, I'm 4,000 miles away, trying to be the mom she was in my childhood. The irony isn't lost on me. I feel guilty that we've temporarily separated my immediate family from my extended family. My parents have been able to come visit a few times, but it's not the same as being able to visit for a last minute weekend or celebrate birthdays and holidays together. When they visit, we do have a longer continuous stretch than in the U.S. (when we live a 1.5 hour drive apart). But it also means that when the inevitable "See you later" comes, we know the distance won't be just a car ride. My family has always been a safety net, and it's hard having them a nine-hour plane ride away. Despite texted pictures, phone calls, and periodic video chats, my immediate family is not enmeshed with my extended family like I experienced in childhood. The love and desire for connection remain. I know that when this overseas experience is over, my family will embrace us with open arms. Read the original article on Business Insider
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Diverse, communal, gender-fluid: African families' true history is being whitewashed
Growing up on the Kenyan coast in a household filled with aunties and grandparents, one thing was clear to me: raising children is a community endeavour. Anyone could be a disciplinarian for a child if they were going astray: a neighbour's stare could straighten your back; a cousin became your sibling if an elder said so. Children belonged to everyone and no one in particular. To me, this has always felt like the most powerful kind of family: fluid, expansive and deeply rooted in care. As we say in Swahili: 'Mtoto ni wa kila mtu' – a child is everyone's responsibility. Just as in my home town, African families have always been diverse, built on extended kinship systems, communal parenting and fluid roles that adapt to context and need. The notion of the nuclear family – a married heterosexual couple raising biological children in a single household, which was promoted at the recent Strengthening Families conference in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Nairobi's Pan-African Conference on Family Values – is not indigenous to Africa. It was imported, imposed and idealised through a combination of colonialism, missionary influence and capitalist restructuring. Before colonisation, African cultures embraced gender diversity. For example, the Igbo and Yoruba people found mostly in present-day Nigeria did not have a binary view of gender and typically did not assign gender to babies at birth, waiting until later in life. The Dagaaba people (in present-day Ghana) assigned gender based not on anatomy but on the energy someone presents. In Kenya, the Agikuyu people practised a tradition of women marrying other women. In a 2000 study on 'woman-woman marriage' among Gikuyu women, Wairimũ Ngarũiya Njambi and William E O'Brien examine the dynamics of these relationships, which demonstrate the fluidity of gender relations and queerness in traditional Africa. Yet most of the time, this sexual fluidity has been ignored at best, or overwritten at worst, by the Europeans who codify and mediate African history. Lately, everywhere I look, I find myself watching the world trying to shrink us as Africans along with our values and diverse families. They are trying to flatten the vastness of our ways into tiny boxes labelled nuclear, functional or broken. It is a dangerous narrative, wrapped in the language of morality and tradition, backed mainly by fear and politics. This story is deeply centred around one kind of family: a man, a woman, a marriage certificate and two well-behaved children who take their father's name. But this version of family is not our truth, we are not 'one size fits all'. We are people with many mothers, many fathers, many uncles and many aunts, and children with more than one home. We have been raised by aunts, grandparents and cousins, and we have lived in families where women live together to raise children communally. Sign up to Global Dispatch Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team after newsletter promotion We are cousins who become brothers, and nieces who become sisters, and neighbours who go out of their way to offer discipline when children are wrong. I remember being naughty and climbing trees in my short skirt, and Mama Asha would punish me. When I sulked and complained, my mother would side with her. Mama Asha's intervention was not seen as overstepping but protection and guidance. The rightwing and anti-gender movements cloaked in religion and family values are pushing hard to shame families that we know and love into silence. They use pulpits, policies skewed by funding, and education systems that have a goal of speaking on morality while stripping away nuance and our African histories. Our African families do not need to be fixed but honoured. Many amazing families are doing the work of love, care, protection and legacy, led by single mothers and fathers, grandfathers, queer parents and orphaned siblings, and yet the church and state look down on them. How do we in the 21st century idolise a model that is built on exclusion and patriarchy and call it 'God's design'? At Zamara Foundation, through digital media and convening grassroots communities, we are trying to understand these flawed narratives that are geared towards erasing the real 'African values' conversation. The #ReclaimingFamilies media campaign was offline and online – we erected billboards across Nairobi and Uganda that had positive messages on African families, we led X and Instagram conversations and we conducted a roadshow where we asked communities what African values and families looked like to them. All this was conducted during the Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Nairobi, attended by predominantly white and European speakers discussing African families. One of the highlights was that Africans started having conversations, and loudly condemned the invasion of Eurocentric ideology of how African families should look. The nuclear-only view of the family is truly unAfrican. Our stories are full of women who parent without partners, boys who grow up with grandmothers, queer folk who build homes full of joy, and communities that stretch wide enough to catch whoever is falling. Those are the true African families. Wambui Esther Kimani is founder and director of Zamara Foundation
Washington Post
10-06-2025
- Sport
- Washington Post
Asking Eric: Uncle's ‘joking' text to niece offends mom
Dear Eric: I'm married with four kids and have a sizable extended family. One son, who is in seventh grade, runs track and finished the season with personal records in his events, which also happen to place second in his school's all-time best records. I sent out a family text to all of our extended family raving about his achievements. This is common amongst all of the aunts and uncles. We got a load of congrats. However, my husband's brother side-texted my eldest daughter, 'tell your brother to stop being first loser.' (He did not text any 'congrats' to the group text.) My daughter showed me the text and chuckled. I'm not sure if she showed my son.
Washington Post
09-05-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Carolyn Hax: Fiancé won't even discuss deviating from Mom's plans on holidays
Dear Carolyn: Although my fiancé is an only child, he is part of a large, extended family. This family has traditions for everything — Easter, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, St. Patrick's Day, Fourth of July, Super Bowl — down to which plates can be used, how the table can be set, the food allowed, etc.
