Have you ever walked into the home of a friend and noticed that the atmosphere and dialogue of that family was just different? It can feel like you were transplanted into a different country! It’s easy to recognize different cultures when you step outside of your own cultural norms.
I never noticed the norms and narratives of my family until I found myself thousands of miles away to Hawai’i which felt like a different country to me. I was immersed in the culture there and fell in love with a people of a blended heritage that was as diverse as I could imagine. I met people from all over the world, and even learned to say hello in 50 different languages! This experience was my first glimpse into learning about family culture.
While there, I met a lot of mixed-race couples. Most of them were amazing, but I met one couple that were at odds with each other because of their cultural differences. I didn’t know what to say to help them, but I knew that starting a family regardless of where you come from would mean blending cultures!
So I asked my friend, Sione from Tonga, what he thought about how to be successful since he and his wife were from different countries and had made it work for decades. I’ll never forget what he told me, and it has started me on this journey of discovering family culture: you forget about where you come from and adopt proven frameworks to form a new family culture.
Fast forward to the time when my husband, Michael and I started learning to navigate our own family culture. We set our goals and standards by the cultural norms we grew up with. We valued our education and faith. We worked toward graduation and meaningful occupations. The path we followed was the same one our parents and teachers claimed would lead to success. What surprised us was how little we were prepared for failure after following what we now see as a dysfunctional and outdated handbook. We found ourselves stranded at the height of the Great Recession in one of the most expensive regions of America with a mountain of student debt, a growing family, bills piling up, underemployment, and declined job applications.
Although we loved each other very much and our hearts were in the right place, the path we were on was undeniably a dead end. I started to get scared. Really scared. Michael and I fell into a deep depression. We felt hopeless and the way ahead of us was dark and difficult. How were we going to survive? I knew that families suffered under the weight of financial strain and irreconcilable differences. Would that become our family? What about our children? How could I raise them under a value system that taught us that we were worthless? Were they simply going to grow up in our footsteps and incur the same baggage?
No one could give us any answers. There was simply no script for facing failure or forging a new path away from the status quo. Our options were either to keep going to school, keep living above our means, or quit altogether. We were suffering from more than the financial strain. Michael felt a deep sense of failure as a provider. He did his best, but ended up working in a toxic environment for an industry he loathed. I grieved for him as I worked to keep our family intact. I had my own personal meltdown when in 2016 our house flooded and I felt like I hit my threshold for chaos in my life.
That’s when I decided that I was going to be proactive and seek out answers. I leaned on my education in lifespan development. I studied all the books I could get my hands on: personal development, marriage, parenting, education, and business. I decided to seek out information from experts and influencers who seemed to have figured it all out. I started this podcast, originally called The Home & Family Culture Podcast to discuss how families could challenge their cultural norms and redefine success for their own families.
In my explorations, I learned that most of us simply do not question the ethos of the culture we grow up in. We are averse to change or anything that challenges our norms and customs. Yet, more and more of us are getting left behind in our changing economic, social, and educational environments. More than this, we are perpetuating the dysfunctional mores that have led to disease and abuse, social injustices and political turmoil, and the general breakdown of the family as the most essential institution for the survival of our civilization.
Parents and children today are not taught the skills of resilience, nor social and emotional intelligence. The reality is, the development of these skills cannot be outsourced. We think we can find it in vanity, popularity, sports, entertainment, schooling, electronics, and money even at the expense of our mental health, wellbeing, and relationships. We call it “The American Dream” to get accolades and applause for our fiscal achievements, stamps of approval, going to the “right” institutions, getting the “right” career, and climbing that corporate ladder. This stress of being trapped between our fear of failure and pressure to achieve and conform leaves a vacancy in our souls where family ought to be and then wonder why our children are shooting up their schools, questioning their identities, cutting, bullying, depressed, anxious, and ending their lives way too soon.
Our families are meant to be the foundation for wholeness and balance. Yet, without realizing it, we adopt society's values as our own and hope to be able to pretend that we know what we’re doing. We cope with our inadequacies by self-medicating or escaping into the private lives inside our screens and turn a blind eye to the troubles within the walls of our own homes. We give up our internal locus of control and hold others accountable without recognizing that the solution to our problems is within our reach.
Family Culture is all about blending your individual and collective values and norms to create an interrelated unit. Every family has a culture whether by default or by design. Your family can become the epicenter of a cultural revolution for changing the ethos of how we discipline, educate, form policies, and define the economy but most of us are unaware of the values and narratives they are being socialized into. Many of the constructs we hold to were formed as a means of coping with stress and chaos to create a sense of order. In the process of upholding those constructs, chaos is often the unintended consequence. To design your family culture with intention is to cultivate an environment where everyone can thrive through the ups and downs, the order and chaos of this natural existence.
I’m Jodi Chaffee. I’m a homeschool mom, seasoned podcaster, coach, and family culture expert. My husband, Michael, and I are on our own family culture journey to change our trajectory. You will hear him join the discussion sometimes, too. For more than three years, I have studied business culture and compared it to families. I am on a mission to break away from the status quo that has failed us and redefine our own culture using the skills I have learned as I have studied these principles. This has resulted in a powerful framework for hacking successful cultures and applying it to families who want to live with intention.
The Family Culture Movement is a show about systems and strategies of successful cultures. We discuss values and tactics for facing family problems, changing dysfunctional patterns, and giving yourself grace when it comes to the constant dance between the order and chaos of raising a family in a changing world. Everything will be on the table as we discuss topics ranging from media literacy to financial literacy, normalizing sexual health to normalizing family dinners, homeschool, and entrepreneurship, and much, much more.
Join me every week with guests from a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences to bring you practical insights, powerful tools, and reliable resources for navigating your family culture journey with intention and compassion. We’re here to support you in implementing best practices and solutions for your family. Together, we can bring families back to the center of society as the means of progress and innovation, transforming the social mores of our communities, and bringing our families into the 21st Century.
Join the movement! Go to homeandfamilyculture.com and sign up for your FREE membership to the Family Success Toolbox. This is The Family Culture Movement.
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