How Family Bonds Affect Us

Family bonds begin at birth and extend throughout our entire lives. How we deal with these bonds will determine how well we can carry out our own relationships in the future. Recognizing the role we play in our family and how the bonds affect us can help us in our current relationships.

The bond between a child and their parents is a strong one. Parents nurture, protect and love their children and help them assimilate into the world. The bond is protective and loving. Parental bonds, however, can be stifling. As children become adolescents they become more and more independent. They need to venture out into the world and grow. They spend less time with their parents and more time with their friends.

When children are at this stage they often start to rebel against their parents and against the family. They try to be independent and make their own decisions. The parents need to be sure to maintain boundaries, even at this stage. They also need to try to keep the rules the same for boys and girls to avoid favoritism.

Children also have bonds between each other as well, making sibling bonds that will last a lifetime. The closer the children are in ages, the closer they are likely to become as they grow up. Family bonds can be helpful in our adult relationships.

As adults, we continue to keep bonds with our parents. Children also create and strengthen the bonds with their siblings. Those who did not form strong bonds during childhood may not nurture their bonds and may become more detached from the family. If the child felt neglected or was emotionally hurt during childhood they may not nurture the family bonds as they become adults.

The role of the bonds with our parents and siblings helps form how we deal with our own relationships in adulthood. If we have good relationships with our family we tend to have good adult relationships with our partners. However, if there were problems with our family bonds we tend to carry these problems and resentments into new relationships. Our expectations may be skewed and we may not have the tools to keep our relationships working.

If you have issues in your current relationships look towards your childhood to find the roots of these problems. Once this is determined you can successfully make changes to your life to help you have healthy adult relationships.