How does family and culture impact our friendships?

And how do friendships impact our relationship with our culture?

We learn to be in relationships with other people from our caregivers, and within our own family systems. Culturally, our own families have their own norms and values when it comes to relationships (ie. what’s expected, what’s accepted, and so on).

So what do we need to think about when it comes to family/culture and friendships? Today, I want to explore:

• the implicit and explicit social, cultural, and familial norms that we subscribe to

• how behaviors we learned in/because of our family relationships translate to how we interact in friendships

• how culture and geography impact our friendships

• how we can bring our culture into our intercultural friendships more intentionally

Growing up, I was taught that family is more important than friends. This made me an unreliable friend. I would get into a lot of tiffs with my childhood best friend on how unreliable I was, because I would often commit to things only to have to cancel last minute because my parents expected me home for dinner, or at a community event on the weekend.

After doing some research, I was really surprised to find recent research on how friendships are more important than family relationships as we age. In fact, valuing friendships is related to better functioning, whereas valuing familial relationships exerted a static influence on health and well-being across the lifespan. Even more, in older adults, only strain from friendships predicted more chronic illnesses over a 6-year period.

A big part of this is shared values (which we will talk about more next week), but in a culture where family is more important than friendships, it can be really hard to unlearn some of the conditioning and find a way to make room for friendship intimacy.

How does cultural/familial norms and values impact our friendships?

I want to share a few specific ways culture and family can impact our friendships. Family over friendships isn’t the only messaging we receive in our sociocultural systems.