The known unspoken family rules

I was born in Chile and so were my parents, they grew up during a period when there was a military coup, followed by a dictatorship of about 20 years. This topic was never touched when I grew up, whenever we started talking about difficult political subjects both of my parents would tell us that they did not want us to speak or argue about those topics whether it was inside or outside of the house. Whenever I thought of this, I would ask myself why they would not let us, and once I was mature enough asked my father. His response was very moving and then I understood his reasoning behind this family rule. He had family be hunted down by the military, as they were opposing what they were doing, the same happened on my mother's side, one of her uncles was killed by the military and the other disappeared without explanation to this day. The rule was meant to protect us, even after the military let go of the power and there was no danger in talking about these previous political issues.

• Just like this rule that I followed without asking for years, I realized there were a lot of rules or traditions my family had, that I accepted and abide by them some of them are:
• No asking for things, we would mention we would like something, but asking was not something we should do.
• After dinner, we would pick up and tidy up after ourselves and would leave mom and dad to catch up and to have some alone time.
• We would prepare our clothes the day before school, so we did not spend time during the morning deciding and looking around for stuff.

Many of these rules were discovered by me not because I was taught about them, but because I saw my older brothers do them, and some other times I did not obey them and received my parent’s correction. This is called positive and negative feedback, whenever we do something right, and we experience our peers acceptance and encouragement, we understand that whatever we did was a correct behavior with them, in the other hand, whenever we do something wrong and receive correction, we learn that whatever we did is not acceptable and that we shouldn’t do it again, as the behavior is not encouraged.

My older brother learned about negative feedback in a rough way, he went with my mother to the supermarket, and he saw a toy that he wanted, but my mom could not afford it so she told him she will not buy it this time (by the way, he broke one of the unspoken family rules I mentioned earlier! Who knows, maybe this is when the rule started?) earlier that week, my parents taught him that he should never step on the roads because that’s where the cars are, and if he ever did, he might get run over by one (harsh way to be taught about it, in my opinion), so my genius brother said, in what he thought was a clever way to convince mom: “then I’ll go to the road and stay there until a car comes”. Can you guess what did my mom do? Do you think my brother happily came back home with a toy truck under his arm? if you guessed No, then you guessed right. He was grounded not allowed to go play outside for two weeks and was practicing his handwriting for the whole two-week period. Did he ever have that attitude again? No, because he learned it was not the right behavior, he did improve his calligraphy though.

It’s a fun experience to figure out what are the different unspoken rules that each family has, you might have realized some of the unspoken rules of your friends when you visited their homes, or when you started dating someone. I invite you to think of all those rules and how they have changed your behavior even after leaving home, and if you are thinking of keeping them when you have your own kids.