Family Values and Modern Identities

Abstract

This paper will consider the problem of identity which reflects ‘family values’ transmitted usually to the child in its first cultural environment. That's why the family is substantial factor of enculturation: internalization of culture, developing a social identity, providing an ascribed social status and early gender socialization – the child usually socialize by getting used to routines of the family members, receiving signs of their needs and expectations. Hence, the personal life experience of father and mother are crucial to the resultant parental values that would be transmitted to the child. But apart from parental identities, their upbringing practices and educational patterns also depend on cultural worldviews and social policies. The collision among the two is present in Serbia where cultural recognition of family values, originating from the traditional society, still seems resilient to modernization policy (since the period of socialism with its ‘state feminism’ that promoted women rights as ‘equality in employment’). Provoking paradox in the issue of women rights, modern values also assumed a need to harmonize both of women's roles – as industrial and as domestic labor force. Waiting for the idea of that harmonization to spread globally, as the reconciliation of family values and modern identities, one should know that mostly women (mother) mediate child's early self – development, and that modern emancipation made that task even harder for her requiring greater engagement of men in the child's care and domestic activities. Basically, it demands both halves of humanity to emancipate as well, just this time maybe not so outwardly, from traditional and modern roles, but inwardly, from egocentric drive to dominate. Only that could mean shifting the paradigm from the obsolete age of domination towards the appealing age of partnership.