Reflection

Reflection

Summer time with family. We go to many baseball and softball games that my siblings and cousins play in during the summer. Low cost entertainment that our whole family enjoys. This is one of the summer nights after a game.

No matter where a family lives they have a certain amount of resources and therefore have choices to make about how to use them.  Many times families make these choices without even realizing it and so part of the challenge is identifying the ways how families are using their resources.  Time is the most discrete resource that we use without realizing it.  One way in which I have been taught to identify how we are using our time is to write out your entire schedule, what you do every hour for a week.  After identifying where it is going then you can begin to decide if you want to be using it differently.  You will also realize that you have choices and are not being forced to do anything, which we can easily begin to believe.

In our world today there are endless opportunities of how to use our resources and when looking at a family if can be very difficult to decide what is best.  However, if a family has goals for how they want their children to develop then they can invest in those kind of activities and experiences.  This can be assessed through a simple conversation of what are you guys doing together as a family and what are you getting from that activity/experience.  Do you think using that resource in a different way would be better for your family?

I am not a financial counselor however, I am all about families succeeding and reaching their goals whatever those may be and so that would motivate me to guide families to make good decisions about the use of their resources.  I think there is also freedom in knowing that there are many different individual professionals that can help in all of these resource management areas.  Referring a client to a professional in the specific resource field they are pursuing could be the best decision and is a lot of what those in the helping profession do.  A large part of my current internship involves networking with the agencies we do or potentially could work with.

Through the networking I have already done I am learning that there is an agency to help with every need a family could possibly and the down fall of many agencies is not using others.  When an agency trying to help an individual completely on their own they stop doing what they do well and begin doing lots of these kind of well.  If we all worked together and specialized in what we do best we would be much better off and could better reach those in need.

In conclusion, there are basic needs, resources that every family needs and so a large part of helping people is helping them get those needs so that they can work to reach those goals.  As I learned in Human Needs through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, those basic need must be met before a family can meet their emotional needs.  However, through my family studies classes I have also learned that those emotional needs of feeling loved are vital to a child’s development and so must be met.  Each family can do this, but may need professionals to come along side them and help chose how to best use their resources and get the resources they need.