Communication Between Cultures

Economic Function

The second function of families is to supply children with the necessities of life (food,

clothing, shelter). In subtle and manifest ways, the family teaches economic sharing

and responsibility. Although the methods for generating goods and services and even

the means of distribution vary from culture to culture, the family consumes food and

other necessities as a social unit. This means that one of the functions of nearly every

family is to supply the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter. Later in the chapter

you will notice how variations in family economic functions often teach important

cultural values such as materialism, thrift, sharing, and hard work.

Socialization Function

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the family is one of the“instructors”who transmit the

important elements of culture from generation to generation. Strong and Cohen

identify part of that instruction when they write,“Children are helpless and depen-

dent for years following birth. They must learn to walk and talk, how to care for

themselves,howtoact,howtolove,andto touch and be touched. Teaching chil-

dren how to fit into their particular culture is one of the family’s most important

tasks.”^34

Part of a family’s socialization process is teaching the culture’s core values, beliefs,

ways of behaving, and worldview. This means that“parents teach their children beha-

viors that are appropriate, expected, moral, or polite.”^35 The child’s first exposure to

emotions such as love, pity, pride, guilt, respect, and fear are experienced in the fam-

ily setting. Obviously, these kinds of“lessons”and“definitions”also come from other

sources, yet it is the family that initially exposes the child to the ideas“that matter

most.”Not only are norms and values passed along by families to children, but fami-

lies also“give them their initial exposure to questions of faith.”^36 Children are not

born into a world that automatically predisposes them to believe in one God, many

gods, or no gods. Devotion to a“higher power,”be it Allah or Christ, the words of

Buddha or Confucius, or the forces of nature, must be learned—and that process

begins in the home. Barry and associates offer yet another catalog of the values usually

assigned to the family. These include training in obedience, responsibility, nurturing

achievement, self-reliance, and general independence.^37 In short, we agree with Al-

Kaysi when he writes,“The family provides the environment within which human

values and morals develop and grow in the new generation; these values and morals

cannot exist apart from the family unit.”^38

Language Acquisition Function

The family is the place where children learn the language of the culture they are born

into. All children arrive with the biological and anatomical tools necessary to acquire

language. However, in nearly every step of this complex and lengthy process, we find

the stamp of family and culture. The process of learning words, what they mean, and

how to use them begins at birth and has its origins in the family. As we have said

repeatedly, at birth it is the members of the family who are the main caregivers.

From how voices sound (learning dialects) to the objects those voices are referring

to (the meaning of“mama”and“dada”) once again make family the main“teacher.”

So important is language to intercultural communication that later in the book, we

devote an entire chapter to the subject.

Functions of the Family 79

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