I would like to share some of my personal experience. Taking this class, in the first place made me think about my life. It hurt digging into my own memories, do not get me wrong I had a great childhood, but I remember being on a playground and seeing my friends’ “traditional” families gather together made me really wonder how my life could have been different if my dad lived with us. But thanks to my mom I never felt like anyone in the family was missing. My dad was barely present in my life for the first four years of my life, and then when I turned 5, he moved to another country. Throughout the nine years living in another country, he was supporting us financially only. When my brother and I moved in with our dad in 2010, we were then living only with him and my mom was still in Ukraine. We lived with my dad until I turned 17, and to be honest living with a single father is so much different than living in a household of a single mom. It was different in every way possible. Which made me miss my mom a lot during her absence. Due to the lack of experience with having children around, my dad was a bad caretaker but he did care a lot about our education. Maybe even too much to the point where he thought he could decide for us what we want to be in the future (profession wise). He is a very money driven man, so he would always make sure that we had money in our pocket, but is that what a child wants? Yes and no. Having money in my pocket always helped, I won’t deny but he always showed some kind of disinterest in what interested me. He put me into a jujutsu class because he wanted us to know how to protect myself, but I wanted to dance and I wanted to draw. Growing up with my mom I went to a music school to a drawing school, I danced, I swam, I did everything to expend my artistic side of me.  I grew up in the environment were mothers tend to be better caregivers. I also feel like if my father would be there while I was growing up he would be more understanding.

Moving from one type of household into a different  type of household was a big transition. I haven’t really thought about it until I started taking work-family communication class but it did influenced me a lot. Also my dad ended up paying child support until my brother and I turned 21.