Reply to Anyone have no good memories from their childhood with their family?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You can't co-opt other people's memories and traditions. You have to create your own. [/quote]

NP. What does this mean? OP didn't ask for other people's memories and traditions. She literally said she's working on doing something different but that it's hard because she has not traditions to pull from.

But in any case, you are actually wrong. You can "co-opt" other people's traditions. As someone with a similar background to OP, many of our family traditions are borrowed from other people and adopted by us. If they stick, they become part of our family practice and will hopefully become traditions that get passed down. If they don't stick, no harm no foul. But when you don't have good family traditions to draw from, it's totally okay to find inspiration in things that have worked for other families.

Also, if you marry someone with strong family traditions, and you continue them, you are co-opting them because they aren't yours but you are adopting them.

Like something I have done as a parent is make music part of our family practice and tradition, because I spent time around other families for whom this was true and it really spoke to me and made me feel good. My family rarely played music at home when I was a kid, and when we did, it was very restrictive and imposed on us. My DH has more musical tradition in his family, and we have taken this further -- music is a part of our daily lives, everyone takes turns selecting music to listen to or to play or sing, it is an important part of all our holiday traditions as well. I was not raised with it, it's not my tradition, but I have happily co-opted it from other families and now my kids will have those memories when they grow up.[/quote]

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