Immigrant Family: Growing Up In An Afghan Family

Growing up in an immigrant family led me to become heavily influenced by culture and tradition. My family immigrated from Afghanistan about 25 years ago and they brought their culture with them. Now since they didn’t quite know how to ‘Americanize’ or adapt to the american culture, they stuck to their own. This was in part because of the idea that moving to a new country possibly increased the chance of losing culture and traditions and in part because it was all they knew. Culture refers to all of the beliefs, customs, ideas, behaviors, and traditions of a particular society that are passed through generations and it is passed on by language, behavior, and it defines which traits and behaviors are considered important, desirable, or undesirable. I, personally, had noticed from a very young age that I was different in some ways: for example the way I acted was

I simply thought (as ignorant and naive as it was) that it was how we were born, just like the colour of our skin. By reading a couple of articles and essays about the influences of culture, I have already found out that members of collectivist cultures tend to be interdependent and to have self-concepts defined in terms of relationships and social obligations and in contrast, members of individualist cultures tend to strive for independence and have self-concepts defined in terms of their own aspirations and achievements. I also learned from psychologist Nalini Ambady that both the structure and function of the human brain throughout its development are shaped by the environment. The social environment, in turn, is shaped by culture. This makes a lot more sense concerning the topic of growing up in a cultured household with strict morals and