Families: Personal Experiences vs. Societal Conceptions

In class on Friday we discussed the role of family in shaping a person's morality and ability to empathize with others.  While I disagreed with much of what was said directly, it did help me to create a number of similar theories which I prefer.  It may be that these theories were implied in what David Kenneth Johnson was saying - however, I've found it helpful to clarify and elaborate my conceptions of this idea.

So - family typically aids children in developing relationships with others, through the idea of parents acting as role models.  While children also learn to relate to others in a family context, they do not usually develop serious empathy and understanding of others' feelings until rather later than infancy, by which time they are interacting with other children to whom they are not related.  Thus, I conjecture that parents' ability to serve as role models is the more important type of influence here.

Children become aware of society's idea of what a family should be at a very early age.  Even if their own families do not fit this model, they are often aware of the difference and which family model is considered superior.  They gain knowledge of this ideal family model through many different sources; watching other families in real life, reading about or otherwise learning of fictional families, and even seeing their own (possibly dysfunctional) families express expectations and opinions on what a family should be, regardless of whether or not they fit that model.

Furthermore, children do perceive emotions from an early age.  If they observe that their parents fight all the time and seem to be generally unhappy, they may wish to find other adults to serve as role models, or even use their own parents as inverse role models of a sort; they may attempt to do the exact opposite of what their parents are doing.

Overall, the concept I am trying to communicate is that I think societal conception of family can be of greater influence even on the morality of individuals than personal experiences with biological relations.  After all, if one was primarily influenced by one's own family, then everyone from happy families would be happy and act morally, and everyone from broken or unhappy families would have problems - they would follow their parents' examples and become alcoholic, or abusive, or addicted to drugs, or narrow-minded, etc.

P.S. Again, I seem to have posted rather more text than I am strictly supposed to.  Also I am now apparently writing six posts for one week.  I apologize (again)!  This particular subject is one which greatly interests me.