What is your Cultural DNA?

What is your Cultural DNA?

Where did all your ideas about the world – and your relationship to it – come from? 

Before we even go to school, our home team and the culture around us, show us where we are on the social grid. Here’s what boys do and what girls do. Here’s how people of our faith act. Here’s what being our race means. Our class says what is possible.  Each group/culture we are born into works overtime to ensure that each new generation is ready to keep up its beliefs and traditions. ‘The way things are done.’

So kids’ early years are flooded with examples and rewards. Stories filled with strong heroic men and beautiful sweet women. Special smiles from adults when kids pick up local mannerisms and scripts. We celebrate that first haircut or fancy dress-up shoes. The more kids reflect what the culture wants to see, the more kudos and benefits come their way.

Our new Culture Sleuth program puts kids in the driver’s seat to trace the genesis of these expectations in their own family. Armed with questions and a plan, they can invite generations of family to go back to the starting gate – to find the earliest messages in their family’s cultural DNA.

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