Tags: Family Ties, Lifestyle - Family, Parenthood 2011

Remember the traditional family?

Series begins Dec. 27, 2010.

for this series.

FAMILY TIES is a quarterly special section published by Troy Media about critical, life-altering issues families face and how they deal with them.

December 21, 2010

Dec. 21, 2010/ Troy Media/ – The mythical traditional family of the 1950s and early 1960s portrayed on television and in film has gone the way of the Edsel and the long-playing record.

I’m dating myself, but it’s hard to forget those weekly classic sitcoms, such as Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver and the Donna Reed Show. They were dubbed “suburban sitcoms” because they depicted a picture-card portrait of the ideal suburban family living in a spotless home surrounded by a freshly mowed lawn, neatly enclosed with a white picket fence.

The immaculate home was populated by the typical American family: Mom and Dad, two or three children and a big, friendly, loving dog who was treated like a member of the family – and often had more common sense than his masters.

A daily miracle

Clean-shaven Dad left for work at 7:30 a.m. sharp every morning, sporting a conservative business suit; apron-clad Mom, hurriedly cleaning up breakfast remains, gave Dad a quick goodbye peck on the cheek while the children bounded out the door, grabbing lunch boxes and scarfing down toast so they wouldn’t be late for school.

Once everyone cleared out, Mom spent her days tidying the house, shopping and attending school or church meetings, making sure she was back home in time to prepare dinner so that it was ready to serve when Dad rolled in from work at 6:30 p.m. sharp.

And when the family returned home, Mom miraculously looked just as perky, cheerful and perfectly put together as she had in the morning – a minor miracle in itself.

There you have the TV sitcom template for building predictable scenarios of family life. The plotlines changed from week to week, but were variations on proven themes with life-couldn’t-be-better endings. The kids were always scrapping and bickering; Dad and Mom interceded; pimply-faced boyfriends and awkward, self-conscious girlfriends sparked the weekly dramas with playful teenage romance. The unrequited teenage love scenes were always tastefully suggestive – hinting at what’s ahead when children leave the nest to make their way in the cruel real world.

Pop culture writer and commentator Lynn Spiegel appropriately described these early sitcoms as a “fantasy of antiseptic electrical space.” And that fairy tale was always so white, pretty and perfect.

A round of applause for the marketing mavens for giving mainstream America exactly what it wanted. Who cared if the story lines were saccharine, puerile, maudlin and hopelessly unrealistic and farfetched? We weren’t ready for real life slice-of-life sagas. It wasn’t ready to handle dysfunction, cruelty, perversion – even diversity.

Fast-forward 50 years to 2010. Thankfully, those silly fantasy family sitcoms have been replaced with modern plotlines. The formats are still formulaic, the humour still as hokey as ever, but the content more accurately reflects the times. Sex, once considered a taboo subject, is obsessively spotlighted (Sex and the City) to pull in the libido-driven 20- to 30-year-old viewers; and for the liberated 30-something upwardly mobile straight and gay generation, there have been shows like Will and Grace.

To quote social poet/singer Bob Dylan, chronicler of the freewheeling, dope-smoking, free-love mid-1960s to early 1970s generation, The times they are a-changin’.

Some things never change

Over the past five decades, accelerated change has been the leitmotif weaving itself into the fabric of our lives. Despite constant change, the purpose and values of the family – that mysterious regenerative engine influencing our lives since the beginning of time – have remained the same. What has changed are family membership and the unwritten rules governing inclusion.

If anything, today’s family is a vast improvement over the family of a half-century ago.

This issue of FAMILY TIES captures these changes. The modern family can no longer be easily defined. It’s not a man and a woman and 2.5 children and a fluffy mutt with a silly name anymore. It can be a blended family, a fairly new term defining a combination of two, even three generations, of families – divorced adults and their progeny – living under one roof. It can be a same-sex couple raising two or three adopted children or a single parent raising a couple of kids. In the past, the majority of single parents were women. Today, a significant number of single parents are men, dispelling the myth that only women were meant to be the essential nurturing force in a child’s life.

A family can be anything you want it to be

The modern family can be anything caring parents want it to be. Blood ties once defined membership. Now a family can be a melting pot of races, religions and generations all melding to form a loving, supportive union that raises and educates children and then sends them off into the world to make their mark. In fact, the offspring of these atypical familial configurations are likely to be more open-minded and accepting of differences than their predecessors.

With all these changes, the seminal force bonding families – however they’re configured – is still love and the organic need to share, protect and care for all members.

The products of today’s families will be the citizens of tomorrow’s world – its craftspeople, engineers, doctors, architects, technicians. Wouldn’t it be a remarkable achievement if they could shape a more tolerant and egalitarian world than the one we have now?

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