The American Family

            In the 1950s and 60s there was a television show called Leave it to Beaver which I grew up watching in reruns. On this program, the mother (June Cleaver) stayed home and raised the two children Wally and Theodore (his nickname was “the Beaver”) while the husband (Ward Cleaver) was a businessman that played golf every Saturday. When Ward came home from work, his supper was always on the table, after which he’d retire to his den to read his paper. Everything was perfect in the Cleaver family, the kids called their father sir, the lawn was always perfectly trimmed behind the white picket fence, and all problems were solved by the end of the show. And, as if you couldn’t guess, the Cleavers were white. This portrayal of American family life in a suburban neighborhood was seen as “normal”. Despite the fact that I myself have a family which includes a mother, father, and two kids, this portrayal of the “average” American family seems strange today.

            I got a DVD from the public library one time to show to my 4-year-old daughter Joa which was about families. Though some families were shown with a mom, dad, and two children, most families did not look like the Cleaver family. In the video, many different types of families were portrayed including single mothers, single fathers, separated parents, and gay couples. In fact, California just legalized gay marriage, thus making this possibility more common. The definition of family has definitely changed in America!

            I bet you hear about ‘step’ families pretty often from American people you know. A commonly held way of think about divorce in America is that about 50% of marriages will end in divorce. In South Korea, divorce used to be an unheard of thing, but has risen dramatically in recent years and currently stands at a level that is only slightly lower than America. Most divorces create a family with a single parent. Of course, many people that get widowed or divorced, later get remarried. This adds the ideas of stepchildren, stepparents, stepbrothers and sisters, as well as half-brothers and sisters into the mix. And of course, any combination of any of these can be living together or in different residences and they are all considered as a family in America.

Coming from a “broken-home” used to be something a person would be ashamed about, but now it is just a fact of life that we all must learn to live with. A broken-home is a nontraditional family in which either the mother and/or father does not live with the rest of the family. I grew up in a broken-home. My mother was divorced when she was young and she raised my brother and me by herself. It was pretty courageous undertaking for my mother then, but not a terribly uncommon situation anymore. Growing up in this type of family was difficult for me, not so much because of people making fun of me or making me feel ashamed, but because my mother had to work long hours to keep the house running. She had to leave before I went to school and didn’t return until after dinnertime. From a very young age I was expected to do a lot of the chores around the house and take care of myself. I was basically forced to grow up in a hurry there just wasn’t a chance to enjoy childhood in the way other kids did. In the end, it wasn’t bad at all and I benefited from what I learned through that time. I know a lot of my son’s classmates come from broken homes as well. They have nothing to be ashamed of, it’s just a fact of life.

As I mentioned in my last article, when my family was on vacation at Disneyworld, we got selected as the “first family” for a stage show since we were so representative of the average American family. The fact that my family, a mixed race family, could be selected as an average American family tells you how much the American has changed since the Cleaver family. As the head of my family, I believe that my family is the most important thing I have, no matter what it looks like.