Examples

Student Name

Buckley

Writing 102

17 February 2016

The New Meaning of Family

“Cam, we are just a new type of family, they don’t have the right vocabulary for us yet. They need one of us to be the mom”

-Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Modern Family

In recent years, researchers who study family dynamics have discovered that the American family is constantly changing.  Stephanie Cootnz, an award-winning writer and teacher of family studies reflects on the 1950s in her essay, “What We Really Miss About the 1950s”, and gives an in-depth analysis of why it was easier to achieve the “nuclear family” structure back then. Now that we are in the 21st century, American families are faced with many new realities.  Natalie Angier, a science journalist for The New York Times and Pulitzer Prize winner, analyzes these different realities and the constant remodeling of our society’s definition of family in her NY Times article, “The Changing American Family”. Angier uses modern day profiles of families in her article to show recent trends such as same- sex marriage and cohabitation that reinforce Cootnz’s idea that families are always in flux and having to play catch-up with a changing world.

In her essay, Stephanie Cootnz describes the 1950s as the time when, “America was on a dramatically different trajectory that it had been in the past… [a path] that had already taken people to better places than they had ever seen before and would certainly take their children even further” (35).  She uses an academic tone to convey both the negatives and positives of the 1950s to the reader. The United States had just recovered from the Great Depression and then just began to reestablish itself from World War II. The 1950s were a time of great hope. This renewed confidence in the country and government allowed for Americans to focus on a new start and establish new values for their families. Cootnz points out that during this decade there was a lot of predictability and order. Cootnz writes that modern day parents, “associate the 1950s with a yearning they feel for a time when there were fewer complicated choices for kids or parents to grapple with… there was a coherent “moral order” in their community to serve as a reference point for family norms” (28).  Throughout her essay, Cootnz builds her claims with the heavy use of statistics. She also uses anecdotes from research that she has conducted, which are reflections of the 1950s from people who lived through them, including her. Although they are opinions, they are used for the reader to have firsthand accounts of the era. She takes her readers down memory lane, especially those who lived in the 1950s, by discussing the importance of TV sitcoms back then. Shows such as Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, constantly promoted the new idea of a nuclear family.  However, Cootnz reminds us that these shows did not reflect the real-life experiences of most American families, but rather showed them how they were suppose to live (33).

Of course there is some nostalgia for the 1950s.  However, Cootnz argues that too much nostalgia can be blinding. Those who pick the 1950s as the best decade often end up saying, “”that it’s not the family arrangements in and of themselves they want to revive… they don’t miss they way that women were treated ” (Cootnz 29).  It is often forgotten how the nuclear family back then served as a distraction for many social anxieties and ills such as the nuclear age, cold war, and racism. Cootnz ends her essay, with the claim the new economic reality in the two decades following the 1950s, caused a change in attitude towards the concept of family.

Natalie Angier essay strengthens Cootnz’s thought that the 1950s’ idea of a nuclear family is a concept that is in our past and with the new realities of the 21st century, it is impossible to reinvent it.  She says, “families are more ethnically, racially, religiously, and stylistically diverse than half a generation ago” (Angier). Her article,  “The Changing America”, is a clear reflection of the reality we live in today. The article is composed of different sections that focus on one of these trends; same sex marriage, cohabitation, immigration, and families with incarcerated members. Angier discusses modern day trends, which means that unlike Cootnz, she does not have history to serve as a foundation of her claims. Therefore she must resort to using present day situations to confirm her ideas.  The tone of the article is much less academic than Cootnz. It contains a more balanced mixture of statistics and commentary from the different families. By incorporating profiles of different family arrangements, Angier makes the article relatable to everyone. The use of present-day statistics, interwoven with quotes from family members she interviewed, validates Angier’s ideas on the reality of modern family dynamics. The numbers of cohabitating couples for example are continuously on the rise. Angier notes, “From 1996 to 2012, the number jumped almost 170% percent, to 7 million from 2.9 million” (Angier).  Statistics like these become a real life scenario to the reader, when they read the story of Ana Perez, a mother of 3 from New York who lives with the father of her third child. In her article, Angier captures the new definition of family onto a piece of paper.

After reading both of my sources it is clear to me that the image of the nuclear family is nearly impossible to obtain.  In our culture, the concept of family will always be a necessity. But one thing that we need to realize is that the definition of family will always continue to evolve. We still hold onto the 1950s’ idea of family because it reflects of time a great optimism and stability. “The experience of shared sacrifices in the Depression and war, reinforced by a New Deal- inspired   belief in the ability of government to make life better… this general optimism affected people’s experience and assessment of family life” (Cootnz 36). In a sense, we are still seeking for a similar sense of hope today. If we idealized the ways of the past too much, it prevents us from seeing the changes and problems happening around us today. Women are far more involved in the paid labor force today than in the 1950s and the idea of marriage has been put on the back burner for many couples. These new realities of our society contradict many of the idealized concepts of family that have developed over the years. However, we must accept that these idealized concepts no longer fit into our society and begin to try to understand what the term family is becoming.

With each new generation comes with a new set of problems and a new set of solutions.  It is evident after reading Natalie Angier’s article that there is much more flexibility to the concept of families today than there was in the 1950s. There is not a rigid and narrow definition that families must conform to fit the “norm.” What works for a family in one cultural and economic setting, might not work for another.

For example, the Schulte-Wayser family, a gay couple with 4 adopted children, could not be more different than the Indrakrishnan family, an immigrant family from Sri Lanka.  The Schulte-Wayser family represents a new take on family arrangement, a mixture of modern and traditional values. The Indrakrishnan family embodies a lot of traditional family ties, even though they are from a far different culture.  Angier points out, “Today the best place to find a traditional, G-rated American Family may be in an immigrant community… [Asian-American families] are half as likely to be divorced and only 16 percent of infants are born out of wedlock, compared to 41 percent over all” (Angier).

The evolution of the American family is something that we can’t control. Just as Cootnz reminds us that family dynamics underwent a change from the 1950s to the 1970s (Cootnz 42-43), our ideas of modern family dynamics will also change 20 years from now. The changes in families amongst different generations reflect how much better they want to be than the previous generation.

It is impossible in today’s world to label a family as “typical” or “normal”.  Just as the 1950s sitcoms served to demonstrate that time period’s version of family, 21st century TV shows, such as Modern Family, are doing the same. There are varieties of forms that families come in today. Not one type family is certain to succeed and another type is certain to fail.  How a family is able to function internally is far more important than how it perceived from the outside. As I compare both Stephanie Cootnz essay with Natalie Angier’s article, I can say that family values and structure have definitely changed, but the value of family has not.

Works Cited

Angier, Natalie. “The Changing American Family.” The New York Times. 26 November 2013. Web. 16 February 2016.

Coontz, Stephanie. “What We Really Miss About the 1950s.” Rereading America: Cultural Context for Critical Thinking and Writing. 9th ed. Eds. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013.  27-43. Print.