An American Family

In the 1999 film American Beauty, the Burnham family consists of a mother, father, and daughter. The father, Lester, is an agency writer while his wife, Carolyn, is a realtor attempting to compete to sell houses against fellow realtor Buddy King. Their daughter Jane is a dancing Spartanette who has grown distant from both of her parents and holds her father in contempt. Moving into neighborhood, new neighbors Col. Frank Fitts, Barbara Fitts, and Ricky Fitts, changes the dynamic of the…

decade and continue to run, the two that can get brought up are “American Dad!” and “Family Guy.” Both shows ultimately demonstrate core family values in the most comedic way but they are equally different and in point of the main characters both have several differences. As a contrast between the main character of “American Dad“, Stan Smith and of “Family Guy”, Peter Griffin, one is more disciplined and determined than the other. “Family Guy” started in 1999 and has 14 seasons so far. It airs…

his working-class Mexican American family to the idealized white families shown on television sitcoms like the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver and the Andersons of Father Knows Best. His early failure reminds us that American families are complicated. Nevertheless, his essay suggests that working-class families of color like the Sotos can be just as functional as Beaver Cleaver’s family. Soto contrasts the families televised with his own to suggest how Mexican American boys are taught to…

David M. Schneider best presents the idea of American Kinship and how we view those in relation to us. He recognizes that all around the world there are different languages and naming categories, yet as a human race we understand those various definitions and are able to relate our own classifications to them. Schneider uses the word “relative,” (others may use, folks, people, family) to define a relationship though blood or marriage. On my kinship chart I placed my relatives, those related to…

Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family is a fascinating story told by Pauli Murray about her maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald, and the realities of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South. The novel ranges from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction ultimately narrowing in on racial segregation and how it affected interpersonal relationships and individuals. The racial segregation divided people significantly and impacted the gender roles people…

Research conducted by Dervartanian Kulwicki and Miller (1999) sought to investigate beliefs and actions about domestic violence in Arab American immigrant families with the purpose of providing education and intervention. The results revealed that moderate percentages of women approved of husband perpetrated violence and control against their wives under certain circumstances (Dervartanian Kulwicki and Miller 1999). The majority of women agreed or strongly agreed that men could tell their wives…

When observing a Family in America today, one would be able to observe many aspects of how they function together. They would also be able to observe some differences that the family faces on a daily basis. Some of these differences occur from gender-related issues. One specific issue that the typical family faces is how children are treated and raised differently based on their gender. For example, based on the works of Seccombe from our textbook, parents may assign rules, toys, chores, and…

Imagine that your ancestors are taken from their home country, their family, and everything they worked for in their life by strangers. Most historians think there were 11 million Africans were taken out of Africa by European slave traders. After being kidnapped they were put on slave ships to come to America or other European countries to be sold in a public auction. The boat ride was horrible, millions of Africans died, some through sickness, suicide and even murder at the hands of the…

In the book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz, the author deconstructs various types of stereotypes and myths embodied by television shows that romanticize family life and gender roles. Coontz (1992) states that these idealizations promote the “traditional family” myth which she describes as “an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in time and place” (p.9). The notions derived from this myth are a…

Today, television is an incredibly large part of basic American culture, with many people’s lives revolving completely around the little screens, or sometimes large, that dominate nearly every single living room in the modern family’s home. But, in the late 1940s, when TV was first introduced, this wasn’t the case. Television has always been on a rollercoaster between fads, and new technologies introduced throughout the decades. But one of the overall most influential decades for the television…