Happy Mother’s Day Mom! But what
if you don’t have a Mom? Today’s modern
family could have two Dads. The new modern family seems to be widely more
accepted in society each year. Other than
giving a biological birth, are we really sure what a
Mom is? Even female stay at home
caregivers can assume many different roles. Many of us honor our Mothers
today by giving her flowers or take them out for dinner or buy
them chocolate or maybe even orchestrate an event where all the famlies get
together with the various Moms. You will
get a lot of family photos out of that
one.
Today is at least a day
for proclaiming that we are family and the makeup of family has certainly
changed in recent years. In schools the
teachers don’t say anymore, go tell your parents to sign your homework, they
know better. Now they say, seek the adult
you live with and have them sign your homework. Like many other things in life,
the definition of family is changing. A few years back, the cereal Cheerios recently had advertisements for their
breakfast food that featured a white
Mother, African American Dad and an adorable mixed race child. The overwhelmingly response to the ad was
positive but there was hateful backlash
on the Internet much of it were overtly racist.
There was so many negative comments, the company chose to take down the
comments section off of the website for a while.
It did not stop General Mills
from running follow up ads with this same kind of family on Super Bowl Sunday,
the most watched advertisement day of the year.
This time the family was going to share their Cheerios with a new family
member. It was the same company, General
Mills that commissioned Norman Rockwell to paint scenes from American family
life in 1938. The American family now is
looking less and less than the images that were painted half a century ago. The difference in the family of 1965 and now
is enormous says Sociology Professor
Andrew Turlington at John Hopkins University who has been writing
about the American family for over three decades.
We are currently going through a
period of extreme change in defining a family.
Marriage has hit an all time
low of 51% of Americans. More
than 15% of marriages are either interracial or inter-ethnic or both. As for raising children, more than one
million homes are raising children by a single parent. The number of same sex parents with children has risen to an all time high of
120,000 families. In the 1950's, the message was that there was only one kind of
family. It was the married family as seen in the popular Leave it to Beaver Show when dad was male and
mom was female and they had biological children. He left home for work and she ran a
perfect household with their perfect children.
Now we have popular TV shows like
Mom’s and Modern Family that shares with
America the new type of family. We have gone to diverse pathways to achieve happy families. Should we even bother to have a Mother’s Day
anymore? There are blurred lines between
even gender roles and the type of chores that men and women handle at
home. There are many stay at home Dads
now making the cupcakes. There are many same gender couples who have been married for many years choosing to be
parents now. No set Mom no set Dad. Could Mothers
actually become a thing of the past?
Much of America still does not
accept same sex marriage. It is legal in many states. Even interracial couples on TV can draw a negative response. There’s definitely two groups of people out
there. One that accepts change and one
that refuses to change. I think more emphasis should be spent on
analyzing the quality of life children are receiving in any kind of
family. Perhaps they might be doing
better without a traditional Mother
around. We are not two
Americans. We are one America going through a rebirth. What will never change will be a desire to
nurture children in a loving and tender way and that is what Mother was to most
of us if we were lucky. A Mother
loves you no matter what. Love whoever raised you today.
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