Myth of the Model Family
...k’s identity was shaped and affirmed through his family working together as a unit to address various child-rearing issues. Another situation that can result in the non-nuclear family is social-class status. Judy Root Aulette discusses this factor in her excerpt from “Changing American Families.” Aulette uses a study done by Carol Stacks, an anthropologist, on a low-income African-American neighborhood called the Flats. Aulette informs readers that African-American families in the Flats were, “composed of both kin and nonkin – parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, as well as nonkin who became “like family” because of their extended interaction and support of network members” (73). In this non-nuclear family, the members often rely on one another for various assets, capital, and assistance. This includes “money, food, clothes, a ride, or child care” (73). In this setting, addresses are frequently comprised of more than one family within one household, children are shared, and there is a strong sense of community (Aulette, 74). Additionally, “decisions in the Flats tended to be made by groups of people that included both women and men in the network” (Aulette, 76). Prejudice is another instance that shatters the myth of the model family. In “Aunt Ida Pieces a Quilt,” Melvin Dixon describes how one family member overcomes her narrow-mindedness to commemorate her nephew, Junie, by sewing a quilt in his honor after he dies from AIDS. Aunt Ida begins with disdain for Junie’s sexual preference. She refers to him flaunting his sexuality in public and how he should keep his lifestyle outside of the church to himself. “And nevermind his too-tight dungarees. I caught him switching down the street one Saturday night, and I seen him more than once. I said, Junie, you ain’t got to let the world know all your business” (Dixon, 132). She also felt that hanging a quilt in the church made with his clothing was shameful. Dixon writes, “When Francine say she gonna hang this quilt in the church I like to fall out” (132). However, toward the conclusion of the poem, she puts her bigotry aside and, together with the other women in her family, she completes the quilt in Junie’s rememberance. Lastly, media influences reiterate the myth of the model family. In “Talking Freaks: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families on Daytime Talk TV,” Joshua Gamson paints a vivid picture of how talk show television is a platform for uncovering the truth about non-nuclear families. Gamson says, “It is no accident that Oprah Winfrey played Ellen-the-character’s therapist in the famous 1996 coming-out episode, and that Ellen-the-star hose Winfrey’s show as the one on which to first appear with then-girlfriend Anne Heche” (93). Although Gamson primarily discusses how alternative lifestyle has affected the nuclear family, dysfunctional families has become the pulse of daytime talk shows. As a result, talk shows have successfully displayed what goes on in the family of modern day society. This imagery is influential in molding our characterization of the model family. Gamson exclaims, “TV-talk shows plant land mines in the ideological ground on whi...