Increasing Diversity of American Family

Modern Family, a TV show now airing on ABC tells a series funny story of three distinctive families’ daily life. Jay is the father of the first family and he is a retired man, but his wife Gloria, and his stepson Manny, are from Colombia. Jay’s daughter Claire and her husband Pill have three children: Haley, Alex and Luke. Their family is often considered the typical American family. Claire’s brother Mitchell lives with his male life partner Cameron and they adopted a daughter Lily from Vietnam. The three families have some interior or exterior fractions in every episode. Despite of the problems between couples or between parents and children, homosexuality, interracial marriage and adoption are also the main factors in the sitcom that bother their life. These situations were not common several decades ago, even in TV shows. Statistically, family is no longer a mother, a father and their biological children living together under one roof (Belkin, 2011). As the TV show have reflects, great changes have occurred to the American families, and the increasing diversity of families emerges to be considerable. In 1950s, the “ideal” American family consists of a husband, a wife and two or more children. The husband is the breadwinner and the wife is the homemaker. This common image of family was deeply rooted in American’s society, so it is no wonder we find many families on TV show confirm this structure, like The Simpsons, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. But Things started to change since 1950s that families like the Simpsons are no longer the majority. Households with four or more persons make up 40.2% of all households in 1960 while in 2011 the percentage is down to 26.4%. Meanwhile, families are becoming smaller compared 2.58 persons per household in 2011 to 3.33 in 1960. Unlike the family as the Simpsons, families tend to be built in other forms thus different types of families become more dominant, including one-parent