Family, School, and Community Partnerships

Effects of Cultural Transitions on Family Partnerships

Television content in popular culture lends insight into modern and postmodern assumptions on the nature of family and the impact of cultural transitions on family partnerships. During the 1950s, family sitcoms such as the Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, and Ozzie and Harriet created images of self-perceptions and experiences with others. For example, with regularity each of these families was cast with father as breadwinner, mother as homemaker, two children, and a dog. Families were all Caucasian and lived in middle-class, suburban neighborhoods. Togetherness was valued and, many times, romanticized by scenes of family meals around the dining room table, parents reading bedtime stories to children, and families playing games on a well-groomed lawn. In general, even though this portrayal of a modern family was accurate, it was uncharacteristic of the many ethnically diverse families and even some nuclear families during this same time period.

Cultural shifts from the assumptions of the modern family to the assumptions of the postmodern family are ambiguous. There are no specific timelines between these two Western phenomena. However, the belief that scientific theory can yield absolute truths, the underestimation of technology's ability to create powerful weapons of mass destruction, and the perpetual destruction of the environment served as the impetus for questioning the given structures and the turn toward postmodern thought.

Family sitcoms such as the George Lopez Show, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Roseanne represent the diverse nature of postmodern family partnerships. Overnight, culturally diverse families appeared, with relatives moving in and out to form new family ties.

[Page 334]Issues of race, class, and gender projected families as uniquely different from families in earlier versions of modern family life. For example, in the George Lopez Show, a Hispanic man becomes employed in a job that gives him newfound power. His family includes his acerbic mother, working wife, dyslexic son, adolescent daughter, and newly divorced father-in-law. The modern role of “father knows best” has now transitioned to a freewheeling approach to parenthood. Family sitcoms, couched in the framework of modern and postmodern worldviews, convey the impact of cultural transitions on the nature of family life and the renewed interest in strengthening family partnerships.

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