CASE STUDIES OF MODERN FAMILY RELATIONS

CASE STUDIES OF MODERN FAMILY RELATIONS

Case 1: An episode of the 1980s sitcom Family Ties presented a story in which high school senior Alex Keaton anticipates his 18th birthday by withdrawing from family responsibilities and interaction. The final blow comes when he goes with some friends to a bar, defying his parents’ plans for a family birthday dinner. His mother Elyse drives some distance to retrieve an embarrassed Alex from this peer gathering. After they arrive home, both are seething with anger. After Alex sarcastically yells at his mother about his right to do as he likes now that he is an adult, she responds in only slightly more controlled fashion, “you have complained to me, grunted at me, lectured to me, and presented me with ultimatums [but never] even come close to talking with me.” She accuses him of canceling out on family dinner plans “without a moment’s thought to my concern.” Gradually growing contrite, Alex eventually acknowledges, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t more sensitive,” and both acknowledge that they have made mistakes in dealing with each other. When Alex asks “How do we figure out who’s right and who’s wrong?” Elyse responds that there is no absolute right or wrong and then offers a startling statement about contemporary parent-child relations: “It’s my job as a parent to set boundaries and it’s your job to negotiate the changes.”

In this scene, fairly typical of family shows of the last 20 to 25 years, the morally serious transgression of the child is not disobedience but insensitivity . If there are troubles in the family, the parents have probably made mistakes as well as the children. Parent-child interactions are to be negotiations, not decrees followed by obedience. Even though traditional family solidarity and family values are in many ways affirmed today as they have always been on TV, the specific nature has changed somewhat.

Case 2: The 1990s workplace sitcom Spin City featured an episode where Mike, a big-city mayor’s political damage control assistant, has to deal with rumors of the mayor’s extramarital affairs. After finally tracking down the mayor in the middle of the night in a hotel room with a woman, he is surprised to find his own mother coming out of the bathroom.

Although Mike is surprised and distressed to find his mother as the object of his boss’ latest sexual escapade, it is the sitcom distress of the awkward situation that stands out, not the moral outrage of a son who has been devastated by discovering his mother in circumstances sons do not imagine their mothers in. Although dialogue earlier in the same episode had made clear Mike’s close relationship to and respect for his mother

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and his basic contempt for the dalliances of his employer, his chagrin at the discovered tryst has no moral dimension or outrage at all. It is just merely another momentarily awkward situation.

Family solidarity may occur in groups other than biological families. Television shows which feature a group of friends, for example, Friends, That 70s Show, Seinfeld, Sex in the City, and Beverly Hills 90210, basically uphold the group of friends as the de facto family unit. Typically the loyalty to this social family is even stronger than to one’s biological family which the featured group has apparently replaced for these particular characters. Another common setting for both sitcoms and dramatic shows is the workplace, which essentially becomes a surrogate family (e.g., ER, Spin City, NYPD Blue, Scrubs, Cheers ). The strong message in these shows is always love your coworker (even if you really don’t) and put his or her needs above your own. This, more than traditional family solidarity, is more tenuously tied to reality.

One aspect of workplace solidarity is probably a direct consequence of the TV series format. This is the way that characters are so intimately involved in the personal lives of fellow workers, employers, and employees. Although real-life coworkers may sometimes be close friends, such intimacy is not typically, and it is almost unheard of in the real world for all of the workers in a unit to be close personal friends. Yet this is the typical case in television land. For example, when one character delivers her baby, the entire crew from the office is on hand. In real life this would not only be unlikely, but probably obtrusively inappropriate and unappreciated, even if for some reason it did occur.

Perhaps even more of a deviation from reality is the way that this workplace solidarity is extended to the clients of a professional. For example, one of the doctors on ER might spend his day off to find a lost family member of a patient or to smooth out a domestic quarrel that he believed was interfering with the recovery of the patient. In real life, physicians seldom do this sort of thing and might be considered derelict in their duty at the hospital if they did. Still, such an image of a professional is appealing because that is what we want to think our doctor would be like. Even if I have never been a patient in a hospital, it comforts me to feel that a doctor I might have would be as caring as Dr. Carter on ER.

Before leaving the subject of family solidarity, we should consider one important class of apparent exceptions to this theme, namely soap operas and similar movies and miniseries. The mean-spirited and self-serving backstabbing between family members would seem to be as opposite as it can be from family solidarity It is interesting to note that there was a period of great popularity of nighttime soaps like Dallas and Dynasty in the 1980s.

333 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

However, in the years since, the nighttime soap genre with its dueling family members has all but disappeared in the United States, although the workplace dramas and family sitcoms are as strong as ever. Of course, daytime soaps remain popular, even more so due to the time-shifting capabilities of the VCR. Also, in much of the world, soap opera-type shows remain the most popular type of program (e.g., the telenovelas of Latin America), although shows in some of these cultures depict strong family cohesion. See Pingree and Thompson (1990) for a discussion of the nature of the family in daytime soaps and Liebes and Livingstone (1992) for a comparison of British and U.S. soap operas.

The Influence of Television on Family Life

Does television add to or detract from the quality of family life? The conventional wisdom is that TV has a negative influence, but that conclusion is by no means certain or simple. In some instances, family TV viewing can

be a positive time of family discussion and interaction, including commenting on the programs or laughing and crying together. In other instances, it can be very negative, for example, if it induces quarreling among family members over what program to watch or whether to turn off the set. Particular conflicts may occur around certain events such as mealtimes, bedtimes, or children’s disagreement with parental prohibitions of certain programs.

A uses and gratifications approach to studying family TV use looks at motivations for watching, which may vary greatly depending on the program or the individuals’ moods. For example, Kubey (1986) found that divorced and separated people watch TV more when they feel down and alone than married or other single people do, perhaps due to their use of TV for solace and comfort to replace a lost relationship.

Men and women may view television watching differently. For example, men and boys are more likely to control the remote and channel-surf; this behavior is often the source of TV-based marital conflict (Gantz, 2001; Walker & Bellamy, 2001). The gender difference is stronger with older than younger couples, although younger people do more channel surfing in general In terms of uses and gratifications, women saw TV viewing as more of a social activity and were also more likely to be doing other activities (e.g., housework) concurrently, whereas men were more likely to devote full attention to the program. Men saw TV watching as “earned recreation,” whereas women saw it as a “guilty pleasure,” a distraction from homemaking duties (Morley, 1988).

Working within one’s home to have television viewing enhance, rather than detract from, family life is a major challenge for families. See Chen (1994) for some excellent advice for families in this regard. Other value

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such as affluence (see Box 11.3) and more specific ones, such as tobacco and alcohol use and abuse (see Box 11.4).

BOX 11.3

ECONOMIC VALUES: IS AFFLUENCE THE NORM? Does television have a fascination with affluence, even opulence? What

subtle messages are sent to middle-class and poor viewers? This is most blatantly seen in voyeuristic shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, or A Current Affair, the saturation news coverage of such stories as the O.J.Simpson trials (1995– 1996) and the death of Princess Diana (1997), and the continuing fascination with entertainment personalities in both tabloid and mainstream media. Seeing all this glitz and glamor may lead viewers to assume that such lifestyles are realistic aspirations for themselves. Even sitcom families, although generally not super-rich, typically live in very large, well-decorated homes rich in splendor and space—especially striking given the great amount of time that the wage-earners spend at home instead of on the job.

Why are affluent people so interesting to watch? There is some evidence that hard economic times bring on more escapist stories of the perils of great wealth, as seen in the many movies of wealthy people that were popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s, in contrast to many movies and TV shows about poor people popular during the affluent 1950s. People like to watch rich people and their fine trappings like sports cars and fancy clothes, but also like to be reminded that these people have serious problems too, preferably more serious than their own. Maybe this is reassuring.

Still another factor is that the producers of television and films themselves tend to be rather affluent, mostly from southern California. The media grossly over-represent the world of those who produce the programming, which tacitly presents this world as far more typical of overall American life than it really is. Most shows are set in Los Angeles or New York, few in Tennessee or South Dakota. Some research suggests that exported programs of glitz and glamor may be cultivating negative images of Americans in viewers elsewhere (Harris & Karafa, 1999; Kamalipour, 1999). Popular TV programs dwelling on the rich are by no means a uniquely North American phenomenon; many developing countries’ domestic shows also present such affluent lifestyles. For example, the telenovelas of Mexico and Brazil present characters with income levels and lifestyles wildly beyond the reach of most of their nation’s viewers.

BOX 11.4