Leave it to Beaver

             For my topic I chose the history of the American Family as it is portrayed in T.V. shows from the 1950’s until today. Many things have changed about families in T.V. shows. The question that still remains is did the T.V. shows influence America or did America influence the T.V. shows?

Scandal

           The first show that came to mind when I thought of the 1950’s was “Leave it to Beaver”. This was a very popular show and explains perfectly what the American Family was supposed to look like. The average family consisted of a father with a job, a mother that stayed at home, and their kids. This image of a family made up, according to Steven Mintz who wrote “The Modern Family”, 70 percent of American households. American families in the 1950’s never got divorced and never had a single mom running the house. Lately that has changed dramatically. According to Steven Mintz, there is a growing amount of divorces because it had been accepted today where back in the 1950’s it was not accepted. There has also been a major increase in household that are run by a single mother. Steven Mintz said that the numbers of single-mom households tripled since the 1960’s, which doesn’t even include the 1950’s. In the 1950’s a single mom running a household would have never been seen, but a lot has changed since then.

               

Bates Motel

Today, a very popular T.V. show would be Scandal. Scandal is a perfect example of how American families have changed in shows. In Scandal there is an interracial couple and a gay couple. Both of the scenarios would have been a disgrace to T.V. during the 1950’s. Many of the things that you would see in T.V. today would have never been accepted back then because in the 1950’s people were all about their image and what other people thought of them. Today, people do not care about what people think. People today are all about doing what they want to do. Another show that shows this is Modern Family. In the show Modern Family, there is a gay couple with a child. Another show that has a single mom running he house is Bates Motel.  People who watch this show do not even think of this as something that is out of the norm.

                On top of everything changing, I think, along with Ella Taylor, the author of a article from the University of Washington, that T.V. was in charge of changing the worlds view. The producers of the shows were taking a leap by putting all of the gay marriages, interracial couples and single mom’s running the

Modern Family

household into their shows. I think that once they put these things into the shows, people became very amused. Once people got used to it in the shows, they began to except it in reality too. I think that T.V. was the influence for the world, not the other way around. I think that people would have never started doing it first because they didn’t know how everyone else would react. In the T.V. shows it gave them a perfect picture of how they would start doing this and everyone was going to be completely fine with it and a problem would never come up. Even after the T.V. shows influence the people, people in the real world still judged the people who were doing it even though the show’s said they wouldn’t.

                I think that people let T.V. change them in a major way. At the same time we wouldn’t live in the world that we do today if it wasn’t for T.V. There is defiantly some good and bad in the way our world has changed but it also doesn’t force everyone to be the “cookie cutter” family or for them to be people that everyone wants them to be. 

Family watching T.V.

Sources:

Digital History

This website helped me get the ideas about how television was and the views on television in the 1950's. 

Television during the 1950's 

This also helped me with television in the 1950's. 

Netflix

I was able to watch old and new shows on this website and compare them. 

Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television

This gave me the opinion of a scholar to help make my paper stronger. This scholar had the same point of view as me so her article was backing up what is had said.