Modern Family. It is an interesting topic in our generation. A modern family has gone far farther than the traditional nuclear family. Modern family has developed through the influence of media, technology, life choices, life’s incidents, and many other reasons.

I remember in Ethiopia sitting at the family dinner. My father will tell me to take my elbow off the dinner table. He would say, sitting at the end of the table, “that is rude”.  We prayed as a family including my brother and my mother whom also sat at the table. We were actually the modern family of the Ethiopian culture. In Ethiopian culture, the women was the one who would prepare the food, clean the children, set the table, and greet the father “with all do respect” to the highness and not as a wife but more of a servant. However, we had a maid, who did all the house work. My mother, however, was a working mother. She worked within the government and loved being an independent women, at least for the time being. Although my family was becoming more modern, its old traditions did not totally go away. My mother still answered to the “bread-winner”, still treated my father like a king. I remember my mother telling how he would oppresses, how he wouldn’t even allow her to go certain places because her happiness meant less attention for him.

            It got even worse in America. All eyes turned to my mother to cook, to clean, to do all the house work since we did not have a maid. She became with all do respect, the families maid as well the mother. It felt like we went back in time to the traditional Ethiopian culture. However, that will all change back to a modern family, after the death of my father. After his death, my mother was an independent woman, who could stand with her own two feet for her children and herself. I know it was difficult for my mother to take on her role as well as my mothers. You know, I am proud of my mother for taking on the role. She could have easily broke down, looked for another man, abandoned her children, but she stayed and matriculated from the servant of the house to the almighty queen of the house, surpassing the King’s power.

            Modern families are completely different from the old traditional families. Mr. Tim’m showed the class a video illustrating how a family should behave called “How to Have a Family Dinner: A Date with Your Family (1950).” This video is interesting because its hard evidence of how a society tries to control a person’s life. How a society draws the status quo shape and everyone has to fit that shape. Even today, we see commercials that say sit together with your family, ask questions about each other’s day, talk about issues, etc.

 Our age is defying that way of thinking. Families are not a systematically equated shape, they are different families as they are different kind of people, and America knows and acknowledges that they are many different people in the world and each individual has their own pencil to draw how they want to shape their family and not have to try to squeeze in society’s narrow-minded art.   

550