Dbq Essay Family

As a wise blue alien named Stitch once said,“Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten”. Family dynamics have changed throughout history and this phrase has remained true. A family is something different for everybody. It can be a group of friends, blood relatives, or perfect strangers thrust together by circumstance. Regardless of the who the members are, it is a group of people who support and rely on each other through the hardest of times, growing stronger through each obstacle they face together. Families come in many shapes and sizes as proven by sociologist Philip Cohen through a 2012 census of children’s living arrangements. In it, only about 23% had a once typical family with a stay at home mother and breadwinner

More modern households have increased diversity and no longer fit into traditional models as they once did (Doc A). Even families with the same living situation can often be very different as seen in Jane Shore’s poem “Happy Family”: describing 2 scenarios with married parents and children, with one being somewhat dull, and the other more full of life. She elaborates, “not all happy families are alike”. Happiness is a key element of any family, even in the smallest of ways (Doc C). Friends often make the best families as shown by Truman Capote in “A Christmas Memory”, explaining “We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together - well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other’s best friend”. He and his friend became their own family, each needing and looking out for the other. They were at their happiest when they were together, with Capote also saying “home is where my friend is” (Doc B). John Steinbeck also draws on the idea of two friends who have each others backs in his novel Of Mice and Men, with