Family Changes through TV

Media has always played a role in how people think the standard of life should be. Before TV, it was radio and newspapers that would tell people what the perfect life should be. Then it was TV and movies that would display the perfect life, how we should dress, act, how many kids we should have. Now it is social media, people share with their friends on the internet ways they raise their kids, what they do, when they get married, and information about their day to day life. All this information that is shared and fed to us through different Medias’ influences the ways others may look at their lives and the decisions they make. TV shows are one of the biggest things that display family life, and a lot of times people might try to indirectly replicate what they experience on TV just because that is what they are used to seeing, and if it is broadcasted on TV it has to be the right way of doing things. Over time TV families have changed to adjust to our ever changing lifestyles, just as our views of what a family is continues to change.
TV plays a huge role in almost everyone’s life, it is how we get our news, it is entertainment, and whether people like to believe it or not it shapes the way we are as people. TV influences us with the commercials or just even advertising in TV shows it has some effect on us. Looking back ten years to shows like “That 70’s Show”, “Reba”, or even cartoons like “The Flintstones” all have one thing in common, which is they all revolve around family life. In “That 70’s Show” there is the Forman’s, which consisted of the parents Red and Kitty, and their two teenagers Eric and Laurie, and then later foster a son, Steven. In “That 70’s Show” the mom, Kitty, has a job as a nurse, the dad, Red, was a veteran...

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...ther. In these two shows you see more disagreements with their spouses, and workplace issues since they do not have the kids to really worry about yet or they are too young to make a big difference.
Although people will always try to change what words mean as time goes on, one word will always hold a pretty tight meaning, and that it family. The word family should not be defined the way the news makes it, it should be defined the way a person believes it is. So whether family to one person is not the same as what someone else defines it as it should not matter. As TV has proved, even when there is a standard that defines something it does not always have to be followed. As TV shows change over time, our views of family really have not, and we will continue to see that as time goes on when new TV shows come out to try to redefine what we believe family should mean.