Perfect Life and Perfect Families What is a perfect life or perfect family? From an outsider looking in, what does that life look like for you? Is the pressure of comparing your family with others and realizing that you do not measure up to what you see? We all have dreams of what our ideal life would be. Sometimes these are prompted by the “model” families that we have seen, or perhaps they are the dreams we had of what our own family should be like. Is there such a thing as perfect families or the perfect life? In the movie Juno and American Beauty some of these families try so hard to look picture perfect, however they are far from it. Remember that looks can be deceiving and comparison unfair. In the movie Juno, sixteen year old Juno is the type of girl that beats to her own drum, and doesn’t really care what other people think of her. Juno ends up pregnant from her boyfriend, Paulie Bleeker. So she decides to have the baby and give the baby up for adoption. Juno finds the perfect couple to adopt her baby. She finds Mark and Vanessa Loring, a yuppie couple living in the suburbs. Juno likes the Loring’s and in some respect has found what looks to be kindred spirits in Mark, with whom she shares a love of grunge music and horror films. Vanessa is a little more uptight and is the one in the relationship seemingly most eager to have a baby. Juno enters a closed adoption contract with the Loring’s. Throughout the film you find out just how imperfect Mark and Vanessa
The arising conflict, which puts extra strain on Mark's relationship with Vanessa, who is so sure in her desire to have a child, results in their separation and the falling apart of what seemed such a perfect solution to Juno's predicament. Mark and Vanessa's separation hits Juno especially hard, because in her helpless situation Mark and Vanessa's seemingly perfect situation not only grounded her but gave her hope, as her birth parent's divorce and the dysfunctional relationship between her father and stepmother seem to give her no hope for happiness now or later in life. As Juno's pregnancy reaches full-term her faith in others and relationships is restored when she realizes that Vanessa's desire and love for her unborn child makes her more than suitable to be the mother of her child, which also gives her the courage to express her true feelings for her friend Paulie. The movie ends on an inspirational and hopeful note, with Juno having a healthy baby boy whom Vanessa willingly and lovingly accepts, and Juno and Paulie entering into a healthy and stable relationship. After watching the movie with some knowledge of the process of growth and development, the role that Bronfenbrenner's, Piaget's, and Erickson's theories played in Juno's development.
Family. What do you picture? Two married parents, their son and daughter, and maybe a dog, all living in a two story house in a nice suburban neighborhood. And who should blame you for picturing that? It’s been drilled into our minds all throughout our childhoods. Through our families, the tv, the books we read. But is this really all true? 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce and of that 50 percent, 46 percent are families. So why is this “perfect” family ideal so widespread? Author Barbara Kingsolver tries to explain this in her essay: ‘Stone Soup’. She claims it’s because society is so traditional and primitive in the way we idealize what a family is supposed to be: two married parents and their children. But that’s not really the case anymore. The main idea of her essay is that the definition of family needs to be reimagined to define more of what a family means, rather than what its terminology implies.
They never discuss specific rules or curfews that she has, other than the one time that Juno's step-mother became agitated when Juno came home late from visiting Mark. It also seems like eating dinner together is one of the few things they do as a group, but it is never mentioned that they must eat together.
Is it worth going back to the 1950s and experience the workplace of woman and men going to War or staying in the present time. Many people in today’s society see the morals and values of the past of the fifties. Nevertheless, the fifties had its nuclear family to where everyone was set for in life already. The woman became homemakers and men worked at an occupation. In the 1950s men were going to War, so the mother had to do both work and raise the family. However, after the War the woman wanting to continue to work, but the men were overpowering the woman in the past. In today’s culture everyone works and raise a family together. From the past to the present time of the 1950s the culture has changed. The woman finally got rights to do more activities now then it was in the fifties. Therefore, people have opinions to go back to the past to experience of what had happened to the nuclear family. America has changed by the culture and the environment from the 1950s to the present time of men and woman raising a family.
Families needed a role model and family sitcoms portrayed that myth so well that they gave families “little reassurance that they were headed in the right direction (38). This myth promoted values that every family should have and people strive to achieve those values, to transform their “abnormal” families into a harmonious one. When Americans would watch these shows, they would follow these traits and try to implement them into their own families. By living in this myth of the American family, creating a more secure home, and preparing for the future, the government rewarded people (42). The government also promoted the family values and secured the family union. Families were closer together and the goal of creating a perfect family was what created a bond between them. The myth of the perfect family formed other families and taught them the fundamentals of a family’s
Juno is a quirky American comedy-drama film about a teenage girl who falls pregnant and must decide what actions to take about the unplanned pregnancy. The movie is told over four seasons, starting in autumn when Juno, a 16 year old junior in high school discovers she is pregnant with her friend and crush, Paulie Bleeker. Juno first considers abortion, but ultimately cannot go through with it. She decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption. But first she has to tell her father and stepmother about the situation, her biological mother is revealed to live on a ranch with her new husband and three children. Her parents are pragmatic about the pregnancy and explain to Juno that they will support her decision. Juno's next step is to
The ideal traditional family consists of a father, a mother, a couple of kids and maybe a dog in a rather spacious home. We all know examples of families like this but are also aware that there are different renditions of it. There are single parent families, divorced/split families, and a family with a remarried couple with stepchildren and same sex couples with/without children. I, myself, have been included in a
In The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz suggests that society romanticizes past generations of family life and points out that these memories are merely myths that prevent us from “dealing more effectively with the problems facing today’s families” (Coontz x). Coontz proposes that researchers can take empirical data and create misleading causality for that data, thus feeding cultural myth and/or experience. Coontz believes that “an overemphasis on personal responsibility for strengthening family values encourages a way of thinking that leads to moralizing rather than mobilizing for concrete reforms” (Coontz 22). She calls on us to direct our attention to social reforms, which can be accomplished by avoiding victim-blaming
This essay, The Myth of the Model American Family, is a discussion of the concept of an ideal family in the different perspective specifically social, cultural and economic. This is also an attempt to identify the structural changes in relation to the global development and the international economic crisis that immensely created impact on their lives. However, the discussion will limit itself on the different identifiable and observable transformations as manifested in the lifestyles, interrelationships and views of family members and will not seek to provide an assessment of their psycho-social and individual perceptions.
In the short story “Looking for Work”, Gary Soto tells us that he wanted to imitate the family he saw in 1950’s sitcoms because they were the american dream family. The kids would wake up to a beautiful perfect table of breakfast go to some catholic school and have a nice dinner where everyone is dressed up. David King was the only person on his block that looked like the perfect american family and when young gary saw that he asked his mother “Mom, do you think we could get dressed up for dinner one of these days? David king does.” “Ay, Dios,” my mother laughed”(22). The idea of the perfect family is still sought out till this day but they don't dream about the “nuclear families” like in the 1950s. Most families now are broken up and kids are affected by it growing into adults with issues that have not been resolved which results into possible drug use or maybe even committing suicide. The dream today has changed from having your own perfect family to hoping
What makes a healthy family? Well in the movie " The Blinde Side" it depicts the importance of family, and what parents need to do in order to raise a happy, healthy family. Leah Anne Touhy a mother of the memphis family took strong effort in changing Michael Oher, a troublesome kid's life for the better. Leah brought Michael into the family as one of their own. Leah then saw that Michael Oher, was born into a family of 12, was held back 2 years in elementary school and had a horrible education record with a .6 GPA. Leah knowing these factors decided to adopt Michael and raise him to become the American football player of the Ravens he is today. This was only accomplished by the efforts of
Throughout the movie Vanessa was scared that Juno would back out of giving her the baby since someone had previously done so. Juno’s decision to stick with her plan to give the baby to Vanessa changed her life forever. Reitman used these techniques to show how your don’t need two parents to have a family. The perfect family is considered to be a father, a mother, a son and a daughter but this scene shows us that Vanessa is a kind and caring mother and she realises that everything does not have to look perfect to have a good
Most people assume the American dream is about achieving the nostalgic ideal of 1950s family life—Dad in charge of the household, Mom always looking pretty, and their children happily obedient and affectionate. The belief that success means living in a suburban home with a nuclear family causes many Americans to disparage any lifestyle that departs from this false image of family life. In truth, the suburbs are full of dysfunctional families and overdeveloped housing tracts. Many people in America cannot afford to buy a home, and most families do not fit the fifties-era ideal. Nonetheless, the media and advertisers continue to promote the delusion of the American dream, and consumers continue to spend their money in hope of achieving it. However,
What is a family? What parts make up a family? These two questions are questions that millions of adults and children ask themselves regularly. When people think about a family in their head they think of a nuclear family. Where you have a Mom, Dad, and a few kids running around a home in the middle of a suburban wasteland. That is the nuclear family that I feel most modern families strive to be like. But factors can change within a family and still be a family. I do not believe that a family is strictly based off what people see from the front porch looking in. A family is about the everlasting bond that is formed between a group of people whether they are related by blood or by other means. A family is a group of people who stick together during hard times and good times, they laugh together and they cry together. They eat meals together, party together, are weaved together in life. They are like a strip of palm leaves, and when you weave a bunch of them together it makes a basket, that is a family. The people that someone can call at two in the morning on a Wednesday just because they can’t sleep. The ones who would sacrifice anything to help them. The bond can never be broken because the word “family” holds them together like glue to wallpaper.
No one can’t meet a family like mine’s. My family is well diversified. Every family member plays an important role in all my family’s lives. In my family, there are four people: my father, my mother, my little brother and me. My father is one who brings money home and is also responsible for organizing and planning family trips. My mother is the one who is in charge for making meals and makes sure everyone eats at the appropriate times. My little brother is the pet of the family. He actually doesn’t have any responsibilities, for he’s the pet. I am the rock of support in my family. I always go beyond my parents’ expectations. I also support my younger cousins and little brother, by being a role model that they can look up to. Another