Hopefully the media is changing. Off the top of my head, I thought of “Inside Out,” where the girl is an only child (I think?) and her family is depicted as pretty loving, just going through a tough move. I suspect a lot of kids’ media has also adjusted to two kids max; I’m specifically thinking of shows like Bluey and Daniel Tiger for instance.
Comment on the Home Alone house then and now
volvoxvsmarla@sopuli.xyz 5 hours agoTo me it is the number of children. All the happy family movies had families with multiple children, and it feels like only child families are portrayed overwhelmingly as dysfunctional and tragic.
I’m trying to work through this mindset because we only have one child, but it is hard because subconsciously, I feel like a failure, like I cannot live up to this expectation and my child is doomed to this gloomy, sad existence.
If anyone is reading this, I beg you, prove me wrong. This isn’t a challenge, I just desperately need picture perfect single child family portrayals.
proudblond@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
volvoxvsmarla@sopuli.xyz 13 minutes ago
Thank you for the tip with Inside Out, I’ll check it out! It was on our watchlist anyway and gets promoted to top rank now.
With the kids’ media that’s the thing - there is still always a sibling. We’ve always read a lot to our four year old daughter and every longer story with an only child ends up with a sibling being born. It breaks me because I actually would love to have more children and every time that I felt safe with a story and it finally was ok, a happy family of three, they add a sibling. My daughter won’t go through that. I won’t go through that. Unless, of course, the parents are divorced, one is dead, it’s an adoptive family, or a queer family. All of these are great and depict amazing, valid family structures, and I like these books too, but they still don’t represent our dynamic.
Funnily enough my daughter caught me reading Sailor Moon mangas once and at least there the protagonist has an only child. (If you do not count parallel universe stories which I don’t for my sanity.) Sailor Moon makes me cope the most currently.
BurntWits@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
I was an only child and had an excellent childhood/teenage years and am still really good friends with my parents. My goal with my daughter is to do as good of a job for her as my parents did for me. I don’t live a perfect life but my relationship with my parents is not something I could ever have any complaints about. Don’t worry, as long as your kid knows you love them and you try your best to do what’s best for them (and not just what you want to be best for them), I wouldn’t have any worries personally.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Only child of lesbian parents checking in. You’re wrong, it takes all sorts to make a family please don’t let corporate bullshit brainwash you.
fireweed@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
There’s a whole trove of portrayals of happy, loving single-child families out there! You just have to look to China’s one-child policy era.
“But Fireweed! This is literally propaganda!” It’s all propaganda, whether it’s “be content with one child” or “be fruitful and multiply.” Media depictions of large families appear fun and loving because the creators make it that way (the more kids the more you have to work with: there’s the jock kid, the geek kid, the uptight kid, the…). Even media about the difficulties of large families (e.g. Cheaper by the Dozen) still end with everyone being happy and loving because it makes for a feel-good ending; that doesn’t mean it reflects reality in the slightest. Society doesn’t like to talk about the darker sides of large families because of heteronormativity, but there’s some media out there portraying large families as hopelessly dysfunctional (Shameless for instance, or you can read about any of the large family “reality TV” shows that have ended in scandal).
Remember that we’re in unprecedented times; large families used to not only be the norm but were practically required (have lots of kids to work the farm, or because you don’t know how many are going to survive to adulthood, or because there’s no social safety net for when you become old/sick/injured except your family members). Nowadays it’s the opposite: more kids equals less resources to go around, and unchecked population growth combined with unchecked consumption is wrecking the planet. But media hasn’t caught up yet, and with influential, wealthy people out there screaming racist nonsense about “crashing birth rates” and “great replacement theory,” there’s pressure to continue to portray large families positively and small families poorly. It’s the same situation as the propaganda I linked above, but in reverse.
In other words, rejoice that you’ve eschewed the media narrative and done the right thing for your family! Also forget visual media (where creators use large families to portray the appearance of a happy family, because more kids = more hugs and smiling faces in the shot = more love, right?) and look to books, where there are plenty of depictions of loving, functional, single-child households.