The Nuclear Family and How Its Changed Over Time

Behold, the Nuclear Family! We have "Mom", "Dad", "Sis", "Biff", "Brat", and "Dog"...and they're nuclear energy-powered robots.

Connie: I told my parents you lot have a nuclear family!
Steven: Nuclear?! Certain, they make stuff blow up sometimes, simply that'southward because they're magic, not radioactive!

Mom, Dad, 2-3 kids, dog, house in the suburbs. Cat optional.

Basis for most Dom Com series. The name references that this is the minimal "core" family unit unit, a single generation of parents and kids, every bit opposed to an "extended" family with cohabiting aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. Or the fact that it is usually unstable, can cause pilus loss, has a fifty-50 chance of a spontaneous split, and may as well lead to early expiry; either works. Mostly avoided in dramas, as missing parents are a practiced source of teen angst.

If yous want to break out of the 2-or-three-kids pattern, you could try going much, much larger. This tin can exist justified via religious behavior ^note Catholics, Mormons, some Evangelical Christians, and Orthodox Jews are simply a few of the groups whose beliefs promote big families, merely it doesn't have to be. However, if the big family is not the principal family for the story, it's well-nigh certainly a religious reason — and almost certainly, nearly or all of the kids are treated every bit a unit, non equally individuals. They may even dress and look identical except for age and gender.

You may also cull to take a gaggle-o'-kids past using a blended family. The parents' exes are even more than optional than the cat.

Then over again, you could go for moderation and stick past the nuclear family, merely take the extended family get way more involved than is typical. Instead of a grandparent or two and the occasional uncle or unruly cousin, effort calculation two to iii siblings on each side and 2 to three kids per sibling (with the childless sibling constantly asked when he or she is going to start a family). Pretty soon you have the kind of setup needed for My Big Fat Greek Nuptials.

Has naught to exercise with people affected past radiation or a certain catastrophe in Fallout four.

A Boy, a Girl, and a Baby Family is a subtrope, when there'due south a son and girl around the same age, and also a much younger sibling.

Compare and dissimilarity The Association and Big, Screwed-Up Family unit.

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Examples

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    Advertising

• Advertisements for iv-door vehicles often pitch their ability to comfortably convey the boilerplate nuclear family unit, even using the ii.3 kids gag (meaning they've got actress infinite).

    Anime & Manga

• Run across My Neighbors the Yamadas for the Japanese version.
• Summer Wars features the exploits of an extended family (and ane dear interest) over the course of a few days trying to stop a viral social networking disaster from causing IRL mayhem.
• Death Note plays this surprisingly straight - for the Villain Protagonist, no less - and gleefully plays information technology for all the drama it's worth by the 2d season.

    Comic Books

• In the DCU comic Batman and the Outsiders (first run), there was a grouping of robot super-villain terrorists called the Nuclear Family. They were based on an idealized 1950s sitcom family and had radiation-based powers. They were eventually blown up, but were rebuilt for the much-maligned Battle For Bludhaven, and so later reappeared in Justice League Action, much less maligned than said Bludhaven bout.
• The Far Side has a strip where the kids are watching Tv while the parents are welcoming guests, telling them to come up in and encounter their 1.5 children.
• In PS238, The Nuclear Family is a superhero squad which is besides an extended family. Despite their "Nuclear" moniker their power set varies from Gadgeteer Genius to at least one Flying Brick. Student Susie Fusion is the child of one of its members, and Julie Fincher ("84") is the girl of a not-superpowered adjunct, who doesn't become along well with his superpowered cousins.
• Invoked past The Vision in The Vision (2015); he creates a nuclear family of synthezoids for himself (comprised of a married woman, a son, and a daughter) and gets a house in a suburb nearly Washington DC since he's trying to live a normal human life.
• Sensation Comics: The Allen family, which Wonder Woman meets in outcome #38, is the downwardly on their luck remains of such a family. The father died a piddling over a yr before and the mother had to have her ii kids and motility in with her blood brother-in-law, whom she did non realize was a massively abusive Jerkass until she was in a position she couldn't easily escape with her children.

    Fairy Tales

• Goldilocks and the Three Bears features Mama, Papa, and Baby Comport who live in a nice piddling house in the forest.

    Fan Works

• In The RWBY Loops team JNPR becomes this due to an early variant loop cropping up around the time Ren and Nora's baseline orphan status was confirmed. Unusual in that all iv individuals are biologically unrelated, too equally generally all being seventeen years of age, and Pyrrha has an on-again-off-once again illness known equally beingness dead. Jaune appears to but gyre with information technology.
• Yours, Mine, and Ours
• In Sadala Chronicles: The Saiyan and the Devil's Fruit, Cabba'south family is interpreted as this, with Cabba being the oldest son of a nuclear family, with a dad, a mom, a younger blood brother, and a pet dinosaur.

    Film

• Disneyland Dream is a 1956 home movie past amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow, documenting his family'south trip from their hometown in Connecticut to the then-new Disneyland theme park. It is, amidst other things, a perfect record of the stereotypical all-American nuclear family unit with the mom, dad, and kids, in this case three.
• In the 1997 informative video The Kids Guide to the Internet The Jamisons, every bit established in the Establishing Shot of their domicile. Mom and Dad, Peter and Dasha. They arrive abundantly clear that Mom likes to pay bills and how the kids grades have improved, and Dad likes to bank check the stocks and sports scores. On top of that they all helped ready the computer, each having their own job. Any sweeter and Lisa and Andrew would have died of diabetes upon entering the house.
• In Suffragette despite the film taking place in an age where the nuclear family wasn't that common, Maud's family consists of herself, her married man and her son. Having lost her mother at a young age, Maud never had siblings, and the fact that she never knew who her father was further serves to reduce the family size. Her husband'due south family is never mentioned, simply it's implied he has no female relatives who can cook for him while Maud is abroad. Considering that they're not that well off, it tin be causeless his parents died early on, too.
• The Sound of Music fits the large family unit motif.
• The Social Dilemma: The family in the story is a composite one, consisting of a mother, a male parent, and three children, emphasizing how social media affects everyone.
• The Bob Promise moving-picture show the The Seven Little Foys, a Very Loosely Based on a True Story one-act about an immature, absentee begetter (legendary vaudeville performer Eddie Foy) forced to become a real parent afterward the death of his wife.
• Invoked and spoofed in We're the Millers, where a drug dealer decides that the best way to smuggle marijuana across the United states-Mexican border is to hire a female stripper, a neighbor's geeky son, and a runaway teenage daughter to act as a wholesome, all-American nuclear family who would never dream about doing annihilation illegal.

    Literature

• Invoked by the Community in The Giver. All families are intentionally ready like this, although minus the canis familiaris, as pets don't exist in the Community.
• In The Phantom Tollbooth, the main character visits Digitopolis, the land of numbers, and tries to find a way to Infinity. After giving upwards, he encounters one-half a boy, cutting right down the center (the other half merely non at that place). Turns out he's the .58 child in 2.58 children for the average family — luckily the average went upwardly a scrap, because it was painful beingness only .47. Fortunately, the average family also has 1.3 automobiles, and since he'due south the only one who can drive iii-tenths of a car, he gets to utilize it all the time.
• ''Project NRI": Yamagi Noriko's family is equanimous of her mother, her begetter, herself and her fiddling brother Haseo.
• House of Leaves: The family that moves into the titular House and who are the protagonists of the cadre story, are a husband and wife and a son and daughter (plus a canis familiaris and a cat).
• In A Brother'southward Toll a nuclear family is made of a group of sisters, their married man, and their children. 30 children are not uncommon, but considered irresponsible if there'south only 1 boy. Overlaps with The Clan, as the children are technically half sisters, half cousins - but equally far as the protagonists are concerned, they're sisters.
• Cheaper by the Dozen (the book, film version, and modern remake) has 12. In the original film there's a scene where a representative from Planned Parenthood arrives to inquire the mother (who's apparently well known equally having her household in social club) to head the local affiliate... and upon coming together the kids at beginning thinks it's a boarding school and and so gasps in horror, "Why — they're all yours!"
• The Berenstain Bears Papa Behave, Mama Bear, Blood brother Conduct and Sister Deport before Dearest Bear came along.
• Teresa Bloomingdale's comedy novel I Should Have Seen It Coming When the Rabbit Died is an autobiography about a strongly Catholic family unit with some 10 kids.
• The Weasleys from Harry Potter. Six boys and ane girl.
• The Carsons in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling are like this. Exterior of Ivy and Josie, the only one of the eight kids who appears or does anything is Jerry. They're described as all looking pretty much akin.
• All-of-a-Kind Family details a depression-era Jewish family with 5 girls spaced two years apart, and, past the end of the first book, a new baby blood brother.
• Star Wars Legends uses the extended family trope quite a fleck. In New Jedi Social club, you might even think Luke and Mara were the Solo kids' parents.

    Live-Activeness Television

• Everybody Loves Raymond
• 8 Simple Rules
• 2point4 Children; they named the series afterward it.
• The George Lopez Show
• The Addams Family is an inversion of the Nuclear Family unit.
• The main family in Just the Ten of U.s.a., spinoff from Growing Pains. As Bo-- er, Richard Stabone noted upon seeing the Lubbock family, "They're Catholic!"
• Ma and Pa Kettle, stars of a pop franchise of belatedly '40s/early '50s comedies, were a rural farm couple with 15 children. A running gag would have Ma forgetting a child'due south proper name.
• On the Reality Show 19 Kids and Counting, the Duggar family unit has xix kids. There besides is a Spin-Off near their friends the Bates, who have 21 kids.
• The Brady Bunch, bringing together a father with three boys and a mother with three girls.
• Step by Step
• Life with Derek
• Drake & Josh
• Malcolm in the Middle has a core group of three boys, plus older brother Francis (away at military camp, and afterward starting his own family) and baby brother Jamie.
• The Dunphys, in Modern Family, are presented as the "default" nuclear family—mum, dad, two daughters and a son—but the show introduces them as part of a larger extended family unit whose other nuclear components fall out of classic or stereotypical American family norms.
• Too Many Cooks starts out parodying nuclear families... and then the episode only keeps going, and going, and going, introducing more and more Cooks along the manner.
• The Family unit from Titans, since they're based on the Nuclear Family unit (run across Comics above). They don't announced to actually exist related since when Dad is killed, he's but replaced past a new man, simply are brainwashed into acting like an old-fashioned nuclear family unit of Dad, Mum, son and daughter all while performing horrific acts of torture and murder.
• Out of the main cast of Stranger Things; Lucas Sinclair and Mike Wheeler are the but ones to have this dynamic with their families: Lucas has both parents and a younger sister and Mike has both parents and is the middle child between two sisters.

    Toys

• The "Loving Family" My Niggling Pony toys consisted of a mare, a stallion, a filly, and a colt.

    Video Games

• The Beamishes of The Adventures of Willy Beamish. Gordon Beamish is a White Collar Worker while his wife Sheila is a homemaker. Their eldest child is Valley Girl Tiffany, followed by grade school-aged son Willy, and finally the bratty preschooler Brianna. Willy has a dog named Duffy (along with a frog named Horny), while Brianna has a cat named Mr. Snickers. However, their suburban lifestyle is as well suggested to come up with a pretty hefty price tag, with Gordon'south chore termination immediately instilling worries in how things like the mortgage, car payments and credit cards will exist paid off.
• The Sardini family unit in Haunting Starring Polterguy. Father Vito is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who sells crappy skateboards to innocent teenagers and does not care even if they die. Flo is his proud but hands frightened wife. Tony is their son who is interested in telescopes and ninjas. Mimi is their Bratty Teenage Daughter with Girlish Pigtails. They also take an unnamed canis familiaris that makes your game harder.
• In Sheltered, you have to help a family of iv (five if you allow them have a pet) survive in the aftermath of a nuclear state of war by helping them to maintain their fallout shelter.

    Western Blitheness

• The Simpsons. Early on, it even used "America's Nearly Nuclear Family unit" as a Tag Line. Homer working at a nuclear power plant fifty-fifty makes this more than literal than other examples.
  • Taken to perhaps its ultimate extreme with Cletus Spuckler, the series' resident "slack jawed yokel". He and his wife Brandine are the parents of some 44 children. In one episode, the Spucklers take in Bart and Lisa when Homer and Marge go to jail, implying that some of the other children may be fostered besides.

• The evil supervillain "Abstraction" (a.k.a Charles) from The Tick'due south animated series is the older son in a nuclear family. His parents are very progressive and hope he'll eventually abound out of the "supervillain" phase.
• The Morgendorrfers in Daria are a parody, although they do genuinely seem to intendance for each other. Even if the female parent is a hopeless Workaholic, the father a Deject Cuckoolander, the eldest daughter a misanthopic Snark Knight, and the youngest a boy-crazy, popularity-obsessed Pretty Freeloader.
• In The Weekenders, Lor is the sole girl in a family with 12 boys, all of whom are treated equally a unit of measurement. Her family environment has formed much of the core of her personality.
• The Loud Firm has the titular Loud family unit, consisting of Rita and Lynn Sr. and their 11 kids, with the sole boy, Lincoln, being the focus of the show.
• Phineas and Ferb, where the family is so blended it can exist hard for a casual viewer to discover information technology at all. This is helped past Ferb, who has a British accent, hardly ever speaking.
• Rugrats began with Chuckie existence raised past a unmarried father, but in the second movie Chas remarries a woman named Kira who has a girl named Kimi.
• Steven Universe has a very unconventional family (his mother gave up her physical grade to get half of him, and he lives with three of her close friends who are sentient gemstones with humanoid projections), but his friend Connie'southward parents are very traditional, which leads to this humorous dialogue when Connie's parents want to meet Steven'south.

  Connie: I told my parents yous have a nuclear family.

  Steven: Nuclear? Sure, they brand stuff blow upward sometimes, but that'southward because they're magic, not radioactive!

  • Steven and so has the Crystal Gems fuse into Alexandrite to laissez passer themselves off as his mother, considering he can't cull simply one of them to play the part.
• Moral Orel Is easily one of the almost scathing Deconstructions of the Nuclear Family ever made, showing how the institutionalization of the Nuclear Family above all else rips people apart on the inside, frequently at the neglect of the children.
• P.C. Pinkerton: The titular P.C.'s family unit consists of him, his wife Jane, his kids Jane and Peter, and after their dog Slipper.

    Existent Life

• The Western nuclear family is a relatively contempo innovation, the product of social and physical mobility brought about past the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
• In more traditional societies, like some in Latin America, the Mediterranean, and South/Southeast Asia, this is ubiquitous. Extended family are virtually universally considered shut family in those cultures. In many of these areas, extended family unit either lives under one roof or near ane another. The Arab Gulf states, for instance, are notorious for having cases of three or four generations living under one roof, with all of a particular patriarch's (very fertile) descendants living in a unmarried edifice. In profound cases (e.g., Italy), "family" might include True Companions, or casual acquaintances.
  • Weddings are an issue in these cultures. The minimum size for an Indian or Eye Eastern nuptials is somewhere in the triple digits; annihilation smaller and yous will run the hazard of offending many people. If you live far abroad from most of your relatives, they will insist that information technology be held close to them. This goes double if you live abroad—they will have y'all get married in The Old Land, and that is concluding.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NuclearFamily

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