TV Families: Bradys? Duggars? Which Are Your Favorites?

By Laurie Sanchez

My 13-year-old daughter was shaking her head at the tabloid cover at the supermarket, featuring the 19th child of the Duggar family. “It just seems a little weird. …” she said.

I nodded, but shrugged: The Duggar family seems like a very nice family, actually, and I have no qualms about how many children they want to have. My surprise, instead, is about how many families agree to be televised while trying to raise them.

There was, of course, the Gosselins (Jon and Kate Plus Eight). There are the Duggars (19 Kids and Counting). There was a show proposed about the Masches (Raising Sextuplets). And now there’s the Hayes family (Table for 12).

Of course, the fascination with big families is not new.

When I was growing up, we had lots of television families, too, but -- the big difference -- is that the families were fake: There was the Brady Bunch (combining a family! Imagine that!), the Partridge Family (performing with your family! Imagine that!), Eight Is Enough (eight kids! Imagine that!), and there were even a few movies about multiples, including the ever-popular Parent Trap (original 1970s version, thank you very much).

We were fascinated with what it would be like to be part of a large family, or part of a combined family, or perhaps a multiple. We watched all the childish hijinks and wondered what it would be like if we had a mom like Carol Brady or a brother like Keith Partridge. Maybe our fascination stemmed from coming off the "free love" 60s, in which the nuclear family took quite a beating. People doubted marriage, doubted the happy 2.5 kids. People were getting divorced in large numbers and having much smaller families. So maybe the flurry of '70s shows was in response to that -- showing us that combined families, even after divorce, could still be happy and normal and filled with a dog like Tiger jumping through the family blow-up pool. The most interesting thing about this, though, is that I now realize many of those stories were told from the point of view of the kids.

As the decades rolled by, then, and infertility treatments became common, and multiples … well, multiplied … large families became real. And television focused on reality. So it seemed an obvious leap that we’d get reality television about families of multiples. (Combining fascinations. Gotta love it.)

But the stories, now, are not romantic. They’re not filled with cute childish hijinks about a fountain filled with bubbles or wearing a pair of fake glasses to fool a date. They’re not designed to amuse, or entertain. Or maybe they are, but they don’t. And they’re now told from the parents’ point of view, not the kids’. The kids’ point of view is funny, but the parents’ point of view is … kinda painful.

How do you feel about the current crop of reality shows about families? Do you think the parent point of view is as painful as I do? Did you watch the “fake families” when you were a kid? Do you think we’re destined to make a fictional-family comeback? (I'm already watching Modern Family and thinking that this might represent our comeback -- the self-defined, no-definitions-attached version of whatever you call "family." Love it. ...)

Laurie Sanchez lives in Southern California with her not-made-for-TV family and is putting the polishing touches on her first contemporary romance novel. She also blogs as Mizwrite and blogs over at Health Bistro on Fridays.