Study misses a big change in the Canadian family
  


Charles Gordon
OttawaCitizen.com
Sunday, September 16, 2007


Major changes have been recorded in the nature of the Canadian family. These include an increase in the number of adult children who remain in the house and a decrease in the percentage of adults who are married. There are more same-sex couples and, for the first time, fewer than half of Canadian adults are married.

This newspaper wisely chose to illustrate an article on this subject with a large photograph of the Nelson family, Ozzie, Harriet, David and Ricky, who, despite the fact that they had their own radio and television shows, were thought to represent the typical North American family -- husband, wife, two children -- in the 1940s and '50s.

Harriet, Ozzie, David and Ricky Nelson

To be fair, in a demographic sense, either David or Ricky should have been a girl, but you can't blame them or Ozzie or Harriet for that.

Important as all these changes may sound, Statistics Canada has missed another important way in which the family has changed. The photo of Ozzie and Harriet should give a clue.

In the period of 1952-'66, the run on radio and TV of the Ozzie and Harriet Show, there was another key member of the family. That was Thorny, the next-door neighbour, who always showed up in the kitchen, coming in without knocking.

In North American households, according to television and radio depictions of them, every home had a next-door neighbour who showed up in the kitchen. Often the householder would enter the kitchen to find the neighbour already there, sometimes making a sandwich. There was Thorny and there was Bill the boyfriend of Beulah, the radio maid who worked for the Hendersons, and whose friend Oriole also paid frequent visits.

Statistics Canada has missed the disappearance of these important people from the family.

Frequently, the next-door neighbour was an announcer, which was rather a coincidence. Harry Von Zell, for example, lived next door to George Burns and Gracie Allen, and was always showing up in the kitchen. He was the announcer on the show. The same goes for Don Wilson, who was the announcer for Jack Benny. He was always in Benny's kitchen.

In those days, it was just taken for granted that if you entered your kitchen, somebody would be in there, probably your next-door neighbour, and likely an announcer.

Statistics Canada has not studied why this is no longer the case. It may be that radio announcers have been replaced by computers, but you would think that would be all the more reason for them to want to make sandwiches in somebody else's kitchen.

Or it may just have to do with the general remoteness that has crept into our neighbourhoods, that feeling that you don't know your neighbour and may not even want to. In many North American households, friction among neighbours can be traced back to the development of hi-fi phonographs, which led to neighbours playing Ricky Nelson records at high volume.

Somewhere around that time, people began asking the announcer, politely at first, if he wouldn't mind knocking before he came into the kitchen. Not long after that, people began not answering the door when somebody knocked because they were afraid that it was somebody who wanted to replace their roof.

This made it much harder to be a friendly next-door neighbour. Another factor, chronicled in the Statistics Canada study must also have played a role: the tendency of grown children to remain in the house. When Thorny wandered into the Nelsons' kitchen to make a sandwich, David and Rick were off at school. Today, the next-door neighbour will find a grown child already at the refrigerator door.

And this is assuming that the neighbour does not set off the security alarm on the way in because the family has refused to give him the access code.

As a side issue, you can see why the family sit-com has vanished from television. Who wants to watch a show about the announcer being mistaken for a burglar while a 45-year-old child sits in the kitchen eating a sandwich?

Because there is nothing good on television, people go out more, partly to escape their grown children and partly because there is nothing in the fridge, so that there is really no point in the neighbour dropping in on them anyway.

It is hard to know whether this constitutes a threat to the survival of the family or not.

Charles Gordon writes weekly.

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=8a54be41-2056-4f17-bd3c-04324fc3d68b