My kids and I recently spent a holiday week at an all-inclusive Punta Cana resort and I didn’t spot any other single parents. All around us, families relaxed in the sun. They splashed in the waves. And they stuffed themselves with food from all-you-can-eat buffets. We did much of the same, but the absence of my kids’ “mom” was always explicit. Frontier Airlines’ gate agents and flight attendants seemed surprised as they asked, “just the three of you?” The staff at Melia’s Paradisus Punta Cana Resort was always kind and attentive, but whenever we ordered drinks on the beach or sat at a restaurant, they seemed taken aback by the number three. Apparently, it’s not normal for a dad and his boys to vacation together.
The experience of being “the weirdos” was thought provoking. It forced me to consider the images of normalcy that I present to my kids. Today’s parents spend hours worrying about the right amount of screen time and the impact of video games on their kids, but how much energy do we expend asking questions about the cultural-norms we promote?
What have I inadvertently taught my kids about what it means to be a family in the United States in the 21st century? How do they imagine the role of a father in relation to his children? The Pew Research Center has shown us many ways in which fatherhood is changing: fewer husband-breadwinners, increasingly converging gender roles, more stay-at-home dads, etc. But are we really content to let the new image of family happen at the whims of economic shifts, or do we want to be intentional about the messages we transmit to the next generation? Children are always learning. So, even on vacation (perhaps especially on vacation), I want to make sure I’m still teaching my kids the things they need to learn to be thoughtful and ethical contributors to the global civilization of the future.
(Photo: Jordan Shapiro)
My ex-wife and I separated about four years ago and we now share equal custody of the boys (8- and 10-years-old). Like any parent who goes through a divorce, I put a lot of thought into how it impacts my kids. I still remember growing up in the eighties, when I only knew one or two kids with divorced parents. They seemed strange. Their lives were different from mine. They had two homes, with different rules at each. And they never seemed to have the kind of full-family vacations that I did.
My upbringing matched what I saw on television, on sitcoms, and in most movies: two hetero-sexual parents with same skin color, two older siblings, and just enough hijinks to make things interesting. Like the Keatons on Family Ties, the Seavers on Growing Pains, the Arnolds on The Wonder Years, I was normal—my family structure was average, and seemingly “correct.” Anything (and everything) other was somehow an exception to the mainstream—interracially parented or shared custody households were not “right” or “normal” (we rarely ever saw same-sex parents in those days—men living together in a Full House were even straight). The popular culture of the 1980s unintentionally reinforced an image of family normalcy even as it tried hard to represent non-traditional households: Silver Spoons, Diff’rent Strokes, Kate and Allie, for example, were all entertaining precisely because they showed something hyperbolically different.
The best example of the media’s covert reinforcement of “normal” family values might be Spielberg’s divorce-themed blockbuster E.T. (1982). The setting, Elliot’s single-parent household, is the ultimate image of chaos and turmoil. Extra-terrestrial literally means unearthly, and as much as I wanted to share Reese’s Pieces with an alien I discovered in my own backyard, I didn’t want the sadness and confusion that pop culture demonstrated as an intrinsic part of not being terrestrially average. In E.T., just like in so many other movies, things only resolve when some semblance of the normal “family” is back in order. Keys (the government agent played by Peter Coyote) stands with Dee Wallace and her kids in the final scene, completing the visual image of an ordinary two-parent family that looked just like mine. It was clear what it meant to be normal.
You would think that over thirty years later, things would have changed some. I imagined my sons would at least be spared from living in a world with a divorce/single-parent stigma. After all, we live in an era of non-traditional family structures, right? My kids attend a school at which many of their friends have same-sex parents. We live in an extremely liberal Philadelphia neighborhood where the things you’d see during trip to the average coffee shop will challenge hetero- and gender-normative conceptions of what it means to be a family. And in the United States as a whole, same-sex marriage is now legal and people are always talking about the rising divorce rate.
But the divorce rate, in fact, is not rising. As Claire Cane Miller explained in the New York Times last year, “The divorce rate peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s and has been declining in the three decades since.” Some estimates say that there are currently only 16.8 divorces per thousand married adults. Which is obviously much less than the 40-50% rate that demagogues love to quote. And when it comes to representations in the media, television’s Modern Family, if you really think about it, actually depicts an unsurprisingly traditional view of the family as an always-two-parent-household, albeit sometimes quirky in its composition. Things may be getting more conservative, not less.
Still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I’d like to think that my kids are being raised to understand that there’s not necessarily one right way to be a family. I’d particularly like to think, for their sake, that the divorce stigma is obsolete. But that is not clearly not the case, as was crystal clear when we discovered ourselves to be the outliers among resort vacationers.
The vacation market, of course, is just like most of the consumption economy. It is always selling more than just leisure and relaxation. It is always marketing an image of the good life. Embedded in every product is a set of emotions, experiences, and characteristics that resonate with a particular identity narrative, defining and reinforcing notions of rest, freedom, and recreation. This is why Walt Disney—always the great American storyteller—was able to build such a gigantic hospitality empire; he understood the narrative of the exceptional American family in depth and with more nuance than anyone else. What’s more, he was always explicit about it. At the opening of the original Disneyland park in Anaheim (1955), Walt said, “Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.”
While most of the vacation packages we buy from online travel sites these days are less transparent than Disney’s, they are still just as much about ideals and dreams. And as I sat on the beach in the Dominican Republic, watching my kids build sand castles and drink water from green coconuts, surrounded by “perfect” two-parent families, I wasn’t particularly happy with the ideals and dreams I was implicitly promoting to my kids. But I was less concerned about the idea that they might imagine our household arrangement to be “weird” than I was that they might imagine our excess to be “normal.”
I knew that right around the corner, outside the guarded gate that separated our resort from the actual country, families lived in very different circumstances. A third of the Dominican Republic’s population lives in poverty—and about 20 percent live in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 per day). Outside the Dominican Republic, The World Bank estimates that 9.6 percent of the global population currently lives below the international poverty line ($1.90 per day). And if you want to know more about how many people actually experience poverty—measured in ways that consider health, education, living standards and quality of work—The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative’s Global Multidimensional Poverty Index measures about 75% of the global population and finds that 30% of them live in poverty. What’s more: when I use this site to find out how my wealth measures up to the rest of humanity’s, I discover that I’m in the top 0.05-0.08% of the world (and my earnings are very modest by U.S. standards). What really makes my boys and me weirdos, then, is that we can afford to travel.
Normal, it turns out, really has nothing to do with the number of parents with whom you journey to faraway places, trying to fit into the leisure industry’s image of a perfect family. And I wanted to show my kids what normal looked like in the Dominican Republic. So I reached out to Punta Cana Mike, a Canadian expatriate who leads cultural tours in Punta Cana. I told him that I wanted my kids to be able to imagine what it would be like to be their age and living in the Dominican Republic. And he obliged.
He picked us up in his SUV and drove us around the area. First, we visited the barrio, where we met two young Haitian girls that hang outside the school all day. They can’t go in since they’re not legal residents of the Dominican Republic. But we could. Mike introduced us to the founding teacher of Centro Educativo Shalom, the local school, that he describes as “providing a quality education to those the world forgot.” He explained that he’s sort of adopted this school. By bringing tours through regularly, it both exposes the pupils to the wider world (a real live experiential geography lesson), and also has enabled them to solicit help from wealthy travelers who can afford to send toys, computers, books, and supplies. After about an hour of meeting the children in the school, my boys insisted we should send them supplies when we were home; I was proud.
(Photo: Jordan Shapiro)
Finally, Mike took us to eat lunch at a ‘restaurant’ (no running water, just a shed with a fire for cooking) on the only local beach not owned by a hotel conglomerate. It was probably the best meal I had in Punta Cana. My kids played in the sand as local fisherman brought in the day’s catch and loaded it onto trucks. Mike and I sipped Cervesa and Rum, finishing our lunches as we discussed North American politics, the Syrian refugee crisis, and both the positive and negative ways in which U.S. foreign policy can impact the world’s poor.
The next day, back on the resort’s beach and protected from the sun inside a palm-thatch-roofed cabana, I asked my kids what they thought of the tour. They seemed nervous and didn’t have much to say. My ten-year-old called it “interesting.” My eight-year-old said, “I wish I spoke Spanish so I could have talked to the kids.”
I don’t expect one trip will turn my children into humanitarians. Nor do I expect that they’ll really consider their privilege on an everyday basis. I doubt they’ll think of the Dominican kids when they throw temper tantrums over video games, or when they resist eating some foods because they “look funny.” But I hope they now have a slightly less fabricated view of “normal.”
