It used to be people thought a family was a mother, father, 2.5 kids, a dog, a cat, a garage, and a chicken in every pot.

But, even though we’ve just emerged from our own economic depression, doesn’t mean that family now looks like family did back during the Great Depression.  Family in the 21st Century is not family of radio days.

Indeed, family today is stretching people’s assumptions and expectations about what a family looks like.  In today’s World we have families with people of different races, with two moms, with two dads, with one parent, and sometimes a grandparent but no parent.  We are, in this age of technology and the Internet, when we are stretching our reach into the Universe and contracting the distance between nations and peoples, literally redefining family.

Some are not okay with that.  Some pine for days of yore.  Of course, people tend to forget that “yore” wasn’t so great for everyone.  “Yore” included days when women didn’t vote, Blacks were enslaved, Jewish people were kept in ghettos, gay people were forced into the closet, and people who didn’t look like us (whoever “us” is) were run out of town.

YouTube and the iPad may be melting our kids’ eyes out their heads, but it’s also exposing them to the fact that people all over the World are kind of the same, and maybe, probably, in fact, definitely, it’s okay that people are different and one size, shape, and color doesn’t have to fit all.

So, what is “family” and what does it look like?  Well, I’d say, it’s not so much about what it looks like as it about what it is.  I think it’s the group of people amongst whom you are at home.  And, as Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer say “anywhere I hang my hat is home” (even if your hat is a different color, shape, size, ethnicity or anything else from everyone else’s hat in the home).

For more on this and to join the conversation on #multiracial families, please join me on Twitter using the hashtag #multiracialfamilyman or check out my podcast, Multiracial Family Man on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/multiracial-family-man/id969793342?mt=2