The first think you will notice when you move in with a healthy family is that they cannot work independently. In the first place, there is too much labor involved in raising kids for anybody to sit on the couch for an extended period of time. They are a unit, like a body with different organs or a car with different working parts. I lived with this sort of family for a while, the MacMurrays. Both John and Terri MacMurray provided incomes. Terri had a great job at an insurance agency downtown and didn’t want to leave because they needed the health benefits. They liked her so much that she worked from home most days, but she still worked. John looked after the kids when Terri was busy or running errands in town, and Terri looked after everything when John was on a photography trip. But it wasn’t just the adults that had important roles. In a way, so did the kids. It was obvious, watching them and being around them, that John and Terri took great delight in their children. They were better than television to them. And the kids felt important, I think, because they would do silly [...]
