I watched episodes of Leave It to Beaver, The Wonder Years and Family Ties. I definitely saw a lot of inaccurate portrayals of teens. Throughout all of these shows, teens were always in the white middle class. Also, all the main characters were male.
In Leave it to Beaver, which was produced and aired in the 1950s, the main family is a set of parents and two boys. One boy is in the eighth grade, those other is in the second grade. The mom is a stay at home mom who lives in a beautiful house wearing pearls and cocktail dresses. The dad wears suits and ties and goes to work early in the morning. They most likely want to be associated with a high social class. The two boys go to the same school. Wally is the older brother, and Theodore, or Beaver, is in the second grade. All the kids are white. The gaping difference between the boys and the parents affects the relationships that the boy has with people versus the relationships the parents have with people. In Leave It to Beaver, the main character gets a note from his teacher asking his parents if he can be Smoky the Bear at the next play, but Beaver thinks he will get expelled for doing something bad. He skips school and his parents get his brother, Wally, to find him. They search town - places only the boys know. The boys know mechanics, veterans, and old people that the parents have no idea existed, so they have trouble finding him.
The Wonder Years was produced in the 1980s about a family in the 1960s in the suburbs. The main character is a white boy who is in school on his first day of seventh grade. His parents are normal stay-at-home mom and office job dad. He has a friend who dresses like a hippie for the first day, and another childhood friend he used to call Winnie but now wants to be called Gwyneth. At lunch, he eats his food in the cafeteria and then walks out holding an apple. A guard stops him and tells him there's no food allowed outside the cafeteria. He throws the apple back into the lunchroom. When he gets home and finds out that Gwyneth's brother died that day in Vietnam, he finds her where she always is in the woods on the outskirts of town. The reason why he doesn't want to admit that he's looking for her is because he still feels weird about having a crush on her, since they're childhood friends. When they kiss, it seems so natural, but it also has a sad undertone because he knows where she is when she's depressed. They know each other so we'll that it seems like they shouldn't have a crush on each other.
In Family Ties, the family consists of a boy, his two sisters and their parents. The boy, Alex, is a middle class kid in middle school, and his little sister is in elementary school. Although his mom and dad dress up, the father doesn't wear a full fledged suit, and the mother doesn't wear pearls. In the episode, Alex has known a girl in his grade, and they have gotten to talking. At some point, he gets her to come over for dinner. The problem is that he wants the entire family to act rich, smart, and together, making them something they're not. When she does come over, she is pretty, but really stupid. When asked what she wants to do as a career, she says she wants to help the needy by being a cheerleader. Also, when his parents ask her what she does in class, she simply says," Oh, y'know." Alex ends up at an exclusive country club with her for dinner that weekend, and his dad is really paranoid, because he doesn't like him to be in an exclusive place without any sort of diversity. His dad comes and takes him home again, and the main character decides it isn't worth it. He learned that he should take his family for what they are.
The problem really is that the parents are hippies who are all about equality, and the main character, Alex, is a complete conservative.
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