All in the non-traditional family

How will the Murphy Brown reboot treat single-motherhood?

Murphy Brown is returning to television.

Few television shows have incited the kind of culture war that Murphy Brown did in 1992, when the fictional unmarried journalist portrayed by Candice Bergen bore a son. The announcement of the reboot coincides with a new analysis of U.S. census data showing the largest increase in fertility over the past decade occurring among never-married women with advanced degrees.

When Murphy Brown gave birth to her son, Avery, in the early 1990s she was portrayed as an aberration. Today, 25 per cent of never-married women in their early 40s are mothers — including me.

In many respects, Murphy Brown deserves credit for making single-parenting feel less lonely for moms like me than it must have been a generation ago. Today, resources and support groups for single moms by choice proliferate and magazines routinely run stories on do-ityourself motherhood.

New research demonstrates that, for children raised by welleducated, older mothers, there is no difference in educational or economic outcomes when compared to those who grow up in married or unmarried households. Some researchers deem single women who have children on their own the “true super moms of the family story.”

Still, as a single mother of a three-year-old son, I’m shocked at how frequently institutions still operate as though heterosexual two-parent nuclear families are the norm. For example, when I showed up for the mandatory childbirth education class with one of my girlfriends as my birthing coach, the instructor appeared genuinely flummoxed.

Although we are hardly aberrations, many of us in “nontraditional” families are still forced to contort ourselves to outdated customs. Worse still, two decades after Murphy Brown left the airwaves, people are still locked in a tense cultural debate over family structure. Although privileged white single mothers are now largely exempt from moralistic finger-wagging, lowincome single mothers of colour are disparaged for their “poor choices.”

For those of us who followed in Murphy Brown’s footsteps, it is a tantalizing prospect to have her back on the air, providing us with a model for single motherhood later in life.

How nice would it be to see Avery having grown into a thoughtful and empathetic young man, belying the insulting rhetoric that still gets propagated, about single-mother households being damaging for boys? How interesting would it be to learn how Brown’s career fared as she juggled the competing demands of work and solo parenting ? But for this reboot to be meaningful, Murphy Brown should go further than it did in did in the 1990s and address issues affecting a range of families.

With its overwhelmingly white cast, the original show could not confront stereotypes and misperceptions of single women of colour who bear children on their own. A new version that took representation seriously could help normalize how American families have evolved.

As Murphy Brown said on the show, “perhaps it’s time ... to recognize that, whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes. And, ultimately, what really defines a family is caring and love.”