Not So Poor Penny

For most people in the US, money is something to worry about.  However, that is not how the average person is portrayed in modern sitcoms.  Even the "poor" characters still have it pretty good.  A good example of this is "The Big Bang Theory."

In TBBT, there are five main characters.  Four of them work at a university doing research.  They all make very decent money.  Then there is the fifth character, Penny.  Penny is a girl that packed everything and moved out to LA to be an actress.  Her acting career has yet to take off, so in the mean time she is working as a waitress at The Cheesecake Factory.  The show does not hide the fact that Penny does not have a lot of money, in fact there are several episodes where her income is involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Liu5PWoNXbw

Here is a clip where Penny buys a pair of shoes.  She says that they cost more than her rent and that she can't afford them, but she bought them anyway.  So she is clearly the poorest of the characters.

Despite this, she still lives in a really nice apartment in the same building with two of the characters that earn a salary of someone that does research at a university.  Granted her apartment is smaller than theirs, but it is still very nice for someone that lives off tips.

Current media has a trend of portraying "poor" characters as not so poor and this is a great example.

Working Class Mom

Watching television, I have come to notice that something the media uses to depict a working class is a household with a single mother.  An example of this is a show called "One Day at a Time."

Most of my life I grew up underneath the care of a single mother household.  My mom was the sole caretaker for my sister and I until I was about 12 or 13.  I do not find that being brought up in a single mother household is any disadvantage, or anything to be negatively stigmatized.  My mom worked while my sister and I were in school, and she was able to buy and pay off a house for us all on her own.

You'd think that my sister and I suffered from a lack of time with our mom, but that was not the case at all.  She spend every evening and weekend with us and helped us with our school projects and we ate dinner together every night and she was there at all of our school programs.

I feel that it is very unfair to look at single mother households negatively.  I know from first hand experience that it is not a bad thing to just have a mom, and that a family can flourish under those circumstances.