People Are Sharing Their Weird Family Things That They Only Realized Were Not Normal Later In Life (35 Answers)

Interestingly, u/i-had-no-good-ideas came up with this question during a clash between two family worlds. "I was camping with my [folks] and another family that we're friends with and we were arguing about the rules of UNO and what was the right way to play and what was the wrong way," the Redditor told Bored Panda.

"It turned out that my family had been playing it wrong the whole time and that just blew my mind ... I had been oblivious to it this whole time."

Researchers believe there is no single 'normal' in the modern American family anymore. According to a report prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families, most commonly (34 percent), children live with married, dual-career parents, however, no single family 'style' is in the majority.

"We have not replaced one ideal family type with another," Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, said. "We have replaced one ideal family type with what we call a 'peacock's tail' in the report because it fans out."

Cohen took data from the U.S. Census and from national surveys on family life and reconstructed the family arrangements of Americans in 1960 and 2012.

He found that in 1960, the American family showed a 'peak conformity'. That year, the age at first marriage was the youngest, the marriage rate was at its highest, and the number of extended families living together in multigenerational households was the lowest.

Back then, 65 percent of children under age 15 lived in a family with married parents in which the father was the breadwinner. 18 percent had married parents who were both employed. And only one child in 350 lived with a mother who had never been married.

In 2012, however, no family type held a majority: the number of children with married parents and only a father working dropped to 22 percent, while children raised by dual-income married parents rose to 34 percent. 11 percent of kids lived with a never-married mother and 7 percent with a parent cohabiting with a romantic partner. About 3 percent of children lived with a single father.

"The first and most harrowing thing I took away from the comments was that more families have poop knives than I thought," u/i-had-no-good-ideas said. "The second thing I took away was what a poop knife was. But the third takeaway was that I'm really glad that my family are who they are. I got a lot of comments that were largely concerning when you think about them too long and it just made me glad that the strangest thing my family do is play UNO wrong."

After going through the comments, u/i-had-no-good-ideas agrees with the before-mentioned study. "Everyone has a different view of what normal is," the Redditor said. "To some, normal could be wearing a tuxedo and top hat to bed or running around your backyard wearing nothing but a sombrero. So there is such thing as a normal family but the concept of normal is entirely subjective and there is no such thing as a wrong subjective view."

Philip Cohen believes people really sort of on their own figuring out how to make their family life work. In fact, the sociologist thinks it's the reason why we have a big parenting advice industry. Plus, the search for role models may also help to explain the intense interest in celebrity families and marriages.