Word: moms
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...burden of raising kids of imprisoned moms often falls on the frail shoulders of elderly relatives. Tiffany Barrett's grandmother has cancer, yet she has been taking care of Barrett's two kids while undergoing chemotherapy treatment. "She's told me I better hurry up and get out of here because she doesn't know how much longer she can hold out," says Barrett, 23, who has served three years on drug charges at Hernando Correctional in Florida. She rides the bus to Reading Family Ties in Miami once a month so Chevas, 6, and Chev'Qavia, 4, can have...
...siblings sit in front of a tiny, oval-shaped camera. Their mom is visible onscreen--dressed in a blue prison-issue jumpsuit. When the monitor suddenly goes dark, a counselor jiggles the mouse to make the picture reappear. Chevas asks his mom when she is coming home. She flashes three fingers, the number of months until her release. He marks off the days on a calendar. "It's really hard, being that I want to see them and touch them," Barrett says. "But if it weren't for this program, I wouldn't be able to see them...
Still, face-to-face contact is crucial. "If I hadn't got the hugs and kisses from my mom and the whispers in my ear," says Nakea Walker, 25, of Staten Island, N.Y., "I know I wouldn't have made it." Walker was 16 when her late mother was sent to a prison in upstate New York, nine hours away. Her five siblings was sent to a foster home. Walker has been fighting to reunite her family. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 will probably send more kids like Walker's siblings into foster care. It allows courts...
...from the Nelsons to the Simpsons, it has largely meant married parents with kids. Not so this year. The lead character on abc's The Geena Davis Show shacks up out of wedlock with a widower and his kids. The single-mom heroine of the WB's Gilmore Girls was knocked up as a teen; the grownup star of Fox's Titus gets knocked out by his hard-drinking, oft divorced dad. On Fox's Normal, Ohio, Dad is divorced and gay. From Ward and June Cleaver, we've gone to Ward and June, cleaved...
This isn't the first year TV has explored contentious families or divorce (Grace Under Fire). Past producers would sometimes simply kill off Mom, leaving a cute dad who could date (ABC's Madigan Men continues the widower-com tradition). But now the nontraditional family is practically mandatory, for reasons as much economic as social. After years of big-city yuppie-coms, the networks realized, says NBC entertainment president Garth Ancier, that "the urban work setting was getting old." That meant a return to the domestic comedy--but now, says Geena creator Terry Minsky, "it's not enough...