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Wouldn't it be wonderful if people were like machines? For instance, when my electric broom stopped doing its job I simply took it to a fixit store to make it work again. It couldn't be repaired. So I replaced it with a newer model.

Unfortunately, when someone in our family has a problem we can't get it solved so simply. You can always tell when a machine isn't working right, but not so with a member of the family.

"There's no such thing as a functional family," my friend states emphatically. There's rarely a time within the family when all is well and everyone is getting along with each other.

Family dynamics start at birth and sometimes never finish, even after death. Think about how young siblings are always vying for a parent's attention or how many siblings fight over a parent's inheritance.

The biblical story of Cain and Abel is a universal tale, timeless and relevant in families all over the world.

The whole myth of the perfect family is a shuck. No family, now or ever, behaved like Ozzie and Harriet did.

The fairy tale of the perfect nuclear family was started after the Second World War. To make way for the men returning home from the war, women had to get out of the factories and back in the kitchen. The push to get women out of the job market came from government and private industry.

A capitalistic society needs more babies to create more wealth and build new industries. A woman who stays home does a lot more shopping. The roads were built to ensure that the new ideal family would have a home surrounded by a picket fence. Thus the suburban housewife was born and soon bored out of her mind, making babies in the wilderness.

The needs of these growing families in newly developed housing areas was a boon to the furniture and gardening supplies businesses as well as the diaper and baby food industries. To make this new lifestyle tempting the ideal family was dreamed up in the advertising agencies.

Norman Rockwell's interpretation of the ideal family still stands as a shrine to the illusion that all was well. But there was never such a thing as a perfect family. It was all a myth and we fell for it.

Such high expectations inevitably resulted in growing divorce rates. The term dysfunctional family was born out of this era.

It gave a huge boost to schools of social work. The more social workers came into the field, the more families were considered dysfunctional. Similarly, the more lawyers we graduate the more people sue one and other. The more roads we build the more housing complexes will be built. It's all about jobs and profits.

So what is a functional family?

As far as I can tell, all children get mad at their parents and each other sometime in their lives.

People mean problems. Just because a family doesn't always get on together doesn't mean it's dysfunctional. It's more normal for a family to have internal chaos on occasion than not.

Family life is dynamic. Children grow and change. Change is not comfortable.

Just think about your typical teenager with his unpredictable behavior. It makes everyone around him uncomfortable until it's over. But the family still functions. Life continues and we grin and bear it.

We also react to behavior that gets us upset. As parents most of us believe ourselves and our families are functioning as best we can.

But sometimes we can be surprised to find out, as I did when my oldest son wrote in an essay for graduate school, that he "came from a dysfunctional family." But what else should I have expected from a Psych major?

We aren't machines. Family life takes a toll and it does break down once in a while. But the mystery is how well most families do function, not the opposite.