In America in the postwar period, popular television certainly reinforced the idea - and ideal - of the American, nuclear family. Television reinforced these ideas by regularly - often in situation comedy shoes - by presenting American families as consisting of a mother, father, and at least three children, in turn celebrating and inventing, in a sense, the "ideal" of the American family. The family, then, was presented as being a workable and healthy social unit that served to promote American values such as prosperity, strict gender norms, and the acceptance of American superiority over the ideals of other cultures and any sort of alternative lifestyle or way of being.