Season 3 Episode 7 - A Cold Mom, a Brother Daddy and a Prison Baby - QUESTION?

In this episode Darlene's fiance Ben gets a call from his mother, played by Candice Bergen, telling him that his father has died. She flies out to see Ben and tells him that his father was not his real father, and that she got pregnant from a guy she did not know and that his fake-father promised to raise Ben as his own, but he didn't.

This is a pretty deep plot for a such a light TV comedy show. I was reading about the phenomenon of men marrying women with other men's children, or men who are, or were in the past, forced to marry women whom they got pregnant and spent their whole lives resenting the child as the object of their loss of the single life and crushing responsibility.

That seems like a terrible thing to happen to a child, especially when they find out in the late adulthood that they never really knew what was going on, the meaning of their family life, in fact as I think about it is downright terrible. Am I just tripping on this or is knowing who you are and what your place in your family and the world is really an important piece of one's consciousness and self-image?