Can you hear the love?

I’M THINKING OF applying those little white silhouettes to the back window of the minivan. You see them everywhere now, those outlines of the family standing shoulder to shoulder -- mom, dad, the kids, the dogs. In the world of fertility bragging rights, they have replaced “Baby on Board” signs and “My kid made the honor roll” bumper stickers.

Of course, to truly represent our mercurial family, the white stick figures would all have to be arguing with one another, bent over double while yelling, pulling at their hair, howling at the TV.

The mother figure would be brushing her teeth and scolding the children at the same time. The father figure would have to be supremely handsome but a little jowly, slowly going to seed, his knees knobby, his prospects dim.

Admittedly, that’s a lot to convey in little white stick figures. There’d also be tiny white outlines of socks people forgot to pick up and fashion magazines strewn just everywhere. But more than anything else, they’d all have their mouths wide open.

“A loud house is a healthy house,” I assure my wife.

“What?” she says, unable to hear over the din.

“A LOUD HOUSE IS A HEALTHY HOUSE!!!” I repeat.

“WHAT???”

OK, I’ll say it again. A loud house is a healthy house. We’re a typical nuclear family -- you know, in the sense of bombs constantly going off. Explosions. Slammed doors. I’ve got one kid who, when she opens her yap, mushroom clouds escape.

Our house is like a freshman dorm in the sense that no one seems to sleep and we’re always arguing vehemently about stuff of no consequence whatsoever. For example, we can argue for days over which Darrin was best on “Bewitched.” And three of the kids have never even heard of “Bewitched.”

“Yes, I have, Dad,” argues one, when I mention the “Bewitched” example.

“You know what a good show was?” says the lovely and patient older daughter.

“ ‘McHale’s Navy’?” I say.

“ ‘Friends,’ ” she says.

“ ‘C.P.O. Sharkey’?” I say.

“ ‘Scrubs,’ ” she says.

Come on, admit it: “Scrubs” is one of the worst shows ever. In fact, you can turn on almost any NBC show these days and be pretty certain that what you’re watching is the worst show ever. You think “My Name Is Earl” is excruciatingly, fingernails-on-my-eyeballs bad? It is. But wait till you see what the Peacock (actually, a pigeon in drag) has up next for you.

To its credit, the Peacock is bringing back “Friday Night Lights,” one of the best shows on network television and perhaps the only show that portrays a real American family, warts and all -- one where the members all love one another, despite many loud and angry moments.

The main couple, harried but still kind of hot, has a spoiled teenager and a newborn they weren’t expecting at this late stage in their marriage, when most of their energy is being sucked up by the 16-year-old daughter who seems out to kill them with pure surliness.

I’ve heard many stories of surly teenage daughters like that -- scream queens, drama mamas. Our own teenager is seldom like that. Sure, she likes to fold her arms during arguments and tap her foot impatiently till her mother comes to her senses. But this happens only three or four times a day. So it’s not like it’s chronic or anything.

Lovely girl -- smart, beautiful, hormonal as a honeybee. She has four times as much hair as anybody I’ve ever met, big heaping waves of grenadine that are always falling into her eyes.

What I like best, perhaps, is the diversity of her personalities. One moment, she’s a silent-screen star and won’t mumble a word; the next minute, she will take off on a roller coaster of thoughts, rants, screeds and political observations. Words are her Stradivarius. To hear her speak is to hear Heifetz tackle a Tchaikovsky concerto after four martinis.

She’s 17 going on 40 going on 4, often within the same sentence. If she has her way, she’ll apply to 30 colleges next year and visit them all. She wants to go to school on the East Coast, a recent disease among SoCal teenagers. Apparently, they ache for the gritty turmoil of Boston or New York. They yearn for the screech of elevated trains. They ache to get stranded for three days at Logan. They can’t wait for a long, dark February, in places where the locals take on the pallor of raw turkey.

“I want to go back east,” she’s always saying.

“Pasadena?”

“Boston,” she says.

That’s east, all right. The land of nervous little men like Paul Revere, who were he alive today would climb a horse and yell, “The redhead is coming! The redhead is coming!”

Just don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.