Couple of Parent-Centric Columns: Lessons from 2011's TV Parents & Why Moms Should Run for Office

Lessons from 2011's TV Parents

It's been quite the year for parents on the small screen.

We've been entertained by the hijinks of the Modern Family's Claire & Phil Dunphy and their bedroom door that should've had a lock on it before their kids surprised them at inopportune moment.

We've seen Parenthood's Adam and Kristina Braverman try and fail to ban their teen daughter from dating an older man who had his own apartment.

We witnessed The Middle's Frankie and Mike Heck declare themselves to be free from their children's unreasonable demands which reduced them to little more than unpaid, disrespected servants (although the self-declared freedom was short-lived).

We laughed as Up All Night's new parents, Chris and Reagan Brinkley, tried in vain to prove that they're hip and cool and able to party it up on weeknights, even though their baby isn't sleeping through the night yet, they're sleep deprived and Reagan needed to work in the morning.

My recent Pop Culture and Politics column details these child-rearing lessons that I gleaned from watching TV parents during 2011.

Why Moms Should Run for Office

In another recent Pop Culture and Politics column I extended an invitation to women who are raising the next generation to run for public office because, all too often, women's voices are not heard or represented in our elected bodies.

The advocacy group She Should Run offered up this dour data on the state of women in American politics:

• "Women hold only 17 percent of the seats in Congress."
• "State legislatures only have 23 percent women."
• "Only 6 out of 50 states have a female governor."
• "The United States trails behind the rest of the world -- ranking 87th in the number of women in our national legislature."
• ". . . [W]omen are 50 percent less likely than men to seriously consider running for office, less likely than men to actually run for office and far less likely to run for higher office."

As one of the founders of The White House Project (whose goals include electing a female commander in chief) said in the powerful documentary Miss Representation, when it comes to our daughters, "You can't be what you can't see."

Image credit: She Should Run.

Three for Thursday: Thanksgiving TV from 'Gilmore Girls' & 'Mad About You' to 'Mad Men,' Helicopter Parenting on 'Parenthood' and Pining For Thanksgivings of Yore

Thanksgiving TV Episodes from Gilmore Girls and Mad About You to Mad Men

Who can forget the wretched awkwardness at the Francis family Thanksgiving table when Betty Draper Francis literally forced her daughter Sally to eat sweet potatoes – shoving a forkful into Sally's mouth which led to the girl gagging them out onto her plate – in order to please her new mother-in-law on Mad Men? Or the Gilmore Girls episode where Lorelai and Rory wound up attending four Thanksgiving dinners because they couldn’t say, “No” to their friends and family? Or even the time when Mad About You's Paul and Jamie Buchman hosted their first Thanksgiving in their apartment and had to grapple with some serious passive aggression from their family members and friends when they didn’t like the fact that Paul and Jamie wanted to have dinner “buffet style” and had messed with everyone’s idiosyncratic ideas of what a “traditional” Thanksgiving dinner is “supposed” to be?

I highlighted some of my favorite Thanksgiving episodes over on my Notes from the Asylum blog, including the one of the famous Cheers Thanksgiving food fight.

Helicopter Parenting on Parenthood

This week’s episode of NBC’s solid, incisive and sharply observed drama Parenthood provided a mixed bag of parenting portrayals.

On the one hand, you had Sarah Braverman, who gave her daughter Amber a much-needed push to get her to overcome her fears and meet with an influential alum from a university she wants to attend. And on the other hand, you had an over-the-top helicopter parent in the form of Kristina Braverman insisting that her son was entitled to an invitation to a classmate’s birthday party even after the mother of the birthday girl said he wasn't invited and that her daughter specifically didn’t want Kristina’s son there. While there’s a whole powerful, poignant and painful Asperberger’s backstory there, and some real bonding eventually occurred between the two moms with children who have challenges, a big chunk of the Kristina story bugged me this week. Read more about why in my review of the episode.

Pining for Thanksgiving Days of Yore

In my Pop Culture column this week, I pine away for Thanksgivings and Christmases of my youth, when I used to actually enjoy this time of year tremendously and didn’t see them the way that I do now: As one, long, life-sucking list of things to do, all at the same time, and all while under a heap o’pressure with no time to just sit back and soak in this time in your life. But when I think of how I used to love this time of year, to quote Liz Lemon, I want to go back to there. But how?