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."
Two boys get into a fight. Their parents get together to calmly and rationally discuss the incident and devise some sort of mutually satisfactory remedy. That’s the premise of the movie Carnage(with Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster) set to open in “select theaters” tomorrow. (I hate it when they “selectively” open a movie.) But, as one might expect, the conflict escalates between the four, affluent parents during the uncomfortable face-off. Things get ugggg-ly. This is a film I’m putting on my “To Watch” list.
One new film (not yet released) which intrigues me yet I’m kind of hesitant to see because I’m afraid I’ll become a bawling mess is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close about an 11-year-old boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks in New York City. While going through his dead father's belongings he finds a key and goes on a quest to find out what it opens. The boy, Oskar, and his dad (played by Tom Hanks) used to collaborate on “expeditions” around the city to encourage the boy to seek, to learn and to overcome fears. The key is the unifying metaphor. With Sandra Bullock playing Oskar’s grieving mother, I’m sure the film will be powerful, but I’d need to be in the right frame of mind to see it, and need to bring a giant box of tissues.
I’ve already seen the smart, funny, tear-jerker The Descendants, starring George Clooney -- who’s a distant father and husband and, after his wife has an accident and goes into a coma, learns that he didn’t really know his daughters or his wife at all – and I highly recommend it. (I wrote a column about the film’s question of whether we ever really know our parents or allow our parents to know us here.) Seeing Clooney as a slouchy, well meaning, confused middle-aged dad in loud, ugly Hawaiian shirts is worth the price of admission.
What films are you looking forward to seeing over the next few weeks?
As the fall TV season kicks off in earnest, I’ve been paying close attention to shows that feature parents and families . . . at least those which tickle my fancy. This was the focus of this week’s pop culture column over on Modern Mom/Mommy Tracked where I previewed the shows which I’m planning to record on my DVR.
Among the returning shows I’m anxious to see are ABC’s Modern Family, CBS’ The Good Wife and BC’s Parenthood. (I reviewed the rather disappointing Parenthood season premiere here, though I’m fairly certain it’ll improve.)
Two new comedies about which I’m holding onto some lofty hopes are NBC’s Up All Night with Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as potty-mouthed new parents (you can watch the pilot episode on the web site) and ABC’s Suburgatory about a single dad (Jeremy Sisto who was great as the messed up brother Billy in Six Feet Under) who moves his teenage daughter from New York City to the ‘burbs in an attempt to provide her with a more protective, wholesome environment. The sharp, snarky pilot reminds me of the freshman season of Desperate Housewives which expertly satirized the faux perfection of the suburbs.
What shows are you eagerly waiting for?
Early Risers
The Eldest Boy asked The Spouse and me to drive him to school for 7 a.m. every day this week in order to get a little extra drum practice with his teacher leading up to the middle school band tryouts next week. (Yes, we’ve got a drummer boy in da house. And thank God he’s good because if he wasn’t, I’d be buying myself some pricey noise-canceling headphone . . . and Tylenol by the gross.)
Meanwhile The Youngest Boy, who also plays the drums/percussion instruments in the fifth grade band, has claimed that he too is supposed to arrive early to school for band practice as well. Only he’s not quite sure when exactly, which makes getting him where he’s supposed to be a tad, um, tricky. I think he simply guessed that he had to be there early yesterday, so I hauled my fanny out of bed early – The Spouse had already driven The Eldest Boy to school – to drop him off at school. That afternoon he reported that he and another kid just wound up sitting in the office until school started because the band teacher wasn’t there. His mistake or the teacher's I’m not quite sure. (Last year The Youngest Boy missed a bunch of band practices because he hadn’t been listening to the teacher when he announced the dates and times.)
All I know is that I was up, dressed and had applied make-up every morning this week well before I normally would have and if it was for no good reason, I'll be. I’ve sent The Youngest Boy's band teacher an e-mail asking him when I’m supposed to roll out of bed early and bring my fifth grader early. I’m still waiting to hear back.
Bronchitis Blows
Last week it was The Girl who not only came down with a vicious case of strep throat which caused her to miss three days of school (after not having been in school for a full week yet), but she also developed what we believe was Scarlet Fever. (Yeah, sounds Dickensonian doesn’t it, or something out of a Jane Austen novel? But when you’re already taking antibiotics, as The Girl was, this side effect of strep isn’t a big concern, or so the pediatrician's office told us.) She rebounded nicely and was well enough to play soccer on Saturday morning.
A few days later, The Youngest Boy started complaining of a sore throat and of feeling poorly – a strep test was negative though – although he never became sick enough to stay home from school or stop participating in activities.
Then there’s me, who catches everything that goes by as if I’m fly paper. Although I miraculously did not contract The Girl’s strep (despite the fact that I’d been snuggling with her the night before she was symptomatic), I have developed a sore throat and vicious cough, the kind that you feel deep within your chest, like an itch that you just can’t scratch. (I only get relief from said itch when I pound on my chest to loosen the phlegm. Sounds awesome, right? You know you’re jealous.) Plus my voice has already started going hoarse, as it does at least three times during the fall/winter season.
A quick check of my symptoms on various, illustrious medical web sites indicate I likely have bronchitis, something I get rather often, and the only treatment is really no treatment at all. Other than rest, which I can’t really get with 14 million kids’ activities going on.
So when I sound like I’m coughing up a lung at Curriculum Night at my fifth grade son’s school tonight, hopefully the school nurse won’t march on over and hand me a face mask as the other parents inch away from me.
I’ll be enjoying a blogging hiatus until next Monday, trying to spend some quality time with the Picket Fence Post family (provided the boys don’t send me to the hospital with one of their pranks).
Not to worry, though. I’ll be covertly taking notes on all our adventures. (And when all this family togetherness gets to be too much family togetherness, I'll retreat to a "Mommy timeout" with a book in my hand.)
In the meantime, enjoy my latest piece over on Modern Mom about how I'm okay with the fact that I often say, "No" to my kids when they want to do things like watch The Hangover or play Call of Duty, making me supremely uncool and unhip. But it's okay. I can take it.
As I eagerly anticipate the new episodes of both The Middle and Modern Family, as they will be Mother's Day themed (And what's Mother's Day if not an awesome opportunity to bring massive disappointment, chaos and burnt toast to mothers everywhere?), I learned that Modern Family's Facebook page is affording fans the opportunity to send personalized e-cards.
I pretended as though the Picket Fence Post kids were sending me an e-card featuring Claire Dunphy there were pre-written greetings from which you could choose.
(There are also e-cards featuring Gloria and Cam.)
Amy Chua wrote a book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It’s about how she started off her life as a mother of two girls as a very strict, “traditional Chinese” mother, like her parents before her. By the end of the book – in which Chua says she gets her “comeuppance” – Chua says she realized she wanted to “retreat . . . from the strict immigrant model” of raising her daughters, according to an interview she gave to the Wall Street Journal.
However the Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt of the first part of Chua’s book, when Chua was describing being fully bought into the strict, no messin’ around style of parenting that believes that children are strong and need to be pushed, not coddled or allowed to choose the direction of their lives. Outside of the context of the whole book -- and without knowing that Chua says she’s “not exactly the same person at the end of the book” -- Chua seems extremely domineering. Combine that excerpt with the headline (which Chua didn’t chose) “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” and you'll see why folks went nuts on the internet, calling Chua every variation on "Mommy Dearest" which they could come up with. Here are some excerpts which’ll give you a sense of why people were outraged by what ran in the Journal:
“Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
attend a sleepover
have a playdate
be in a school play
complain about not being in a school play
watch TV or play computer games
choose their own extracurricular activities
get any grade less than an A
not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
play any instrument other than the piano or violin
not play the piano or violin.”
Then there was the anecdote about Chua's then-7-year-old who was having trouble with a piano piece and, after the girl and her mom worked on it “nonstop for a week” and the daughter wanted to give up, Chua ordered her back to the piano:
“Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have ‘The Little White Donkey’ perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, ‘I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?’ I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.”
Jen Singer, of MommaSaid, has created a fabulous send-up video lampooning how super-involved and nutty the world of youth soccer has become. In the video, a mother of a 9-year-old boy wants to sign him up for soccer and another woman, whose son has been playing since pre-school, said it’s too late for the 9-year-old. When the first mom says she herself didn’t start playing soccer until she was 10 and played all the way through college, the second mom scoffed at that as representative of the “dark ages of youth soccer in America.”
My favorite part? When the first mom asks when practices are held and the second mom says matter-of-factly that they're on, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.” Sundays are reserved for games, of course.
Item #2: The Middle Parents Try to Take Back Their Lives
The Spouse and I loved the latest episode of The Middle in which the parents of three, Frankie and Mike, decided to spark a revolution and “take back” their house from the tyranny of their children after Frankie had raced around to three different fast food restaurants to get a separate meal for each kid, blowing off the parents desires. And her kids still weren't satisfied and wanted her, who worked all day, to run back out to different places and buy them a few more items. The parents had been caving on everything the kids asked of them because they thought that’s what they needed to do to be good parents.
And even though, after taking a strong stand that adults are in charge, NOT the children, Frankie and Mike capitulated in the end to their offspring, I think it’s worth having a substantive discussion about how American parents SHOULD aggressively strive to strike a balance between spending time with their children and attending to their needs, with the fact that the kids should NOT rule the roost and be catered to as though the parents are indentured servants at the children's beck and call.
Item #3: I Won’t Watch Dead/Dying Kid-Centric Fare
With the voluminous critical acclaim which has been heaped upon the film Rabbit Hole and its star Nicole Kidman, you’d think that a pop culture buff like yours truly would’ve put the film on my shortlist to see either in the theater or on DVD.
But no. Hell no.
Why? The film focuses on the aftermath of the death of a married couple’s 4-year-old son in a car accident. Kidman plays the mom in mourning while Aaron Eckhart plays the haunted father, their marriage fraying under the emotional gravity of what has happened.
My Pop Culture column this week over on Mommy Tracked is about how I tend to avoid, if I can help it, watching TV shows or movies in which kids are gravely ill and/or die. Why? Because I’m already an intense worrier – I think of myself as an in-recovery helicopter/safety crazed parent – who doesn’t need to start obsessing over the varied ways in which harm could befall my three children, nor do I need to try to put myself in the place of a grieving parent because that would prove painful. As Liz Lemon might say, "I don't want to go to there."
While writing a recent Pop Culture & Politics columns I gave a lot of thought to Christmas movies and TV specials, in particular, how moms are portrayed.
With the exception of Doris Walker, the strong divorced mom in Miracle on 34th Street, most of the moms who appear on the Christmas movies/specials the Picket Fence Post family owns on DVD, were mostly background figures, like Mary Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life (which the Picket Fence Post family just watched together), who was mostly just an accessory for George Bailey. Ditto for the moms in Elf, The Year Without a Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
I wrote at length about all this on my pop culture blog and declared that only one other mom, Mrs. Parker from A Christmas Story, really asserted herself, albeit in a passive aggressive manner. (Think the leg lamp’s “accidental” demise.)
Do you have a favorite mom character from a Christmas movie or TV special?
According to two of the three Picket Fence Post kids, I engaged in an act of parental abuse over the weekend: I made them watch It’s a Wonderful Life together, as a family.
The two boys had seen in with me two years ago, but they didn’t remember a great deal of it, so it was as though they were seeing it for the first time. As for The Girl, she was practically dragged into the family room to watch it with The Spouse and me because we thought she’d get something from it.
And what did they take away from one of my favorite movies?
The Eldest Boy – whom we joke can sometimes act like Alex P. Keaton -- declared that all of George Bailey's troubles were money-related. If George had money, none of this bad stuff would’ve happened, he reasoned. (Though I doubt it would stop Uncle Billy from losing cash.)
Meanwhile, the Youngest Boy and The Girl were enormously ticked off that Mr. Potter got away with keeping his ill-gotten gains and that nothing happened to him in the end for his evil behavior. (The Girl, in fact, used that very word, observing, “Oh, he’s just EVILLLL!” while she watched the scene where Uncle Billy was frantically searching for the missing $8,000 as Potter looked on from behind his office door at the bank.)
Later that day after watching the film The Youngest Boy told his hockey coach that the reason he was so tired when he took to the ice for practice was because, “My parents made me watch It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a four-hour movie.” (For the record, the film’s running time is 130 minutes.)
Thanksgiving TV Episodes from Gilmore Girls and Mad AboutYou 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?
While I watched the sophomore season Parenthood premiere last night, there were two storylines that felt really familiar to me. I mean really familiar. Uncomfortably familiar.
First, there was the story about a 6-year-old girl's questions to her parents about how babies are born, how eggs get fertilized and how babies get into moms' bellies. I could so relate to this, having just gone through a series of reproduction/sex discussions with The Eldest Boy and The Girl earlier this year, while The Spouse suddenly had an urgent domestic chore that he had to attend to in a room far away from where we were talking the minute he heard me ask the kids if they really wanted to know what "sex" was. This is never an easy topic to discuss with kids, makes parents mighty uncomfortable.
The mom on the TV show, Julia, though she was initially taken aback by her daughter Sydney's questions, she answered them accurately and calmly until the questions got a bit, um, well, detailed is a good word to use. At that point, Julia got too squeamish and decided to take the route her distinctly embarrassed husband Joel, who kept wanting to change the subject, took and discussed what kind of ice cream they might have after dinner.
Then there was the teaching-your-teenager-how-to-drive storyline, which brought me smack, dab back to my days as a teen when my parents were trying to teach me how to drive.
The scenes, which were also uncomfortable to watch, also convinced me -- after watching the mom on Parenthood make her daughter completely paranoid about the horrid things that could befall teenage drivers, literally grab her daughter's leg, shout at her and exaggerate the magnitude of the mishap with the side-view mirror -- that I am not going to be the one to teach my kids how to drive. I'm afraid I'll be doing that sharp, loud, sucking in your breath thing that moms are apt to do from time to time (my mom used to do that, a lot), or that my fear about them learning how to drive will cause me to overreact to things to which I shouldn't overreact.
Previews promise more meaty parenting material in upcoming episodes. I hope they don't disappoint.
Item #1: Restaurant Tells Screaming Kids to Get Out
A North Carolina restaurant owner has sparked a hearty dialog online by posting this simple sign in its front window, “Screaming children will not be tolerated.”
A Babble blogger called the "no screaming kids" policy a “total joke,” writing: “I don’t condone bad behavior in public, but we all know even the most well-behaved children are sometimes more boisterous than we’d like them to be. That doesn’t mean families should be forced to stay home.”
A writer on Slate said while she doesn’t tolerate “screaming by my children at home, let alone in public,” she thinks the sign is overly hostile: “It’s an admonishment, an advance assumption that those children will scream. It creates an immediate atmosphere of hostility toward families, and it is, in itself, rude.”
In her defense, restaurant owner Brenda Armes told her local TV station that she wants to give her customers a pleasant dining experience saying, “We want to attract the type of people that come in knowing they aren’t going to have to sit behind a table with a bunch of screaming children.”
In the TV interview, Armes added that she just wants parents to take their children outside if the kids start to scream. The sign notwithstanding, that’s not an unreasonable policy . . . speaking as someone who has, in the past, hastily asked the waiter to pack up my food in a To Go bag while I hustled my screaming toddlers out to the car and The Spouse paid the bill.
Do you think the restaurant owner went overboard or is sending a negative message to parents?
Item #2: Showtime's Dysfunctional Moms
Back in March, The Wall Street Journal ran a feature story saying that Showtime was planning to build on the success of their pot-dealing suburban mom show Weeds and was promoting more shows featuring strong, dysfunctional female characters.
From Weeds’ Nancy Botwin, who has taken her children on the run along with her former brother-in-law, and Nurse Jackie’s unfaithful, drug-addicted nurse married mom of two, to The Big C’s married high school teacher mom whose cancer diagnosis (which she’s kept secret from her family) has caused her to upend her life, Showtime is really delivering on the dysfunctional mom front, a subject to which I dedicated my recent pop culture column.
Item #3: Sports Parents Crying Uncle
And I thought I was the only one who feels overwhelmed by the intensity and time suck that has become youth sports. Just this Saturday, my three kids have four games in four different towns, starting at a pre-dawn hour, with the last one occurring smack dab in the middle of dinner hour. The whole day will feature The Spouse and I racing around to four different places for soccer and hockey games. (My 9-year-old son has TWO games on Saturday in different locations.) I've already informed my daughter's coach that The Girl will miss her Sunday afternoon soccer practice because we’re going to be belatedly celebrating Rosh Hashanah with family -- heresy, I know -- however we have arranged for The Youngest Boy to get transportation to and from his soccer practice Sunday morning while The Spouse and I are preparing for our big family celebration (for which we're missing church, FYI, because Saturday was so packed).
This schedule makes me crazy because I oftentimes feel like sports can take over family life, even when I limit each child to one sport per season and don't go to "extra" tournaments and competitions. Well the local CBS station here in Boston just featured a mom of three who decided she’d had enough of her sons’ insane sports schedules and is taking their participation down a notch.
In the segment – link here – the mom talked about the scheduling nightmare that is having three children play sports at far-flung locations and the negative fallout she has received from her parenting peers when they learned that she pulled her kids off of travel teams and stopped making a year-long commitment to specific sports. She just reduced their involvement, not eliminating it altogether, mind you.
“Experts in youth sports have found a lot of youth burnout among over-scheduled child-athletes, and now there is burnout among parents as well,” WBZ reporter Paula Ebben wrote on her blog.
As the new fall sports seasons commence, what do you think about this issue? Can sports – particularly when it comes to travel teams – spiral out of control? How do you handle it?
The Spouse kindly agreed to accompany me to the movies last week where I dragged him to see The Kids are All Right, the new Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo flick.
By the time we left the theater, we were convinced that the whole point of the film was this: Regardless of the fact that the main couple was comprised of two women who had raised two children, ages 15 and 18 (they each got pregnant with donor sperm from the same guy), their gender didn’t really matter all that much. What DID matter most was the fact that raising children changed their relationship, challenged it and sometimes obscured the romantic partners’ ability to see one another as they really are, not simply a collection of assorted weaknesses and flaws that can prove irritating.
In my pop culture column this week I wrote about the commonalities I felt I had with the film’s characters, saying, “. . . I felt as though I was observing some of the similar challenges facing my marriage to my husband being played out on the silver screen, witnessing the inevitable scars child-rearing, and life in general, can cause to a relationship.”
