Can We Have Some Normal Movie Parents?
If I'm honest, when I watch parents on screen, it's with a mix of eye-rolling and aspiration. You?
I took my kids to see IF on a rainy Sunday last weekend. It’s a really wonderful movie, particularly if you enjoy sobbing within the first 5 and final 20 minutes of a movie geared toward kids. And if you enjoy watching movies featuring Ryan Reynolds, or as my kids refer to him, “the Free Guy”. Which I do.
Anyway, my kids loved the movie.
I enjoyed the movie, but it also fell into a familiar trope of the perfect parent and that irritated me.
This trope is a fairly common one across multiple genres. You can find them in movies, tv shows, and books — pretty much anything that can tell a story about parenthood or childhood, this trope exists loudly and proudly.
To be clear, this isn’t about what it means to be a good mom or a perfect mom and the conversations that are happening about this problematic idea on and off social media or in the broader culture; this is about how parents are depicted in narrative storytelling. I’m talking about the parents we see portrayed on the big and small screen when we watch with our kids. The parents featured in the books we read to our kids before they go to bed at night and sometimes even in the books we read to ourselves.
The perfect parent trope is demonstrated by a few basic characteristics.
First, the parents appear to utterly delight in being parents every single second of every single day. They adore their kids and it shows. They live to parent and they love their lives. They are always smiling, often gazing with absolute affection at their offspring, as though their children can do no wrong.
Second, they play along with every whim and wild hair their child has. They ask their kids to tell them stories and sit transfixed when their kids tell them those stories. When their kids come up with silly games to play, they happily play along with them. These parents are exceptional at make-believe and all things imagination. They behave as though they have all of the time in the world to sit and play or create or dance or explore or talk with their kids. There is an air of the magical about them — not that they are magical beings, but that they create magic in the way they engage with their children.
Third, they never yell at their kids. They occasionally might seem mildly irritated but their response is often a knowing smirk and a gentle reprimand, threaded with a little humor. But they’re never really angry, never overstimulated, never overwhelmed, never at their limit with their children. They never complain about how hard parenting can be, either.
The trope of the perfect parent was on display throughout the movie IF, starting with the opening montage. A young girl narrates over a medley of clips featuring 2 adoring parents and their daughter (our narrator, several years younger). The clips are jumbled together, but clearly from a distinct year or 2 in time for the family. There are videos of them dressed up as dragons and a witch for Halloween, having a tea party, doing magic tricks, and cuddling on the couch.
There’s a moment in which mother and daughter are in young girl’s bedroom that looks like an actual dream, with silver and blue ornaments dangling from the ceiling and decorations on every inch of wall space. The clips themselves have no sound but you can feel the love and the happiness pouring out from the screen. There’s a lot of glitter, everyday moments that read like big adventures, and so much joy.1
Later, we meet our young narrator Bea in the present day. She’s at the hospital with her dad (her hot dad, John Krasinski), who is there for heart surgery of some kind. He’s silly with her and the nurses, doing a smooth and playful dance routine with his IV pole, which he’s named Harriet.
Even though the moment is laced with sadness, there’s this bubbly undercurrent of ridiculousness and sweetness. He’s just a dad cracking jokes because he doesn’t want his daughter to be afraid and also because it’s clearly in his character’s nature. We’re meant to believe this is how he approaches life — with a little slapstick humor and a hefty dose of joie de vivre.
My husband does a little bit of this, actually. He has a habit of answering people who ask him how he’s doing with, “feeling fine like cherry wine,” which usually causes them to raise an eyebrow or smile or even laugh. Which is always his goal.
But the perfect parents in movies and tv shows and books do this sort of thing all of the time. And specifically with their kids more than total strangers.
If I’m honest, when I watch these parents onscreen, it’s with a mix of eye-rolling and aspiration.
What parent can actually be like this, I ask myself.
And shortly after, “How can I be like this parent?”
On the way home from the movie IF, my kids were pretending that the yellow lines on the asphalt of the parking lot were lava. If someone accidentally stepped on a yellow line, the whole parking lot would become lava. Ordinarily, I’d let them play and just take a few moments to breathe but on this day, I joined in screaming, “oh no, I stepped on LAVAAAAAA. Run for your lives.” And they all hopped on the shopping cart as I raced to the automatic door at the grocery store. It was fun. They were so delighted. And I was over it as soon as I’d done it.
Apparently, I am not a member of the perfect parent club.
But I kept trying anyway when we had to stop at another store on the way home.
The truth is, that kind of play is exhausting. At least for me.
Kids love it. Thrive on it. And it’s so important for their growth and development.
Parents (or at least most of the parents I know) struggle with it, in part because we’ve grown out of it. Not necessarily the sense of play or the desire to have fun, but the energy required for it.
And being “on” all of the time is hard, too, which feels like the default setting for “perfect parents.” They’re always up for fun and play and adventures. Making dinner be damned.
Part of the problem is that these movies and tv shows are created primarily for kids. So both the kids and parents are often depicted as ideal.
We want our pop culture kids to be adorable, quirky little humans and their adults to be calm and indulgent, with some quirkiness of their own.
The kids are whimsical, creative, imaginative, and kind. We rarely, if ever, see them screeching at the top of their lungs because there’s a small rock in their shoe and even after you take it out, they refuse to put the shoe back on — like my kid did when we went on a brief hike earlier this week.
The parents are patient, silly, generous, and compassionate. They don’t angry-whisper at their kid in public like I did, when my child refused to put her shoe back on and started pounding her fists into my body, even as I was trying to help her. And they definitely don’t let out a frustrated sigh/scream/grunt in front a group of other adults when that same child demanded I carry her because she wouldn’t put her shoe on. And they absolutely wouldn’t have refused to carry her, like I did, instead insisting she put her damn shoe back on. The perfect movie/tv parents would have made a silly game out of it, sort of like Dr. Becky is always suggesting we parents do.
The other problem is simply that real, day-to-day parenting is so much more complex than what you’re going to see in a tv show or movie geared towards kids.
We don’t typically see parents arguing with their kids about doing their chores or brushing their teeth. We don’t see them refusing to pick up their dirty clothes from the floor and put them in the laundry. We don’t see them leaving dirty plates, ketchup, empty pretzel bags on the table and catching attitude when we remind them they need to clear it. We don’t see the tantrums, like the one my son threw this morning when I told him he couldn’t just snack intermittently while playing MarioKart with his sisters (which would damage the controllers and create a mess I’d end up cleaning later).
What we tend to see in tv and movies is the highlights reel. The beautiful moments between parents and kid(s), rather than the mundane moments. Movies and tv shows give us a small, artificial window into the lives of characters, not people. We see the story that screenwriters and directors want to tell about childhood and kids and their parents — not all that different from content creators telling the stories of their lives in a curated fashion on social media.
And like social media, it’s aspirational.
Of course I want to be like the dad in Orion and the Dark, which we watched 2 months ago, who makes up an epic bedtime story in order to help his daughter feel less afraid at night. Instead, I’m the mom who is so bone-tired at night and just wants her kids to go the fuck to sleep, that the best I can do is read a few books and lie in the dark with them, holding their hands or scratching their backs. And trying not to be grouchy about it.
Of course I want to be like the parents in Easy A, who have a comfortable relationship with Olive, their teenage daughter, which feels like it’s built on mutual respect. They genuinely seem to love being around one another as a family and share easy, hilarious banter. Instead, I’m the mom who struggles with parenting her deeply anxious pre-teen daughter and it’s anything but easy.
Of course I want to be like the parents in Bluey, down to play games that their kids make up like feather wand or magic xylophone or hotel or keepy uppy. And in fact, I actually have.
But playing feather wand in the grocery store gets old really fast. And when I tried playing magic asparagus at dinner, it didn’t result in my children actually eating their asparagus, which was annoying. Also, sometimes I just want to get through dinner, not lengthen it.
Mostly, I just don’t have the energy or bandwidth for Bluey games. Or I can only sustain it for a few minutes while my kids want to play for an entire hour.
However, as one of my friends frequently reminds me, Bandit and Chili only really play with their kids for 5 minutes or so at any given time. That’s all we see. And to the credit of the creators of Bluey, they do a decent job of showing the balance of the challenges of parenting alongside the whimsy of kids and their brilliant imaginations.
I think that’s why the show is so beloved.
I just wish I could enjoy my parenting as much as tv/movie parents appear to.
I would love to feel as relaxed in my parenting as these tv/movie parents seem to be.
And I also wish that more tv/movie parents screwed up more visibly or yell on occasion. Not just to soothe my own anxiety about how I parent, but because I also think that when we don’t see parents screw up we also don’t have the opportunity to watch them repair.
These perfect parents in movies and tv shows don’t always show us all of their humanity, just the slice that is appealing and enviable.
I’m sure lots of parents don’t really pay attention to or compare themselves to actors playing parents on tv or in a movie. And I don’t think that kids movies or tv shows are created expressly with the intent of shaming parents for not being as awesome as what they see on the screen.
On the other hand, I wish I could just enjoy movies and tv shows for what they are instead of comparing myself to the parents in the story. I know the comparing myself to other parents, real or fictional, is mostly on me. So that’s work I have to do. It’s also a tough one to avoid when you just want to do right by your kids but always feel like you’re getting it wrong.
Last night we watched IF on the smaller screen because my kids really wanted to see it again (I told you, they loved it) and they conned me into buying it.
I let them build a fort and even made popcorn.
I saw it with slightly different eyes, this time.
I saw that opening montage as what it was: a brief moment filled with the happy memories, not the hard ones. Did it still make me feel jealous for their joy and aspirational to their parenting? A little. But I also could see me as a parent in some of it. Just on a smaller, less cinematic scale.
I realized that the dad was in a shitty position and was just trying to anchor into joy and laughter for self-preservation.
There’s a moment in the film, in that same scene with Harriet the dancing IV pole, in which Bea says to her dad, “you know, you don’t need to act like that. Not every moment is life has to be funny.”
Her dad responds, “That doesn’t mean you stop trying.”
They’re both right on this one, honestly. But I think I’d rather aim for the laughter, too.
And yesterday, I did.
Even though we were inside all day, crammed into our tiny cabin, we had some silly moments together. I didn’t play any Bluey-inspired kid games with them. They mostly played MarioKart while I tried to tune out the noise and finish this essay.
I actually tried to emulate the dad in IF (not yet knowing we’d be watching the movie again that night), going for goofiness and easy laughs. And it worked. Right up until my 4 year old tore right through all of my best intentions and got on the very last nerve that was holding it all together.
So mostly a win?
It’s hard to say, because I never get a chance to see what happens when those movie/tv parents screw up spectacularly like I do, pretty much on a daily basis.
I also know that I am not a perfect parent. My life isn’t scripted. The best I can do is simply parent them the best way I can, not the best way Bluey’s parents can or the way the dad in IF can or any other parents I admire on screen — even if it means I mess up multiple times in the same day.
For now, I’ll stick with win.
It’s important to note that the mom in IF is sick. In the opening montage, there are also scenes of mom in a hospital bed reading to her daughter and mom wearing colorful scarves on her head. Another interpretation of the opening montage is that the parents know mom is sick and might not survive. So they are making as many fun memories as they can in case the worst happens. I totally get this. I’d like to think I’d act the same way if I was in that situation. So there are certainly 2 ways to read this. I just think it also feeds into the perfect parent trope because we’re not shown any other examples of their parenting, mostly because it would detract from the actual story.
I've complained about this before...that the way Hollywood portrays parents seems to have had an impact on parenting. Like we all subconsciously think this portrayal is normal/aspirational.
Anyway, have you seen the Aussie series Heartbreak High on Netflix? I loved how Amerie's mother is portrayed in that series. She doesn't mess around.
Oh my gosh this is so true and relatable. Isn’t it funny that movies geared towards kids show perfect parents and movies geared towards adults show depressed parents????