Sitcom Fail: Why Doing Everything For Your Kids Is Not a Good Idea. Or Funny.
Order the pineapple pizza if that's what you like (even if the kids don't)
You know what’s funny? It’s not most sitcoms (ba-da-bum!). What’s funny is that after the last time I wrote about the CBS TV sitcom “The Middle,” my friend Sally wrote to agree with me, and also to wonder how it was that I even managed to sit down for an 8pm show. Sally and I both have young children, and yes, watching a show that starts at 8, which is the boys’ basic bedtime, is tough (and no, we don’t have a DVR. Yet. It’s on my list. Thanks in advance for that suggestion).
But it’s not impossible. And that small effort is part of a larger determination to not let my life, or my husband’s, be run over by small feet and sticky fingers.
And that brings me to my report on last week’s episode of “The Middle,” which totally let me down. I was so high on the Hecks a few weeks back, when Mike, the dad, stepped up to the plate and told another dad that, in fact, it was his job to tell his mean tween daughter that her manipulations and deceit were bad form. It would have been so typical-sitcom if he’d laughed it off, but he didn’t; he took the other guy to task. Go Mike, I thought.
But the other night, Mike and Frankie Heck dropped the ball. I won’t belabor the recap, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m a TV junkie (as if) or obsessed with this particular show in a way that would be unseemly (I mean it’s not HBO or anything!). But here’s what happened: the Heck parents realized that they were doing way too much for their three kids, at the expense of their own comfort and pleasure. They only ever ordered the kind of pizza the kids liked, they ran around on their lunch hours getting supplies for school projects, they lived without first-rights access to their own TV remote, for heaven’s sake! So they decided to take back their house and their lives, getting pizza with pineapples and watching what they wanted, kids be damned.
It was way over the top, natch, especially when Frankie rid the family room of any trace of her children and refused to drive her youngest to the library. And also naturally, they gave up soon enough, specifically when they realized that not driving their bookworm kid to the library meant he was spending too much time online, and had already made plans to meet in the park “a guy he was chatting with online.” Uh, oh. Bad parents. Bad!
It was funny, sure, a little bit. But when Frankie, the mom, after capitulating once again, tells a random mom with a baby that she should start now to not give her baby every little thing he ask for, to not subsume herself in his needs (“It’s too late for me, but you can do it!”), I felt so… let down.
She missed the point, the show missed the point. You can drive your son to the library and make a point of buying the polka-dot umbrella for your daughter’s dance routine without giving up your own life. Mike and Frankie compel their eldest to babysit one night so they can go to see a cheesy 80s cover band at a local bar mid-week. And why shouldn’t they? Why is the choice — bear with me, I’m talking now about all of us in the real world now, not just these fictional TV people — between doing everything for our kids and never doing anything for our kids?
Which brings me back to my friend Sally and the modern-day wonder of my husband and me sitting down at 8pm every so often because, damn it, we want to watch a show. We get the bath/books/bed routine done ahead of time, and shoo the little darlings off to their beds by 7:59. The little guy usually falls asleep pretty soon after, and I don’t care if the older guy stays up puttering in his room for a while (what he actually does in there is the subject of another post; when I check in later I try to piece his routine together with clues like an overturned piggy bank, scribbled notes taped to the walls, and which books are face-down on the floor around his bed), as long as he’s not in my hair. Hey kid, after bedtime, unless you’re sick, I’m clocked out (as much as parents ever clock out).
At 8pm, the remote is mine. Minus the remote, which hadn’t been invented yet, this is how my parents rolled. They did an awful lot for us — you know, like paying the mortgage on time, feeding and clothing us, and extras like driving us to dance lessons and dates and taking us to really high-class resorts in the Catskills with actual running water and ice cream for dessert. But their parental self-sacrifice did not include cooking to order for us or doing our homework (though my dad was aces at helping with big projects, like the shampoo he helped my sister make for a science fair, or the Inca terrace-farming project he all but created for me).
Listen, I’ll certainly order half the pizza plain, but the rest is going to have something totally icky on it, like eggplant.
January 7, 2011 @ 4:08 pm
Denise, I am so with you on this. My kids are near grown now, but when all three were babies, I established solid routines — for their sake as well as my sanity. Dinner, bath, story, bed. No ifs ands or buts. I cannot believe when I hear parents complain that their young ones stay up until all hours of the night, because, well, they just want to stay up and the adults don’t know how to get them into bed. Same for parents who sit every day with their children and do their homework with them. And for parents who cook three different meals for dinner, one for each child, because they don’t like what the adults are having. What the…? In these situations, it’s the kids who are in charge of the household, not the parents. Who does that benefit?
January 7, 2011 @ 5:47 pm
When I was pregnant with my first, I read this somewhere and it stuck with me: A child should be a welcome addition to your home, not the centre of it. I think kids grow up happier and healthier when parents do strike the balance of being there for them, doing lots for them, but not revolving their lives around them. We had friends whose 2 year old had equal computer rights to her father. What?? I pull rank for the computer any time I like, although if my child is doing homework and i want to check facebook, I obviously let them finish. I want my kids to learn perspective, selflessness, and how to think of others, not just themselves.
January 7, 2011 @ 5:56 pm
Love this post. This was one of my biggest fears about becoming a parent–waking up one day and realizing that the rugrats had comandeered the castle. At just 7 months old, my daughter is not yet in any position to be asserting dominance (she’s still mastering head control and is a ways off from pizza, pineapple or otherwise), but this post was a nice reminder that a) the grown-ups are in charge and b) (as Claudia points out) this is as it should be. Needing some grown-up, “clocked-out” time does not make one a bad, selfish mommy.
January 8, 2011 @ 11:50 am
Amen! As parents, we’re here to teach our children to do for themselves.
January 10, 2011 @ 7:34 pm
I felt the same way about that episode. My husband and I are “harder” on our kids than most of our friends are on theirs. So our friends will tell us that we are “mean” and that our kids “need a break” once in awhile. They have a bedtime. Their television viewing is restricted. They are responsible for their toys. They even have chores (*gasp*), at ages 7 and 4. I do not feel that we are being unreasonable or cruel. I like to think that we are setting them up for the real world, where there is very little that is all or nothing. My husband’s parents did EVERYTHING for him, and he resents them for it now. He didn’t even know how to do laundry when he was 20 years old (which was when we met) because his mother was still doing it for him, even though he lived on his own. Doing everything for your children is doing everyone in the household a huge disservice.
January 10, 2011 @ 8:53 pm
Awesome, awesome post!
January 17, 2011 @ 8:00 pm
Claudia, I have those friends! Bless her heart, my friend makes separate to-order meals for each of her kids. Not that they are picky eaters: they eat sushi – the raw kind. But they have never been expected to eat what their parents are eating.
As far as sitcoms, I watched the first two episodes of “Modern Family” and sent it back to the library. I couldn’t stand that the dad (with three kids) was such an idiot. If he’s so dumb and incompetent, why did she marry him? I would like to see some intelligent, strong fathers portrayed. They do exist.
February 11, 2011 @ 10:37 am
Hi, I just discovered your blog and I love this post! Can I get an “AMEN”?
February 11, 2011 @ 11:53 am
Danielle,
Amen!
Thanks for reading and chiming in, and I hope to “see” you again.
Denise, a.k.a. Mean Mommy