Okay, listen up, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and Sprout.
I’m gonna need you to come up with some more realistic parent types for your
shows because Caillou’s milk toast mom and pop and Olivia’s ever-sighing,
ever-patient fore-pigs simply aren’t cutting it.
Do you remember watching Roseanne
growing up? That shit was real. When Roseanne or Dan flew off the handle
yelling at Darleen for being lazy or DJ for just being DJ, you could relate
because your own parents had gotten to that place before…the
I-can’t-take-it-anymore place. And as
much as they loved you and adored you and relished your every joy, they would
gladly hand you over to the next gypsy circus that came along.
In those moments of sitcom gold, your childhood self would
experience a Vietnam-style flashback to the moment when you were caught with a
half-eaten, week-old ham sandwich molding under your bed or a note from the
teacher reporting your use of a few colorful words to describe the reading
assignment. You shivered; then you laughed because, this time, it wasn’t
happening to you.
The other day, Suttie was watching some kill-me-now kid’s
show on one of your networks, and the main kiddie character didn’t want to take
a bath despite repeated pleas from his parents (fyi, the top rule in the O’Neal
house: mom and dad don’t beg. We tell, they do. It’s like military school, but
the food isn’t as good). After numerous
attempts to get little Sid or Max or Zeke (they all blur together after a
while) to go happily to the tub, Mom and Dad Pushover suggested that they all
pretend that they’re astronauts and fly their imaginary space ships to the bath,
laughing all the way.
And that’s when I ripped the TV off the wall and yelled,
“Awwww…hellllllll no!” (This is obviously an exaggeration; my husband would
kill me if I made us buy a new TV right now.)
But it did make me think about how bad these cartoon pricks
were making me look. Here they were glossing over their child’s blatant
disregard for the rules and turning his outright refusal into a fun family
activity to create some kind of lame-ass memory. In the immortal words of Sweet
Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
This is how a similar situation goes down at our house. The
first warning is slow and direct, “Suttie, it’s bath time.”
The second warning comes out a little less clear as I try to
think calming thoughts to fight the growing cloud of rage that blinds my sense
of reason. It tends to give my speech a certain Foghorn Leghorn quality: “Lookit
here, I said…I said it’s bath time now.”
By the third and final warning, I’ve degenerated to a
clenched-toothed demonic bellow only rivaled by Linda Blair mid-exorcism, “It’s
bath time, son. Get in the damn tub!”
Or…if it’s been an
especially trying day, I just point silently to the stairs. Suttie will try to
say something, either in defense or as a distraction, and I’ll simply shake my
head and point. After two or three attempts and some hard staring on my part,
he’ll take the hint and go…painfully, because there is nothing so tragic to a
four year old as not saying something that he’s made up his mind to say.
So until shows like Sid
the Science Kid and Gaspard and Lisa
start writing some real at-home scenarios involving belts and spirit-breaking,
we’ll be watching re-runs of Married with
Children and Dance Moms as a
gentle reminder to our kids that it really could be worse…much, much worse.
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