What does a Father look like?
When I was little and kids got together to play House, no one wanted to be The Dad because all he did was go to work and then come back later. That was all their life experience allowed. When I was very little, I remember being angry with my father for going to work in the summer. I thought, if it was summer vacation, everyone would stay home. I thought he must actively not want to be with us.
I guess I honestly didn’t know what a dad was for. He went to work, sometimes for several days at a time. He came home, he ate, he slept, he read detective novels. Occasionally he drove the car on family vacations. If he was taking a nap you did not wake him up. How different that was from the life of Mother.
A father was a thing apart.
There weren’t a lot of involved or fully fleshed-out fathers on cartoon shows or television shows that we watched back in the day. George Jetson? Fred Flintstone? Popular culture reflected the attitude that the home was the mother’s domain. Perhaps dad taught his son how to play catch or go fishing. I can’t remember ever seeing anything on television or in a movie that made me wish I had a dad like that, different than the one I had.
I don’t mean to suggest that children learn what parents are by watching television. But I do think television reflects the current views. Compare The Jetsons and The Flintstones to Peppa Pig’s family, or Bluey’s. Much of the better children’s programming of today has evolved through a greater understanding of early childhood development.
Some of the worst shows still dole out the same tired old tropes: dad can’t cook or take care of babies, mother is vain or worried about what the neighbors think. Parents are too self-absorbed to pay attention to the antics of their offspring. Children think parents are likeable fools to be gotten around.
Can you think of better examples of fatherhood on television and in movies geared towards children today? I think there are more than there used to be. What about when you were growing up? Were there tv or cartoon dads that appealed to you? Did you ever see your kind of family dynamics reflected in television or movies?
Did you even want to? Or was television the escape from your kind of family that you found restful, even a relief?
What does a Father look like?
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