Happy Father's Day
Published Sunday, June 20, 1999
From 'Dad knows best' to 'Dad's a loser' in 50 years
David Peterson / Star Tribune
Here's a Father's Day challenge:
Think about the TV dads in the early years of the medium. Think about Ward Cleaver on "Leave it to Beaver" or Steve Douglas, the character Fred MacMurray played on "My Three Sons." Now try to plug those dads into the following plots from a contemporary sitcom:
The men take a camping trip and accidentally kill an endangered whooping crane.
Dad's antismoking lesson leads to his whole family becoming addicted to nicotine.
Dad accidentally uses crack cocaine for fish bait, getting fish hooked.
The family guy on the screen in your living room has changed. And some people think that's a problem for our society.
"Kids are most affected by what they see in their own everyday lives," said Michael Obsatz, a family counselor and Macalester College sociologist. "But it just has to affect them to watch a bunch of bumbling, idiot fathers on TV."
A study of the prime-time offerings of the five major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and WB) has found that only five programs -- an average of one per network, all week long -- portray a father as competent and involved with his family.
The Maryland-based National Fatherhood Initiative found that viewers who turn on their sets at random -- even early in the evening, when the greatest number of children watch -- are 15 times more likely to find a show where "sex between unmarried adults is the recurrent and central theme than a show where responsible fatherhood is."
Some experts tell us that television has always been ambivalent about dads. But others grumble that "Father Knows Best" has turned into "Father Knows Nothing."
Fifties sitcom dads had their comic foibles, said Roxy Foster, executive director of the Minnesota Parenting Association, "but Ward Cleaver never blew up the neighbor's house. What are kids these days learning from this powerful medium about what it is to be a father?"
Analyses of all the male and female images kids see on TV -- including commercials, MTV and other kinds of programming -- have found that men are much more likely than women to be depicted in the kinds of ways that kids find admirable: hip, active, independent, driving fast cars, making decisions.
The latest study adds to that picture by suggesting that, on prime-time shows, those men who are the sharpest human beings are least likely to spend time with children, while those who do tend to their families -- such as Homer Simpson -- tend to be goofballs.
"I don't get it," said Mark Abraham, of Roseville, who dropped out of a career with the Billy Graham organization, and later Habitat for Humanity, to rear two children while his wife works as a physician. "It doesn't reflect any reality that I'm aware of."
Indeed, some experts note that '90s goofball TV dads arrive on the scene even as real '90s dads are probably more nurturing and more involved with their children than any of their predecessors -- moreso, certainly, than real '50s dads, who wouldn't have dreamed of helping with childbirth or bathing infants.
Abraham, 42, said that one reason he made the choice he did was that his own dad, a New Jersey businessman, was a busy man who didn't have the kind of relationship with him that he'd like to have with his own kids, Eric, 4, and Nicole, 9 months.
Asked whether he likes to watch "The Simpsons," Eric replied: "That's bad." His dad laughed and explained, "It's not on our list."
Unsure about dads
Is being a father a really manly, masculine thing to do? Can men do it? Or are they bound to mess it up? In one way or another, experts say, these questions have been reflected in TV dads since the first big clunky sets entered the American living room.
"As a culture, we are ambivalent about fathers," said Scott Coltrane, a University of California-Riverside sociologist. "And our public imagery about their competence and connection to children reflects this ambivalence."
The rude, self-centered, ineffectual fathers in shows such as "Married with Children," "Home Improvement" and the animated "The Simpsons," TV historians note, are the descendants of the inept or downright nasty husbands and fathers depicted in such series as "The Honeymooners" (1955-56), "The Flintstones" (1960-66) or "All in the Family" (1971-83).
In a parallel stream, meanwhile, a good guy such as the one Bill Cosby played on "The Cosby Show" (1984-92) has his own line of predecessors dating to "The Brady Bunch" in the '70s and "My Three Sons" in the '60s . These have tended to be middle-class fathers, sociologists note, while the dummies tend to come from the working class.
Though some shows with role-model dads have been popular, the reality for TV networks is that viewers love to watch fallible human beings -- of both sexes -- in comedies. The only programs with fathers that rank among the top 20 for this past season -- "Home Improvement" and "Everybody Loves Raymond" -- feature fathers with sizable flaws. The Fatherhood Initiative ranks them about on par with Homer Simpson as role models. Tim Allen's character on "Home Improvement," for instance, is a charming klutz whose wife is described in the network's promotional literature as the one who "holds the house together" -- a not-uncommon role for long-suffering TV wives.
Other caveats
That's not to say that television is an utter wasteland when it comes to portraying fathers. Coltrane said today's eagerness to avoid stereotyping women as mothers means that viewers are far more likely to see men in TV commercials "cradling a newborn or diapering a toddler" -- powerful, memorable images that have helped further our sense of the father in today's society.
Nor are fathers the only ones with a gripe about their image. The angelic mothers of early television were criticized by feminists at the time as "household appliances," while the Lucy Ricardos, Edith Bunkers and Roseanne Conners have taken heavy fire over the years from feminists and traditionalists alike for the image they create of moms. As Lisa Simpson puts it on one episode of "The Simpsons," when psychological vocational testing shows she's a great candidate for stay-at-home mom:
"A homemaker! I might as well be dead!"
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