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Television dads seem to be a dying breed
By Carl Heintze
There are times when I think my family sees me as Mr. Toad.
You remember Mr. Toad. He was a character in "Wind in the Willows."
Mr. Toad was always inventing new and strange adventures, almost all of which ended in minor disaster: driving what he called a "motorcar" with reckless abandon, taking an unfortunate trip on the river in a boat and so on.
In between adventures Mr. Toad sat benignly in his house, his hands, er, paws, er, legs draped over his ample middle, blinking his large eyes, grunting, burping or croaking as he saw fit.
This somewhat unflattering picture sometimes seems to me the way my family considers me as I drift on beyond my middle years, cast as a somewhat harmless and eccentric sort of buffoon. Everyone is nice to the old boy. They tolerate him, but they don't pay him much attention.
This gradual shift in attitude on the part of my wife and children is somewhat in keeping with the shift that's taken place in fatherdom in the last half century, the time which I spent rearing and weaning my kids.
The time of fatherhood started about the time of the now almost forgotten television series, "Father Knows Best."
In "Father Knows Best" Father in the person of Robert Young came home after work impeccably dressed in a suit and tie. He doffed the coat, but kept the tie and put on a sweater, usually in the first scene or two of the current episode. This meant he was home and holding court. Then he settled various family debates, smiling all the while.
Mother, Jane Wyatt, who I sometimes wished had been my mother, didn't leave home all day long apparently and sparred with her three children, a boy and two girls, leaving Father to sort it all out when he got off work.
"Father Knows Best" lasted for several years. but somehow never did well on reruns, in part because even as it was being shown, fatherhood in America had begun to change.
Along came the hippie-Vietnam revolt. All parents were bad, fathers especially. Father's role got reversed. He became the subject of derision, the sort of do-do that Bill Cosby portrayed, always being outsmarted by either his children or his wife.
He seldom got credit for wisdom or knowledge and he especially was outfoxed by his youngest child, who was less innocent than crafty.
These days fatherhood is sort of nowhere in the media. Few fathers appear as main characters in television sit-coms. Frasier's father, for instance, a guy I like to think is my age, although actually I think he is younger, grumps around. Frasier pays him little attention and not much respect.
Nor are there many other father figures about in television. Most TV sitcoms are young, sexually starved couples who are without children, or with small children. They are programs obviously aimed at that mythical group of viewers who are somewhere between Generation X and the Baby Boomers.
Oddly enough, Baby Boomers do have children and are raising them, but producers of television shows apparently do not find this grist for the television mill. "Mad About You," for example, soon lost its audience and shut down after Paul became a father. It was apparently that becoming a father, turned out not to be funny after it actually happened.
And there is even less humor in contemplating grandfathers, the class in which I now find myself. The Beverly Hillbillys had grandparents who were not only stupid (that was what made them funny), but had stupid children, too, who I always thought were even less funny.
So the popular culture, that is to say, television has gone through a whole revolution so far as Dad is concerned. Dad doesn't know best, Dad doesn't know much of anything. Dad may not even be around.
And that's literally true, too. The large number of single parent families, most of them headed by a woman, don't have even a benign old Mr. Toad nodding in the corner, croaking and planning new mad cap adventures. If there are nay adventures at all, they are invented by Mom, who in situation comedy after situation comedy has become something of a wonder woman.
Where that leaves us dads of the old school I'm not sure. It would be nice to think we were something a little like Robert Young, always smiling, always there, always with a clear solution to the currentproblem. It would be nice, but it's probably not true.
The world has moved on since the 1950s in America and we have had to move on with it.
But maybe we need to reconsider Dad even if he is a kind of Mr. Toad.
Maybe we need to invent some new kind of father. Maybe we will.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
