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How Sitcoms Make Me Feel Like a Bad Parent

by "Karen Rosenberg"
Photo by: istock


I blame family sitcoms for making me feel like a bad parent. In sitcoms, children act up, steal the car, fight with their siblings, etc., and it all gets resolved in 22 minutes. Tied up with a big red ribbon and a big, awwww from the audience.

In “Sitcom World”, the house is immaculate, the children are well dressed, and mom isn’t still wearing pajama pants at 4:00 in the afternoon. As a matter of fact, by 4:00, mom has fed everyone a healthy breakfast, driven them to school, worked out, gone to work, did the grocery shopping, and started dinner.

Even in “The Middle” and “Roseanne”, which show the struggles of working class families with working moms, everything is still resolved by the end of the episode and life moves on with a happy family.

But what about real life? Nothing gets resolved in 22 minutes (or even 44 if it is a “very special episode”). In real life, when our children fight, it can last for days or even weeks. You think that they’re almost finished and boom: “Mom, she came in my room without permission,”

“But I knocked,”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

You get the point.

In a sitcom, if a parent asks their teenager to clean the room (which, by the way, is already immaculate) they hem and haw a bit, but they do it. In my house, there is an all-out fight that can drag on for weeks about how clean a room is and what time it really has to be finished by.

Even when there is a big problem on the show (drinking/drugs, breaking curfew, bad boyfriends) after the episode that it is resolved in, it is, well… resolved. There are no lingering repercussions. No ongoing therapy. No long term grounding. It is never mentioned again.

Disney and Nick sitcoms are even worse. Those kids get away with everything. And when they do get caught in the last minutes of the show by their bumbling parents, they hardly get any punishment at all!

How is all of this supposed to make a parent feel?

Well it makes me feel rotten. It makes me feel inferior. It makes me feel inept.

I know that it shouldn’t. I know that this isn’t real life. I know that it is for entertainment purposes only. But, when you have been watching happy families from the time you are a child, expecting it to be the same way when you grow up, it is kind of hard not to feel like you are doing something wrong.

Why won’t my kids listen to me? Why don’t I have all of the witty answers? Why can’t my house be clean and a good meal on the table? What am I doing wrong?

Nothing. TV has just given all of us a warped look on life.

I have two teens. Their rooms are not always (ok, never) going to be clean. They are going to have massive fights. They doesn’t want to spend time with their Dad and me. The bullying that goes on in school is more than one episode long. And, hardest of all, they are going to experience heartache unlike I have seen on TV.

I have a husband. We fight like they do in “Sitcom World” but we work at resolving our issues; we don’t make up because of some silly little comeback that puts everything into perspective. I don’t win because I am the women or lose because he is the man; we spend time understanding each other’s views until we come up with a compromise – and sometimes the argument – I mean discussion – itself lasts more than 22 minutes.

So what is a parent supposed to do? Turn off the TV? No, that is my release after a long day. Change shows? No, I have no energy to concentrate on more than a sitcom. Live in a fantasy world? That would be fun, but I don’t think that it would last too long.

Instead, I need to realize that is not real life and at the end of their run, they disappear into oblivion, while I still go on with my wonderful, but not perfect, life.




Karen Rosenberg is starting her 7th new career by writing. She started her adult life as an actor, moved on to co-running a theatre, tried her hand at designing websites, taught at Gymboree, and is currently a full time mommy and school volunteer. Using the same creative skills as in her previous “jobs” she has decided to write. Karen lives in the Chicago Suburbs with her two daughters and her husband who have been very supportive of all of her “careers”. Karen’s works have appeared in Mamapedia and ScaryMommy.

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