Sunday, December 07, 2008

John Patterson, Good Dad: Can It Be True?

Even back in 1980, Elly Patterson’s method of dealing with young Elizabeth Patterson in today's For Better or For Worse would have been considered poor parenting. Shortly after putting young Michael to bed, Elly hears Elizabeth screaming. We don’t know what time Elizabeth was originally put to bed. Nevertheless, we see Elly pick Elizabeth up and attempt to reason with her using words and then shoving her back into the crib and leaving her by saying that she is going to bed also, which she does. Then Elly has the nerve to proclaim her actions are the actions of “tough love.” I would call them the actions of “stupid mom.”

Elly doesn’t check Lizzie at all for any reason that she might legitimately have for screaming like that. Not only that, but if Elly is going to play the same game of not going to Lizzie if she wakes up in the night like Deanna did with Merrie, then Elly failed that by going into see Lizzie. If Lynn Johnston wanted to show a true trial of parenting, she could show Elly checking all these things and little Lizzie is still crying. If she wanted to put a camera in my house, she could show a parent trying all kinds of techniques to try to calm down a child with colic where the only thing that seems to satisfy them is belly-to-belly contact with another human being. She could show a parent rocking their child to sleep and then, oh-so-carefully, trying to shift the child to their crib without waking them up and failing. But Lynn doesn’t do this. Does Lynn really expect any parent to admire Elly for her parenting technique?

The temptation is to see this strip as one where John Patterson fails as a parent, because he does not follow Elly’s lead by letting Lizzie cry it out. However, the final panel makes a minor joke off the phrase “tough love” without Elly saying anything to condemn John for his actions. Moreover, little Lizzie has stopped howling, which means that John has been successful in solving her problem, where Elly was not. I don’t see this as John Patterson failure. In fact, I am not so sure the Lynn Johnston intends it to go that way; however, it wouldn’t be the first time she wrote a strip with one expectation and ended up producing a strip with an entirely different conclusion. If anything, today’s For Better or For Worse portrays a very, real situation in a family where the father comes to understand that his wife is not doing the best thing for the child and makes the decision to oppose the technique being used by the child’s mother.

I remember this moment vividly with my son. My son was doing was Lizzie is doing. He shrieked and cried and nothing seemed to slow him down. It was not until years later that we learned that, thanks to his Asperger’s Syndrome, he would get upset about something, but lacked the ability to calm down. There were times when he was too much for my wife. He would arch his back and you had to be very strong to be able to hold him without dropping him. It was during these times when I discovered that if I changed his environment, his mind would react to the change, and that reaction caused him to be able to concentrate on something other than being upset and angry. So, when our baby son was really upset, he got picked up and walked around all the rooms of the house, in case being in a different room calmed him. Or sometimes, it meant walking him outside, where the temperature change or a breeze (or sometimes rain), would do the trick.

If I take the point of the strip is “Elly is wrong and John is right,” the strip actually works for me; because Elly’s method looks so wrong to me. Moreover, if it was Lynn’s intent to write the strip that way, then kudos to you, Lynn Johnston. This would be the first, decent new-run I have seen. It actually does what the new-runs were supposed to do, expand on the characters of the early strips by telling new stories.

2 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

howard,

The temptation is to see this strip as one where John Patterson fails as a parent, because he does not follow Elly’s lead by letting Lizzie cry it out. However, the final panel makes a minor joke off the phrase “tough love” without Elly saying anything to condemn John for his actions. Moreover, little Lizzie has stopped howling, which means that John has been successful in solving her problem, where Elly was not. I don’t see this as John Patterson failure.

Neither do I. I also wouldn't rule out the possibility that Lynn doesn't either. I've always sort of thought that John's impatience with Elly was based part-way on his hatred of her incompetence. As another example, I should think that he reasoned "she does housework by the most stupidly labor-intensive mode possible and prefers it that way so why waste money on labor saving devices she won't use?" when asking himself if he should buy appliances.

4:12 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

If I take the point of the strip is “Elly is wrong and John is right,” the strip actually works for me; because Elly’s method looks so wrong to me. Moreover, if it was Lynn’s intent to write the strip that way, then kudos to you, Lynn Johnston. This would be the first, decent new-run I have seen. It actually does what the new-runs were supposed to do, expand on the characters of the early strips by telling new stories.

I agree--especially since she's seemed incapable of presenting John in a favorable light, let alone making a better parenting decision.

4:51 AM  

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