For White, Upper-Middle Class Moms and Dads on TV These Days, Parenting Is Misery

They are hardly the first shows to paint parenthood as a difficult slog with rare moments of bliss; older, more traditional sitcoms like Home Improvement got their humor from tropes about teens fighting with their parents, typically relying on the stereotypical husband who wants sex and the wife who is mostly uninterested. But Home Improvement, or Roseanne, or any other show of that type, were not “dramedies” airing on cable networks. They were bleak in their own way, but the characters never seemed to feel quite as sorry for themselves as modern leads do.

And as Wesley Morris recently pointed out, sitcoms of those types featured truly middle-class families, who are rarely depicted these days; where there once was a bevy of programs about families with some money but not tons, they’ve been replaced with families who might not be Bill Gates rich, but certainly might seem that way compared to the majority of Americans. It’s the rare exception of a show that tells the story of a blue-collar family. Raising Hope did, before it was cancelled after four seasons; it also gave equal weight to the stories of children and adults, showing how both parties exhausted the other.

What has replaced these middle-class shows is a bevy of implicitly richer ones, which sit as part of an overall culture that has in recent years welcomed, if not downright embraced, a normative depiction of parenthood as difficult, exhausting, and begrudgingly worthwhile—even (or especially, in some cases) for people whom, at first glance, one would assume should have a more enjoyable life.

This hasn’t been isolated to scripted programming. Take Bravo’s new show There Goes the Motherhood, which “follows six dynamic Los Angeles mothers, who meet through parenting expert Jill Spivack’s highly-coveted, eight-week course” as they struggle with their families and in their “mom group,” where they talk through their issues. Almost all of them are white stay-at-home mothers, and while some of them might have more money than others, none of them are remotely struggling financially (unless you consider struggling to be, as it is in the case of one mother in the midst of a divorce, not being able to buy literally whatever you want anymore). What they are struggling with, rather, is the state of being a mom specifically, as indicated by some of their quotes at the start of the premiere: “Moms are under a ton of pressure from the moment they give birth.” “Everything changes when you become a mom.” “Motherhood; I love it. But then I might hate it. But I love it.”

It’d be impossible to pin down exactly what intersection of factors has prompted this shift towards stories that foreground the difficulty of being a parent, most often a mother. But certainly, we’re experiencing a moment: one that’s either been fueled or indicated by the rise of the type of shareable personal writing that’s allowed women, who’d for so long written or been written about as if being the perfect mother was their only goal or joy in life, to express the flip side of that experience. In years since, the floodgates have opened: women (on this website and many others) have written about what having children has done to their bodies, their relationships, their sense of self. Men have, to some degree, followed suit, writing about how they fantasize about sleeping with coworkers or the lack of respect stay-at-home dads get.

This overwhelming message that having children is sometimes not as much joy as it is struggle has also seemed to be a response to the relatively new way children are treated. To put it in sweeping terms, children were usually seen and not heard until into the 20th century; now, they are often positioned as the focal point of their parents’ lives. There’s been an observable backlash to that trend; people have broken down the nuclear-family ideas of what it means to be a mother or a father, and what it means to choose to be neither. But, despite the discussions surrounding “helicopter parenting” and treating children too delicately, despite the growing number of women choosing not to have children, our world still does revolve around how to care for them—particularly in the US, where parents, regardless of their station in life, have some of the worst parental leave options in the world. For many new parents, who have spent their lives being treated as people in their own right, being defined by their role as mom or dad has frustrated them more than anything. And now, they have the option to talk about it with (sometimes) less judgment, and be widely heard.

As such, we see characters on television who have swung away from submitting to their role as parents and into parental rebellion. But even shows that purport to be realistic can seem fabricated; scenes from Togetherness where the parents are off doing whatever they want with no sign of childcare frustrated a coworker of mine with children. “I wish my life was like their lives,” he said, “where they could run off and play Capture the Flag or pull all-nighters stealing sand while apparently there is some magic unseen entity caring for their kids.” It’s slightly rich, then, to watch a show that’s all about how hard and exhausting it is to be a parent when in actuality the parents you’re watching don’t even have it as hard as the ostensibly well-off, real-life parents they’re supposed to be mirroring; when even a version of reality that’s supposed to be comically shitty is better than what you’ve got.

Then again, the stories we take in—fictional, non-fictional, or a mix of the two, like Catastrophe—will rarely be representative of those who are struggling “the most.” On the television side, that’s because aspirational programming will always be greenlit, and on the essay side, because those are the people who most often get the opportunities to share their stories. And perhaps that doesn’t matter much for the viewing audience; even if your resources are fewer than those that you’re watching, those shows can offer comfort and connection by demonstrating that it sucks for someone else too.

But for viewers who aren’t yet at the parenting stage, the inundation with negative stories about that next step is frustrating and depressing. Watching them, it’s easy to wonder why anyone would procreate at all. (Perhaps one answer is that the generation of people being depicted weren’t watching programs like the ones they’re getting now.) The idea of mostly enjoying parenthood seems impossible through many mediums today—though that’s a feeling that dissipates once you talk to members of previous generations in real life. Consider what my grandmother has always said when asked how she raised three kids, kept her house running and held a full-time job: “We just did it.” Or, as Rob says in Catastrophe, “I’m gonna be a husband and a dad once, I’m gonna do a good job, and then I’m gonna die.” In different ways, they’re both acknowledging the same thing: sometimes dwelling is your biggest problem.