Father’s Day is over for the year, so Disney channel can go back to doing what it loves: making Dad look like idiot #1.
For their research study, a student at Brigham Young University sacrificed 8 hours of her time (that she will never get back) to watch two of Disney’s most popular shows. After suffering through Girl Meets World and Good Luck, Charlie, study author Savannah Keenan found that “every 3.24 minutes, a dad acts like a buffoon” on the TV screen.
This would be appalling on its own, but Keenan also observed something else – the kids on these shows don’t find Dad’s buffoonery funny or entertaining ala the old Cosby show, but instead roll their eyes, criticize him, or disrespect him in some other way.
It’s hard to imagine Leave it to Beaver’s Theodore ever making his father the butt of a joke. But the trend in today’s sitcoms is to make dad the bumbling idiot who can’t do anything right.
When kids grow-up from watching the Disney Channel and move to other network sitcoms, the theme of “dumb dad” follows them. Another study cemented a fact that many TV viewers have observed for years, that Disney is not alone in ridiculing father-figures. West Virginia University professor Jessica Troilo found that working-class fathers are overwhelmingly depicted by network and cable shows as “bumbling” and “incapable.” Eleven of the 12 fictional fathers she studied said hurtful things to their children and were often depicted as uncaring, absent, or incompetent. And what about the twelfth father, the only one who was shown as compassionate and involved in his child’s life? He was gay, of course.
Entertainment media is a powerful tool in influencing society, especially when it comes to children. That’s why LGBT activists would love to see Elsa get a girlfriend in the upcoming Frozen sequel, and the media swooned at the possibility of a lesbian couple in the new film Finding Dory. And don’t forget about the liberal propaganda show airing on Netflix that’s dedicated to teaching kids about evil Donald Trump.
When parents are invalidated and dads are painted as dudes who got this far in life by sheer luck, children are left without an authority figure to contradict the lies coming from the TV screen. No wonder there are so many kids who don’t even know which bathroom to use.
