Every child gets a different version of their parents, and if you’re our third child you evidently get a far more relaxed set than your sisters did.
Our oldest daughter rarely watched anything other than Disney movies.
Our middle daughter watched Disney movies with some Pixar mixed in (though round about 8 or 9 I did introduce her to the empathetic comedic genius of Adam Sandler, and Happy Gilmore became her favorite movie).
Our youngest daughter – well, we’re all Disney’ed out in our house and we’ve seen all the Pixar films several times. On her own, our youngest will watch a KC Undercover or some other 20-minute Disney show, but we don’t have it in us to guffaw along with the laugh track.
So sometimes we let our youngest watch a show with her olde sisters – within reason, we thought.
And recently they were all watching Modern Family, one of the great boundary-pushing yet deeply sensitive and nuanced sitcoms of the past decade. Or at least that’s how I see it.
Our youngest had a more literal interpretation of the family back-and-forth, the jousting, the ducking and dodging of barbs, that makes Modern Family some complex and satisfying.
She watched it like a third grader, which is what she is.
We have the email from one of her teachers as confirmation.
Now the upside? The email immediately answered the question my wife and I were asking each other: Do you think she’s too young to watch Modern Family?
Why, yes, yes, she is.
The other upside: we’ve worked hard to have open communication with all of our daughters’ teachers, so we simply relayed the story – and pinpointed Season 1, Episode 2 of Modern Family as the culprit. We all had a good laugh.
We’re always changing as parents. I think of where we were in life and at work when our oldest was born and I look back a bit condescendingly on who I was then. So knowing, so wise, so wildly inexperienced in the art of fathering, let alone the contact sport of working parenting.
But the one thing that’s stayed consistent is trying our best and maintaining a sense of humor.
And now, it seems, back to the Disney archive it is.
