Cartoon Critique

Even though Comfort and Joy are 4 and 3, respectively, we've only been watching cartoons on TV for a few months. We have a stash of videos that we watched a lot of before but we didn't watch TV with them until Snowmageddon then our downstairs TV became permanently tuned to Nick Jr. That's when I noticed a few things:

There are no parents in these cartoons.

Was it always like this? Even when we were kids? Well, of course. In fact, the cartoons we watched were seriously violent, too. Roadrunner and Coyote anyone? Of course, we were also introduced to classic music through cartoon. Now, that only happens on Little Einsteins and, maybe, Wonderpets.

There were parents in The Flinstones, and their futuristic counterpart - The Jetsons, but you could argue that The Flinstones didn't actually have kids in the show until later on. It was about a family but not necessarily a family with kids. The Jetsons had kids right from the beginning. And Astro, we can't forget about him.

But now that I sit and watch shows with the girls you can't say that there are many good family role models on cartoons. Little Bear has parents. So does Olivia. And Little Bill has parents and Alice the Great, too.

On the other hand Dora is out roaming the world with her backpack getting her stuff swiped by whatever that other thing is. And as the group on Facebook asks, "Just where the heck are Max and Ruby's parents?"

Even though we don't see actual parent on these cartoons, are they implied? Wonderpets has the voices of adults at the beginning of the show. Kai Lan has Ya Ya, her grandfather. Or maybe it's just the bringing together of a community. That's not a bad thing. Kids need to know that their Village is there for them. Because we know it takes more than parents to keep up with our kids.