Review of Father Knows Best

At the time it was first broadcast, "Father Knows Best" was the quintessential American dream family life that was the fulfillment of what had been denied during the Depression of the 1930s (when everyone wished for financial security) and the World War II years of the 1940s (when everyone fantasized what life would be like in the "post-war" years of peace and prosperity). The Anderson family had that ideal life in Springfield in the 1950s. In the 1970s,1980s, and 1990s the American dream shows of the fifties (Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, et al) were, in hindsight, criticized for presenting week after week an ideal family that caused so much of real America to feel inferior and mal-ajusted. Seminars with titles such as "The Way We Never Were" were conducted to assure real life Americans that they were, in fact, "normal," even if they didn't come from a nuclear family of two never-been-divorced, heterosexual parents, two or three children, a college educated, white collar father, a stay-at-home mom, and dog in the back yard surrounded by a picket fence. Decades after the show had run its course, Billy Gray apologized in interviews to the American public for causing mothers all across America to ask their teenage sons "Why can't you be like Bud?" In those interviews Billy Gray declared, "I was just playing the part of Bud as written for the show. Even I wasn't like Bud." However, what I find quite ironic now when watching "Father Knows Best" 60 years later, is that both Father and Mother in "Father Knows Best" week after week violated the first rule of listening to children. Instead of putting down his newspaper, listening, and appropriately responding to his 7 year old daughter, Jim Anderson shrugs, "Not now, Kitten, I'm reading the paper." The other members of the Anderson similarly, week after week, ran in and out of rooms not really listening to each other and giving sarcastic responses to questions and situations. The scripts provided the resulting confusion that caused the comic problems that Father eventually resolved at the end of the show. When seen now in the year 2018, "Father Knows Best" is an object lesson in the value of passive listening that I found opened up a treasure of father-son relationships when I raised my son in the 1970s and a treasure of relationships that I now have with my granddaughter. Put down whatever you are doing when the kid wants to be with you and what will happen is wonderful.