Bluey's dad isn't so bad — and moms can be overly nurturing too



Does "Bluey" really "turn fathers into mothers"?

That's the claim Jeremy Pryor makes in a recent article for Align, arguing that that the mega-popular cartoon attacks the traditional family, especially in its depiction of fatherhood.

Any parent — father or mother — who fits Pryor’s description of 'Bluey’s' Bandit is in fact an active detriment to his or her children.

Bandit (the dad in "Bluey"), Pryor contends, is “constantly nurturing” and “always present.” He is no disciplinarian but “a plaything” in the eyes of his children.

Don't blame Bandit

First, let me be clear: I’m not sure that Pryor’s take is quite fair to Bandit, who seems in my limited exposure to "Bluey" perhaps overly gentle but not pathologically so. This is, after all, a preschoolers’ show.

That said, Pryor’s broader point about our mistaken postmodern paternal ideal is well taken. The idea that dads should always be accommodating and never be intimidating is, like most postmodern ideas, an infantile fantasy. It takes no account of human nature and creates misery wherever it is permitted to fester unchecked.

Pryor may have picked a poor example to make a valid point about what children need from their fathers.

Nevertheless, his critique of our modern investment in parental androgyny raises a question worth addressing: What makes an ideal father different from an ideal mother?

Nurture shock

Pryor contends that the very qualities he says make Bandit a lousy father — constant nurture, constant presence, always pleasant playmate — would make a woman an ideal mother.

Putting aside the question of whether Bandit in fact displays these traits to such excess, is that true? I would submit not.

Per Mary Wollstonecraft, the founding mother of feminism before it all went so terribly wrong: “Weak, enervated women” are “unfit to be mothers.” A woman who responds to her child’s every whim is not raising that child to engage the wider world but delimiting his capacity to engage anyone but her. The archetypal term for this insidious maternal figure is the “devouring mother.”

The devouring mother does have a long and storied history; she is an archetype for a reason. But she cannot be considered “traditional.” After all, women throughout most of history could not focus with such martyred self-abnegation on their children. They simply had too many other things to do.

Getting to good enough

Until industrialization, when middle- and upper-class women could for the first time in history devote themselves solely to the domestic welfare of their own nuclear families, nearly all women labored alongside their husbands and children on farms.

In these circumstances, the best a woman could hope for was to be a “good enough” mother: loving and strict and far too busy to be next to her child every second, like the mom in "Little House on the Prairie" or the one in the “Kirsten” books of the original "American Girl" series.

Fortunately, it turns out that “good enough” is what’s best.

Any parent — father or mother — who fits Pryor’s description of "Bluey’s" Bandit is in fact an active detriment to his or her children. Judging by today’s soaring rates of childhood misbehavior, mental health problems, and fragility, we do indeed have far too many such parents.

So if mothers should not be hovering pushovers any more than fathers should, what makes fathers unique and uniquely valuable?

Dad duty

Personally, I have two answers.

First, fathers provide a different kind of discipline — but only to a point. Yes, “talk to Daddy” is drawn as a leveling up of firmness in my house. Mommy is plenty firm, but Daddy has a different impact because Daddy is a man. But I also have four boys and no girls. If I had four daughters and no sons instead, I truly cannot imagine a scenario in which my husband would be the heavy; in fact, it would almost certainly go the other way.

Second, per Pryor, fathers do tend to offer a unique kind of “territory-expanding” and “training,” particularly to sons but also to daughters.

I am a “he’s fine” kind of mom. In part because it’s not my personality and in part because I know it’s not a good idea, I do not gasp or run over when my kid skins a knee or even a chin. I try to respond to what my kid says he needs (sometimes a hug, sometimes ice, often nothing), not react to what I saw.

But I am a mom, and I have my limits.

Checks and balances

I “let grow” pretty well, but when my kids aren’t back to my side exactly when I expect them to be — say, from the library across the street or from a bike ride around the block — I am always on the precipice of running to find them.

My anxiety is inevitably written all over my face. And my kids would surely see that, were I to follow my impulse and dash off at the first suspicion that they might be trying without immediate success to find their way back to me. Fortunately, my husband’s voice is always in my head, and often in my ear: “This is about you getting reassured, not about them being safe. They are fine. They will be fine. Do not worry them with your worry.”

I am beginning to notice that my sons tend to stay calm even when they are unsettled precisely because they have a dad who models that kind of stoicism consistently. Dads do tend, I think, to keep their sights trained more steadily than moms do on the endgame of raising adults who can manage real life, including when it’s scary.

So part of being a “good enough” mom, I guess, is knowing when to get out of the way and let Dad do his job.

How a beloved children's cartoon turns fathers into mothers — and what the Bible says about it



As the Western world catches collective amnesia around the profile of the historic father, we’ve begun to move past portrayals of fathers as the bumbling idiot of shows in the 1980s and 1990s to a new kind of engaged, empathetic, and present father.

There’s only one problem with this new ideal father: He embodies almost all of the elements of the traditional mother, purged of the essence of elements from the historic father.

The poster child for this new depiction can be found in the mega-popular kids program "Bluey." The dad, Bandit, is seen as a constantly nurturing, always-present playmate to his two daughters, Bluey and Bingo. He’s so present, in fact, that fans of the show often joke about when Bandit finds time to work, and in the show, it’s clear that the mother has less time to play than the dad.

Our culture LOVES this depiction of fatherhood. It empties the father character of all the elements of the traditionally masculine father we’ve grown uncomfortable with, and at the same time, it provides freedom for the mother to get out in the world and explore her individual passions.

Everyone wins, right? Well, it depends.

God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order.

It depends on whether there’s an objective ideal of fatherhood and motherhood, and if there is, then symbolic depictions seeking to reverse these objective profiles are problematic.

Embracing these kinds of portrayals, especially in a highly symbolic medium like in a cartoon, will go a long way in shaping our intuition around the essence of these roles.

Now today, almost no one thinks there are objective ideals to these archetypes, and if they are right — and they personally resonate with the father, mother, and daughter depictions in "Bluey" — then everything I’m about to say will be dissonant and probably offensive.

So let me say from the outset that, even in the conservative Christian world, my position is a tiny minority, maybe less than 1%. So feel free to stop reading if you’re getting triggered.

Let me lay out three premises I believe about this topic, and if you disagree with any of these, you’ll likely disagree with my conclusion.

  1. Masculinity and femininity are not social constructs or primarily biological concepts but are family concepts designed to create a certain dynamic and to construct a highly functional multigenerational family team.
  2. The Bible presents meta descriptions of masculinity/fatherhood and femininity/motherhood through symbolic characters primarily rooted in the story of Genesis.
  3. Meta depictions of these roles are good and necessary to give culture at large something concrete to aim at even, though all of us as individuals will find some elements of these roles dissonant with our desires or even our innate wiring.

I derive my first premise from the theological principle of first mention. When God created male and female, he actually revealed the purpose for gender, and that was to create a certain kind of family team.

“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth" (Genesis 1:27-28 ESV).

God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order. Genesis 1 does not yet give us content around the different male and female roles, only that male and female combine to achieve the purposes of the family.

The second premise is that Genesis gives meta descriptions of the various parts of the family, and these meta roles can be seen in the Hebrew names given to the people.

"Adam" = Man or Humanity
"Eve" = Giver of Life

But since we’re focusing here on fatherhood, the most important person comes when we meet a man named Abram.

"Abram" = Exalted Father

Abram is literally described in our language as a meta father. As he progresses in this role, his name is elevated again to Abraham, or father of many nations.

One struggle that Greek-minded people often have is to think "meta" means ideal or model. Abram is not the perfect father. He’s the meta father. We understand the elements of how God interacts with both the specific father Abram and the concept of fatherhood through the Genesis narrative.

I’ve learned that this idea is highly intuitive to people native to the Middle East but endlessly confusing to Western thinkers. That’s why of the three “Abrahamic religions,” Christianity is the one least influenced by Abraham’s depiction of fatherhood — and this is the West’s primary source of fatherhood confusion. Jesus, in one of his parables, referred to Abraham as “Father Abraham,” but — besides a particularly annoying youth group song — Christians do not think of Abraham through the lens of fatherhood. We see him more as an individual historic man of faith.

This lack of a symbolic depiction of fatherhood has untethered the concept of fatherhood and masculinity from anything objective and leaves us vulnerable to following the ever-changing depictions of fatherhood and masculinity invented by modern cultural sensibilities.

This brings me to my third premise and back to "Bluey."

I first heard of red flags in "Bluey" from my two teenage daughters, who watched an episode after hearing from so many Christian families who loved the show — and they immediately saw what was happening.

You might think that 'Bluey' is a wonderful depiction of fatherhood, but please don’t be naive about the power of symbolic depictions, especially ones aimed at children.

Their first statement was something like, “They treat their dad like a plaything.”

I then watched one three-minute clip on YouTube from a different episode and saw what they were so alarmed by.

There are hundreds of interesting elements of fatherhood that one can glean from studying how God interacts with the meta father (Abram), but I’m pretty sure Bandit is in no way tethered to this understanding of fatherhood.

And this tethering is not hard to do. When I’m in the Middle East, I see it everywhere. All the good and toxic depictions of fatherhood I see from those native to this region I recognize as coming from these Abrahamic stories. It’s increasingly hard to see in the Christian West.

We need to get into the details of the beautiful biblical balancing of the life-giving presence of motherhood and the training, territory expanding, and leadership of fatherhood.

But let me say one more thing that concerns me.

One reaction I’ve received is from people who think it’s absurd to criticize a cartoon. You might think that "Bluey" is a wonderful depiction of fatherhood, but please don’t be naive about the power of symbolic depictions, especially ones aimed at children.

We spend almost one-third of our lives experiencing symbolic depictions in our dreams, and most of our entertainment is created by watching stories filled with meta characters and what they symbolize. Symbols tend to bypass our conscious awareness and form our intuitions about the nature of truth and reality. These symbols include things like numbers, colors, animals, objects, shapes, and storylines. The Bible is full of these kinds of symbols, and most Western Christians are totally unaware of their power. When Jesus says things like “how many baskets did we pick up” after the feeding of the 5,000 and 4,000 and the disciples reply, "12" and "seven," he expected his disciples — and us — to immediately get the symbolic significance of what he did. But we don’t.

And in the same way, creating a daughter named Bluey using the color blue is totally lost on us. It goes right past our conscious awareness. If we do think about it, we think it’s cool that they’re reversing the gender stereotype of colors. We’re playing checkers with those who are playing chess, and we’ve been checkmated over and over again.

Editor's note: This essay was originally published by Jeremy Pyror on his Substack and was republished with permission.

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