(upbeat music)
- What's up, everybody? Michael here.
Today, we're serving up a fresh grilled take
on the hungriest and one of the horniest sitcom families
in adult animation, the Belchers from "Bob's Burgers."
With 12 seasons and a new feature film to their name,
they've cooked up plenty for us to talk about.
- All that matters is you're a man now
in love with a mannequin who I'm holding by the arm
but should be in yours.
- [Michael] But today, we wanna focus
on how the Belchers function as a family unit.
Bob and his wife Linda are busy running a burger joint,
and as such, they don't have a ton of time for their kids,
at least by the standards of today's helicopter parents.
As a result, the children, Tina, Gene, and Louise,
get to wander off on their own adventures
while their parents work to keep the lights on.
This makes for a well-structured episode of television,
but it also begs the question:
Are Bob and Linda bad parents?
- We don't know all the crazy crap our kids are doing.
- We don't wanna know.
- To answer that, we have to look at how society defines
good and bad parenting in the first place,
and we'll also have to ask:
Are nuclear families even the best way to raise a kid?
Let's get into the meat of it and chomp down
on this "Wisecrack Edition" on "Bob's Burgers:
Do You Even Need Your Parents?"
And of course, spoilers ahead for the TV show.
Though eccentric, the Belchers are a fair representation
of the contemporary American family,
where the sole male breadwinner
and female homemaker have been replaced
by two parents working full-time jobs,
thanks to evolving gender roles
and changing economic realities.
- $50? For that?
- $50. There's a little girl, a horse, and a zombie.
- [Michael] This leaves parents with collectively less time
and energy for their tots.
For their part, both Belchers struggle
to find a healthy work-life balance,
and without hovering parentals to interfere,
the kids are free to frolic about town
without appointed adult supervision.
- I don't get it!
- [Michael] Whether they're exploring
an abandoned taffy factory or taking a ferry
to go trick-or-treating at rich people's houses,
the Belcher kids are frequently left to fend for themselves.
For folks who favor a more involved mode of childrearing,
this might set off alarm bells.
Surely a lack of parental supervision
would leave the Belcher kids
with irreparable feelings of neglect, right?
Well, not really.
In fact, these kids are pretty well adjusted.
Sure, Louise finds herself in trouble here and there.
- What are you kids doing? - What knife?
- [Michael] And yeah, Tina could probably
use some more help navigating puberty.
- My crotch is itchy. - Okay.
Are you telling me as my daughter or as my grill cook?
- [Michael] Still, their issues rarely cause anything
but trivial problems.
Critically, though, this is largely
because of the many neighbors
who pick up the slack when Bob and Linda aren't around.
These adults seemingly share the communal goal
of ensuring that the Belcher kids turn out all right.
They all step in at various points to look after the kids
and teach some lessons that their parents don't.
- Gene? Tina?
What are you two doing here?
- Learning to paint. - We're honing our craft!
- Wait, I thought you hated my kids.
- My artwork shop is open to all who respect art.
- [Michael] Because of their constant interactions
with their adult neighbors, the Belcher kids are exposed
to a multitude of different lifestyles and perspectives.
Take Teddy, the restaurant's most loyal patron.
While he's a passive, lonely dude
who's easy for the kids to target with pranks,
he's also the first person they call
when they're in trouble.
Maybe they need to hack into the school's electrical circuit
for stage magic reasons.
Maybe they need someone to negotiate with the cops
to keep Tina out of jail, a mission that helps
to earn him the fleeting moniker of Uncle Teddy.
While the kids might just be looking out
for their own self-interest, Teddy clearly has traits
that they feel their parents lack.
Or take Mr. Frond.
Yes, watching over the Belcher kids
is technically part of his job at Wagstaff Elementary.
But as the world's most intense guidance counselor,
he takes his students' emotional welfare
extremely seriously.
From him, the kids learn lessons
like perfectionism has its limits-
- Nobody wants a relatable guidance counselor!
Kids think I'm perfect.
That's why they listen to me.
- [Michael] and don't frame your students for a crime
to cover up how you mishandled school funds,
no matter how delicious your new coffee pods are.
- Attention!
There has been a grisly crime committed in my office.
My therapy dolls have been mutilated.
- [Michael] And because he's so fixated
on whether or not these kids are breaking school rules,
the young Belchers are frequently challenged
to point out the nuances and gray areas
of complicated situations,
even if piping up lands them in detention or music videos.
♪ Let's swap eyes so we can ♪ ♪ Empathize ♪
And don't forget the extended Belcher family,
like Linda's sister Gayle.
Even though her penchants for crying,
painting animal buttholes, and sneaking bites of cat food-
- You gotta warm it up and put it on your oatmeal.
- [Michael] make the kids a little wary of her,
they know she's ultimately a safe person
to run to when there's trouble,
like when Louise runs away to stay with Aunt Gayle
to avoid seeing the dentist,
even if she's in for an intense experience.
- Time to get some shuteye. (screaming)
The apocalypse is upon us! Why?
Why must the world end right when I'm getting sleepy?
- [Michael] Importantly, Aunt Gayle
eventually teaches Louise to be brave and face her fears
or risk growing up to be like her.
- You've seen my life. - Yeah. It's bad.
- [Michael] But despite all of her eccentricities,
the kids understand that time spent with Aunt Gayle
is a crash course in radical empathy
and the power of white lies to keep the peace.
- I did it, I did it!
I fixed all the paintings.
I added pants and huge, pendulous breasts.
What do you think?
- Gayle, it's beautiful. - They're great.
- [Michael] Another adult friend in their community
is Marshmallow, the trans sex worker
whose identity is fully respected.
Marshmallow acts as a role model for self-determination,
independence, and creative expression.
- (gasps) Tall, dark, and handsome.
- That settles it! Mom's psychic.
- No, she isn't.
Marshmallow isn't handsome. She's beautiful.
- Blush.
- [Michael] Even characters who are supposed to be villains,
like Mr. Fischoeder, the landlord,
actually accidentally add value to the kids' lives.
Beyond proving that you can wear white after Labor Day,
Mr. Fischoeder helps the kids
improve their bargaining skills.
- I take IOUs.
- [Michael] At other points,
his own deeply rotten ethical code
actually serves as a helpful contrast
to their own developing moral compasses.
You know, the basics,
like "It's bad to threaten to evict your tenants
unless they pose as your family at Thanksgiving
just so you can trick a date into having sex with you."
- Give me those lips. - No.
- Lips. Lips. - No. No.
- Lips. Lips. - Okay, fine.
(Bob screams) - Whoa.
- Sick! - Aw.
- [Michael] Or that you shouldn't
teach children how to cheat at games
so you can keep your arcade's profits high.
- It's a good thing I was expecting this
and was able to catch them.
- But you taught us to cheat.
- Yeah, you did!
Are you dirty-dogging us?
- I've never seen you before in my long and prosperous life.
- [Michael] Although, to be fair, the kids learn
some pretty sweet heist skills from this debacle.
And just like in real life,
the kids regularly encounter people
whose sense of morality or even reality is a little tenuous.
- What are those pretty buttons?
- Oh, these patches?
Well, we got this one for tickling a cop.
- Whoa. What's that one for?
- For not being associated with the white power movement.
- You think you are a mannequin.
- Oh, no, it's okay.
You don't need to be scared of me.
I'm not one of those murder mannequins
or Satanic mannequins.
- [Michael] Cumulatively, these interactions with most
of the townsfolk make the Belcher kids better people.
- You're all willing to give up
your Christmas presents for Chad?
- [Michael] They're exposed to more perspectives
outside of their parents' worldviews,
and they're emboldened and trusted by their parents
to make their own decisions.
Well, for the most part.
- Found a perfectly good mirror to smash on the way home,
and everybody made me feel weird about it.
- Oh, I love smashing a good mirror.
- Lin. - Right.
Playing with glass isn't a good idea.
- [Michael] All three of the Belcher babies seem
to exude an emotional maturity
far exceeding that of their peers,
and you could argue that it may come directly
from this mode of childrearing.
And Bob and Linda's parenting style can actually teach us
how to view family in a radically different way.
- How thoughtful of you all,
but I don't need a hat to complete me.
I'm all I need. Just me.
- For a long time, it was assumed
that humans evolved so successfully
in part due to a family dynamic
wherein males would hunt for food
and portion that food for their mates and offspring
and the families that did this the best survived
to produce more offspring.
But modern anthropologists have started
to cast doubt on this hypothesis, suggesting instead
that communal parenting played a much bigger role
in our evolution.
This method of shared parenting is called alloparenting.
As anthropologist David Lancy explains,
alloparenting is based on "the notion
that all sorts of folks can step up
and play what we think of as the normal parenting role.
All the various parenting roles can be distributed,
and collectively those folks are called alloparents."
This had significant benefits for prehistoric human tribes.
If a male was bad at hunting
or if a female had lactation issues,
it didn't necessarily mean that their offspring
would have less of a chance of survival.
This sharing of resources and responsibility led
to more offspring surviving overall.
Lancy explained, "The payoff of alloparenting
is that our species grew very rapidly over time
compared to, say, our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees."
Alloparenting is obviously no longer dominant
in industrialized nations, but we still implement elements
of this parenting method today to an extent.
We send our kids to schools or houses of worship
to learn from experts,
and parents often share childcare responsibilities
with their own parents or siblings.
Those with the resources also might yield
some of their parenting duties to daycares,
babysitters, nannies, au pairs, you get the idea.
As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child.
Bob and Linda seem to instinctively know this,
and they generally trust their own village
to raise their children in an organic and communal way
without the commercial exchange
that comes with babysitting or daycare.
They don't try to shield their kids from pretty much anyone.
They have no problem with their kids hanging out
with nudists or sex workers or even bank robbers.
Bob and Linda don't have to teach their kids acceptance.
It just becomes their default response
to the different lifestyles they encounter.
So what happened to alloparenting?
Obviously, a lot of social and cultural changes brought us
from the earliest hunter-gatherer tribes
to modern American life, but even as late as 1900,
it was still common to live in large households
with big extended families.
This meant more people to offer childcare, worldly advice,
shoulders to cry on, et cetera, et cetera.
Extended families didn't vanish,
but rampant industrial migration into big cities
bred smaller familial units,
and this shift was intensely amplified
by post-World War II cultural ideals of,
you guessed it, the nuclear family.
Kids were increasingly siloed off into units of two parents,
one breadwinner, one caretaker, supporting them
without substantial outside involvement,
and this was long hailed in popular culture
as a paragon of healthy child development.
Interestingly enough,
"Bob's Burgers" couples its celebration
of a sort of alloparenting by frequently critiquing
your typical nuclear family relationships.
For example, Tina's recurring love interest,
Jimmy Jr., has a far more dysfunctional relationship
with his father than Tina.
He resents his father, Jimmy Pesto,
who disapproves of his son's passion for dance.
- Don't tell me not to dance, Dad!
- [Michael] It seems that Jimmy feels determined
to pass down his own conception of masculinity
on to Jimmy Jr., which doesn't include dancing.
- You see, Bob, I'm a collector of rare and exotic trophies.
- [Michael] And Jimmy Jr. unfortunately doesn't have
another surrogate father figure to offer support.
Meanwhile, Gene's occasional love interest, Courtney,
has her life micromanaged by her own father,
who attempts to live vicariously through her
to achieve what he never could,
like when he writes a working girl musical
for the kids at school to perform
and tries to make Courtney pass it off as her own work.
- I wrote a play.
We're doing it tomorrow. See you there.
- [Michael] Or like when he gets
a little too emotionally invested
in being Courtney's temporary roller-dancing coach.
- You are ruining our dreams!
- I don't even like doing this!
This is your thing!
- [Michael] While Bob and Linda are there
to offer a guiding hand when needed,
they rarely take a disciplinary approach,
and they don't really do much
to steer their children's interest or behavior.
This allows the kids to fully explore their identities
while figuring out important life lessons for themselves.
They don't try to suppress
Tina's sometimes robust sexual urges.
- [Narrator] She knew what she had to do.
She grabbed Jimmy Jr.'s butt and changed the world.
- [Michael] Instead, they allow her to learn
and develop healthy boundaries from those around her,
sometimes by trial and error.
- What's Tina doing out there?
- Becoming a woman. - Oh.
- I can't tell where your back ends and your butt begins.
- [Michael] The Belchers also encourage
Gene's passion for music and theater.
- [Doug] Stop that singing right now!
- Nobody tells my son to stop singing!
- [Michael] And while they do their best
to channel Louise's anarchistic urges productively,
they don't use a heavy hand,
preferring to talk to her like a peer,
like after she lands in in-school suspension
for pantsing a bully in the cafeteria
and Linda bails her out.
- What you did was wrong.
- Yeah, everybody made that pretty clear.
- But I don't want you getting the idea
that helping people isn't worth it, Louise, 'cause it is.
- When we consider
that so many other adults have significant influence
over the Belcher kids' lives, we have to ask:
Are parents all that important
when it comes to raising kids?
Our collective social fixation
on the sacred nuclear family continues today.
Even as our definitions of marriage and families evolve,
there's a continued emphasis
on the importance of children being raised
by two adults in a romantic relationship.
And while there is certainly data that suggests that divorce
or absent parents can have negative impacts on children,
there's also plenty of evidence that suggests
that marriage might not be so great for raising kids either.
Philosopher and children's rights advocate Samantha Brennan
contends that shifting away from our cultural hyperfocus
on marriage can mitigate "some of the worst dangers
resulting from the close link
between marriage and parenthood,
which largely result from the instability, tension,
and even violence that too often form a central part
of romantic conflict," which makes sense.
Witnessing domestic arguments, or at worst, violence,
can have devastating effects on children,
and they can pass that trauma onto their own kids.
We see Bob confront this kind of generational trauma
when he realizes that in making his kids stay inside
and work on a fun summer day, he's being just like his dad.
- Lin, I just realized something.
I had a bad childhood. - Yeah, I know.
- [Michael] Crucially, he decides then and there
to break that vicious cycle, at least for the day.
- [Bob] I want you to go out and have the summer
and the childhood that I never had.
- [Michael] Of course, this results in the kids
unwittingly working for drug dealers,
but at least they learn some valuable lessons
from that experience.
- And if the po-po rolls up,
the first call is to your lawyer, not your mom.
- It seems that every generation of parents
faces a new moral panic
about what their children are being exposed to.
Whether it's rock and roll, video games,
or "Dungeons & Dragons," there's no shortage
of external forces to blame for corrupting the youth.
It's natural for parents to want
to shield their children from harm, but sometimes,
that sheltering can be harmful in and of itself.
One American Psychological Association study found
that "children with helicopter parents may be less able
to deal with the challenging demands of growing up,
especially with navigating the complex school environment"
and had more trouble regulating their own emotions
and making friends.
Giving kids autonomy, then, is important.
What's more, by giving their children free rein,
the Belchers effectively outsource
some of their parental duties to their family, friends,
and neighbors, lessening their own strain in the process.
Nowadays, despite its continued veneration,
the reality is that many families no longer look nuclear,
often being composed of single or divorced parents.
In this landscape, extended family
or surrogate parent figures become more important than ever,
particularly if your family isn't loaded.
While wealthy families of any formation can afford
to pay for alloparenting privileges
like daycares or bassoon lessons,
the biggest consequences of collapsed social networks
and extended families hit those with the least resources.
Even conservative columnist David Brooks argues
that successfully maintaining a nuclear family today
has a lot more to do with class than anything else, writing,
"Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back
for having stable nuclear families.
They preach that everybody else
should build stable families too.
But then they ignore one of the main reasons
their own families are stable:
They can afford to purchase the support
that extended family used to provide
and that the people they preach at,
further down the income scale, cannot."
It's like a real-life version
of that famous ClickHole headline.
At the same time, we're seeing less social
and financial support being provided to families than ever,
with the slashing of the Child Tax Credit sending
almost 4 million kids into poverty seemingly overnight.
Nuclear and non-nuclear families alike
who lack economic resources are faced
with unreasonable burdens and expectations
of what good parenting should look like.
For the working-class Belchers,
their solution, to rely on friends and family,
might just be the best way to cope
with the realities that many families face today.
And as we see with the Belchers, this support
can ultimately make the family unit even stronger.
The comfort of knowing everyone is safe and well cared for,
well, most of the time, alleviates stress.
Each Belcher is free to grow as a person on their own terms.
In other words, the Belchers prove that you don't have
to spend all your time with your nuclear family
to still love the (beep) out of 'em.
- Kids, I love you, and Linda, I love you too,
almost as much as the kids, but not....
- Oh, Bobby, I love you too.
- [Michael] What's more, "Bob's Burgers" shows us
that a society structured to allow children
to reap the benefits of alloparenting
rather than making raising children
exclusively the domain of the nuclear family
is one that fosters the development
of smart, savvy, and yes, occasionally devious tots.
But what do you guys think?
Are the Belchers a model for a more adaptive family unit?
Do nuclear families ruin us?
Let us know in the comments.
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I love you, but you're all terrible.
(upbeat music)