(upbeat music)
- (Michael) What’s up guys? Michael here to talk about a bunch of:
- (Angelica) DUMB BABIES!
- (Michael) That’s right, Rugrats, one of Nickelodeon’s most beloved ‘90s shows. And sure,
the antics of Tommy and the gang are endearing. But when it comes to overthinking a kids show,
one thing really stood out to us: their parents. That’s because, if we do the very
complicated arithmetic, these 90’s parents are the embodiment of the internet’s favorite object of
ridicule: Boomers. What’s more, they’re Boomers raising millennial children, even if the little
tykes weren’t called that yet. And once you start to think about the show from that perspective,
a certain shift in meaning occurs. Because what if we can understand a generation of people
obsessed with anxiety memes and what Harry Potter house they belong to through the story of their
parents? Let us explain in this Wisecrack Edition on Rugrats and the Rise of Boomer Parents.
- (Michael) And now for the briefest
of recaps: Rugrats, as you know, spotlights a play group of babies and toddlers. The core original
group consists of Tommy, the idealistic leader, Chuckie, the perpetual worry wart, Phil and Lil,
the worm-loving sweeties, and Angelica, the bratty bully. When their parents leave the room,
their imaginations go wild, leading them on many fanciful, occasionally horrifying, adventures.
For context: Rugrats debuted in 1991. And while the 80s and 90s are often remembered as a time of
relative prosperity, it also was a time of widening economic inequality and a rapidly
shrinking middle class. As a result, many Baby Boomers entered full-on adulthood/arenthood, in
a state of very real economic anxiety. They were faced with demanding mortgage payments, stagnating
wages and an unraveling social safety net, which to be fair, all still are things today.
These anxieties manifest in the Pickles, particularly in the early
seasons. Dee constantly worries about money, saying things like:
- (Didi) I've been going our bills Stu and I thought maybe if you got a job, outside the house-
- (Michael) She even grocery shops with a calculator to avoid an unexpectedly high tab.
- (Didi) And don't forget the calculator Pop. We're on a budget, remember?
- (Michael) Here, Didi reflects the reality of being a boomer during this era,
a reality described by journalist Anne Helen Peterson’s book, Can’t Even: How Millennials
Became the Burnout Generation. Peterson looks at the plight of the stressed out millennial,
starting with the trajectory of their Boomer parents. Born between 1946 and 1964,
Baby boomers entered the world during the relative prosperity of the postwar economic boom.
America had a robust social safety net and middle class workers could generally rely on the support
of labor unions. For those Greatest Generation parents, even a blue collar union job promised
middle class glory, along with the ability to buy a house and provide for your family,
including your crying boomer baby. As scholar Louis Hyman put it, “capitalism worked for nearly
everyone.” But over the course of the next several decades, the rise of what political scientist
Jacob Hacker calls the “Personal Responsibility Crusade” remolded American culture into one where,
increasingly, people were left on their own to succeed or fail, without the help of GI bills,
generous social security checks, or a good union job. As a result, boomers became “grown
ups” in increasingly uncertain economic times, when maintaining a middle class
lifestyle was becoming harder and harder. And for some people, that worked out really,
really well -- especially if you had no moral qualms about selling junk stocks on wall street.
- Greed is right. Greed works.
- (Michael) But for everyone else, it was a huge bummer,
one that Rugrats may have accidentally documented in cartoon form. For example,
Tommy’s dad Stu faces the constant pressure of operating a small business in a ruthless economy.
(Stu mumbling) - (Didi) Stu honey,
I'm worried about you. I think you've been working too long lately.
- (Michael) The pressures Stu faces manifest physically, he’ll sleepwalk or be caught talking
to himself in a state of overexhaustion. In one episode, Tommy fancifully wonders if his Dad
is secretly a robot, and Stu’s stress-induced sleepwalking confirms his fears. Here,
we see Tommy accurately perceiving the way economic anxiety weighs on his father.
At another point, Chuckie similarly relays his father’s own concerns:
- (Chuckie) I've always heard my daddy say that he's afraid that the boss is going to fire him.
- (Michael) So
what happened as baby boomers adjusted to a new, more cutthroat normal? As Peterson describes it,
the generation of weed-tokin’ hippie protestors evolved from being more socially-minded agitators
to becoming increasingly insular. Or as economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti put it,
they “decided to look out for themselves, they invested more in their education and
individual success while deeming social protection less important.” Anyone whose
seen Rugrats could perceive this cutthroat mentality in the character of Angelica’s mom,
Charlotte, the incessantly cell-phone chatting business woman and CeO of
the very ominous sounding “Mega Corp.” Charlotte’s known for saying things like:
- (Charlotte) The junk bond market is coming back and I for one
intend to be in a position to take advantage of it!
- (Michael) Her selfishness, while played for laughs,
actually just exaggerates a very real social and cultural shift that took place
in the hearts and minds of many non-cartoon boomers long before you were telling them:
(Music: Old ladies suck - ok boomer!)
- (Michael)
Now, as boomers became increasingly focused on the self and keeping that self economically, socially
and physically successful, they were vying to maintain middle class status. This new mentality
resulted in the rise of the “yuppie.” That is, the special brand of college-educated boomer who,
according to Peterson, can basically be defined by their lavish consumption habits -- their gadgets
or vacations or French sparkling wine. Also, quaaludes. According to Peterson,
the yuppie mentality “took form over the course of the ‘70s, metastasized in the ‘80s,
and became the base temperature of the ‘90s.” And make no mistake, the Rugrats’ parents may be
some of the yuppiest yuppies ever to yuppie, as the LA Times noted in a 1998 review of the show
Particularly in early seasons, the parents are hyper-concerned with projecting prosperity.
- (Grandpa Lou) A puppet show for one year olds! Why the little
sprats aren't even going to remember it! - (Didi) They'll remember this one Pop,
rated number one by birthdays magazine! - (Stu) And besides, do we want to be
remembered as the family who settled for less?
They are super consumption-happy, lusting after boats and fancy golf
clubs. They film their banal vacations on their camcorders:
- (Stu) There's Didi
packing for our vacation to the grand canyon. - (Grandpa Lou) Oh it's going to be a long night.
- (Michael) And obsess over health food:
- (Didi) Don't order them any junk food or I'll take your teeth away.
- (Michael) They take their hobbies seriously and present their new neighbors with decorative
jello molds and throw nightmare-inducing costume parties galore. Occasionally,
they even rent limo buses to show off for their friends.
- (Charlotte) We've even rented a limo bus to celebrate Stu's big night.
- (Michael) Of course, there are moments of reprieve from their yuppiness.
The dueling realities of the boomer identity - between flower child and
Sharper-Image-loving yuppie -- comes to a head in the second season when the
Pickles throw a garage sale to reduce bloated clutter of commodities like
- (Betty) You got your fondue set, your basic lava lamp, and that old stand by, the pet rock.
- (Michael) The children, trying to be helpful, move all the beloved belongings that the parents
chose NOT to sell outside, and the family ends up accidentally pawning off everything they own.
After a brief moment of panic upon seeing their empty house, the Pickles go full circle,
almost as if retreating to the anti consumption ideals of the 60s, at least temporarily.
- (Didi) I mean all we lost was material possessions. and what we re-discovered
are the important things, like family, and love and other real human values.
- (Michael) Hell, they even sing:
- (Group Singing) Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya!
- (Michael) But for the most part, they stay in character.
- (Stu) Put a sock in it Dee.
- (Michael) But what else did boomer yuppies do? According to Peterson,
“surrounded by perceived threats and growing uncertainty, middle-class boomers doubled
down on what they could try to control: their children.” And indeed, nothing made
boomers more crazy than the pressure to be good parents and provide well for their spawn. Early
on, the show sets this tone pretty clearly, as Didi panics over throwing the perfect
first birthday party for Tommy, complete with a puppet show that no one year old deserves.
- (Didi) Betty, my future as a mother depends on this party,
and the party depends on the puppet show
- (Michael) Contrast her approach with Tommy’s Greatest Generation grandpa,
who was raised and became a parent in a more hands-off age.
- (Grandpa Lou) Why, when I was a spud we didn't have puppet shows.
If we wanted entertainment, we went out back and pulled up stumps!
- (Michael) After the puppet show fails, Didi frets that
- (Didi) I'll never live up to being the kind of mother I want to be!
You know like those moms on TV!
- (Michael) Here, Didi reflects the nearly omnipresent desire among boomers to be a
model parent and to perform that good parenthood for the whole neighborhood.
She, like many a millennial parent who would come after her, internalized a stress-inducing
message that, as sociologist Sharon Hays put it, “the methods of appropriate child
rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing,
labor intensive and financially expensive.” This pressure is encapsulated by Didi’s
realization a few seasons later that she had abandoned her work on Dill’s baby book,
forever losing the chance to memorialize the first time he burped or pooped his pants.
- (Betty) Better haul out the baby book and write that down! Woowee!
- (Michael) Again, she feels like she’s failed. At the same time Boomers worried about their
child-raising methods, they became fixated on what sociologist Annette Laureau calls “concerted
cultivation,” that is, the process of carefully developing their children via cello lessons,
expensive summer camps, and ensuring that they’re trilingual by the age of ten.
But given the persistent economic anxiety that permeated the era,
these choices start to make more sense. It was all in pursuit of their desire to raise children
who would maintain their middle class status. If they failed, they feared their kids would grow
up to be the lowly garbage collector, who keeps our neighborhoods clean rather than getting paid
hundreds of thousands of dollars to do whatever the f**k a consultant does. As Peterson puts it,
“the child’s well-being, and, more importantly, their future capacity for success, is paramount”
Didi can barely get through a sentence without referring to her favorite child “expert”
- (Didi) Lipschitz knows best Stu.
- (Michael) She obsesses over the minutiae of how she rears Tommy -
- (Didi) Diapers, wipies, books, blankets, a cap,
a change of clothes, bandaids in case of emergency, and two extra bolts of juice
- (Michael) And takes him to maximum security day care. The parents panic over bottle feeding
- (Dentist) This boy, his parents didn't think it was important to wean him.
This child, well... you get my point.
- (Michael) They panic over runny noses.
- (Chas) I tried everything. Decongestants, herbal remedies, chanting -
- (Michael) And BOY do they panic over potty training, with Chuckie’s dad even fretting that:
- (Chas) He's gonna be taking diapers to work with him in his briefcase!
- (Michael) Here, Chas is literally worrying about how his failure to potty train Chuckie
in a timely manner could be a threat to the mini-ginger’s career and therefore
middle class status. The Boomer need to carefully cultivate their child is best
exemplified in an episode when Angelica takes up painting for a very yuppie reason
- (Charlotte) My personal shaman said it was
absolutely the best way to nurture her creative side.
- (Michael) Immediately, her mother praises her work saying:
- (Charlotte) I love it! - (Angelica) What?
- (Charlotte) The total abandonment of form, the disregard of balance, it's so Jackson Pollock!
- (Michael) Little does she know that this umm “abstract expressionism” is actually
the result of the babies fooling around with paint. That’s a nice touch which maintains
the Rugrats maxim that the best things happen when kids are just allowed to be kids. It’s
worth noting that concerted cultivation also makes a prominent appearance in a
Rugrats All Grown Up episode when the kids panic over a 5th grade standardized test
- (Tommy) I gotta take a test! My entire future depends on this test!
- (Michael) Meanwhile, Angelica’s mom urges her to start worrying about her college resume,
giving her 11-year-old daughter totally normal advice like:
- (Charlotte) You
must do things that will impress the college admissions office. Show concern
for the environment, your fellow man. - (Michael) The grand result of concerted
cultivation was, as Peterson puts it, that boomers raised mini-adults, millennials
who quickly grew up and began “mimicking the habits of adulthood.” Cue: excessive anxiety.
Fittingly, the Rugrats ARE mini adults in a lot of ways, worried about living up to expectations:
- (Chuckie) Want to go play in the sandbox? - (Tommy) II can't Chuckie! My daddy went away
and wants me to be the man of the house!
- (Michael) And worried, like their parents, about their own child development.
- (Tommy) When is he going to be a big baby anyways?
- (Michael) Also fittingly, they’re prone to suffering from real bouts of anxiety,
sometimes sounding like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders.
- (Chuckie) Life is so hard Tommy.
- (Michael) Angelica, for one, becomes an
expert at performing her parent’s expectations of a perfect childhood.
- (Angelica) What difference does it make who did what? The important thing is that we're
all here and we love each other. (voice change) After all, family is really what matters, right?
- (Michael) Of course, she simultaneously develops a low-key diabolical alter ego
that allows her to vent her pent-up anger and frustration in the playpen. At the same time,
she seems to innately have picked up her mother’s love of luxurious consumption,
a hankering best displayed when she harasses a mall Santa until he quits his job.
- (Michael) So were the Rugrats always doomed to grow into the anxious, depressed,
burned out millennials that Peterson analyzes in her book? Maybe? But we wonder if their fate was
really set in stone, and for one main reason, the same reason that makes Rugrats so fun to watch:
Unlike a lot of boomers, the Rugrats’ folks are way too self absorbed to be true helicopter
parents. That is to say, their patented parenting move is to put the kids in the play pen and eff
the hell off. This was perhaps out of narrative necessity: A show about babies sitting on their
parents’ laps, listening to classical music while learning to read at age 2 and a half is a lot less
fun than a show about kids wreaking havoc while imagining themselves in outer space. As a result,
the Rugrats get plenty of time to themselves, away from their parents’ neuroses and paranoias. Time
to play, time to dream. And that’s something a lot of middle-class millennial kids didn’t get much
of. Peterson notes that lower class millennial children whose working parents didn’t have the
luxury of videotaping their every burp often had a lot more free reign. That meant more of what
she calls “natural growth,” or “the conscious or unconscious allotment of unstructured time,
which allows children to cultivate curiosity, independence, and learn to negotiate peer
dynamics on their own.” Inadvertently perhaps, and despite their very real anxiety and neuroses about
raising their children right, the Rugrats’ parents give them a lot of this unstructured time to do
the important things: like imagine themselves as pirates. This kind of play, according to Peterson,
helps kids develop “independence” and “a strong sense of self.” It also makes for damn
good television. At the end of the day, Rugrats is fascinating for its depiction of boomer parenting,
while also strategically leaving out one all important tactic of boomer parents:
as Peterson puts it, “constant surveillance and protected childhood.” We think that may be part
of the broad appeal of the show - At a time when kids increasingly had less license to goof around,
watching TV kids go on adventures reminiscent of a different era was extraordinarily appealing.
Perhaps there was some catharsis - we might not have been allowed to play outside unsupervised
but we got to watch the Rugrats build their own Noah’s Ark in complete freedom. But what do you
guys think? Are the Rugrats’parents exemplary Boomer parents? Would these lumpy babies have
grown up to be depressed millennials memeing their way through our current hellscape? Let us know in
the comments. A huge thanks to our current patrons for supporting the channel and a hello to our
new ones! Check us out at Patreon.com/wisecrack for ad free videos and more. And before you go,
don't forget to pat that subscribe button real soft, like its the head
of your overprotected five year old self and as always, thanks for watching, later!