Family Life is Serious Business in the Comics

The perception of fatherhood has shifted with the forces of social and political tides, according to a study of some of America's best-known families. A six-decade analysis of fatherhood and motherhood as played out by popular comic strip characters charts the parodies that challenge and perpetrate national ideologies and gender stereotypes.

The chronological study, headed by Georgia State University sociologist Ralph LaRossa and reported by the National Council on Family Relations in the May edition of the national Journal of Marriage and the Family, examined 490 nationally syndicated cartoons published on Mother's Day and Father's Day from 1940 to 1999.

The popularity and long lives of comic strip families make them trusted observers and reporters of the public discourse taking place in the greater society. Among the most intense and lampooned debates of the 20th Century, as the role of women broadened, has been the proper place of men in the family and the contribution of fathers to the overall development of their children.

From the breadwinner/ homemaker model of the post-World War II years to today's dual-earner couple in search of quality time with their children, the comics capture families in the ordinary routine of household life. But their comfort factor wavers with the consistent change and extraordinary events of their times.

For their study, the researchers measured the level of incompetent (ignorant, inept) behavior exhibited by cartoon fathers and mothers; the level of mocking or making parents look foolish; the depiction of nurturing and supportive parenting behavior, such as expressing affection toward a child, encouraging, comforting or praising a child, and listening to a child's problem; and the attention given to the public rituals of Mother's Day and Father's Day.

"Comics are part of a society's cultural supermarket. Their presence on the shelves makes their stories and vocabularies (Good Grief!) available for selection and incorporation into the mixture of values, beliefs and symbols that influence people's perceptions and behaviors.

The oldest comic in the study was Gasoline Alley, first published in 1919. Others such as Blondie, Bloom County, Cathy, Dennis the Menace, The Family Circus, Garfield, Hi and Lois, Little Orphan Annie, Peanuts, Pogo and Ziggy were also included. Among highlights of the study:

• Men penned the majority of comics, reflecting the patriarchal culture of the newspaper industry.
• Only recently was there any representation of minorities. In this sample, only 5.1 percent of the comics featured an African-American parental figure as a main character.
• Depicted families tended to be middle class and nuclear in structure. Single parent families were rarely shown.
• Family-oriented comics came to dominate the funny papers after W.W.II.
• The proportion of comics that had fatherhood, motherhood or parenthood as a theme, regardless of reference to the holidays, mushroomed to nearly 25 percent in the 1990s.
• In the 1960s, in contrast to the 1950s, fathers were as likely as mothers to be depicted as nurturing and supportive, but more likely to be made fun of. This change was not due to an increase in the "warm and fuzzy" quotient of fathers, but to a decrease in the nurturing view of mothers as the women's movement and social activism increased.
• In the 1970s, fathers were no more likely than mothers to be depicted as incompetent, a result of feminists gains in the 1960s.
• There was a dramatic increase in both paternal and maternal nurturing and support that began in the 1980s and continued through the 1990s.

"The fluctuation reflects societal shifts," says LaRossa. "When you look at the figures across six decades, they go up and down in a way understandable with what was happening in the larger society."

The modern father movement, begun in the 1920s and accentuated by the national defender image of the 1940s, was evident in post-war era cartoons.

Contrary to popular belief, comic strip dads in the late 1940s and early '50s were frequently portrayed as nurturing and supportive toward their children. From the late 1950s through the late '70s, however, paternal nurturing and support declined. Then, true to its fluctuating mode, the pattern made a U-turn in the 1980s and 1990s, as comic strip dads were once again portrayed as nurturing and supportive of their kids.

With the increase in two-income and split-shift families, more fathers are spending more quality time with their children. At the same time, because of the long-term escalation in divorce, many non-resident fathers have only minimal contact with their children, creating a dilemma for cartoonists to reconcile. In the past five years, say the researchers, it seems that cartoonists were caught between these two images of fathers 'very involved, nurturing dads pushing strollers and the emotionally distant or absent fathers. Presenting fatherhood more positively without letting up on the scoffing appears to reflect this contradiction of the good and bad side of the contemporary father and an attempt to mitigate increasingly fragile family ties.

"Comics are part of a society's cultural supermarket," says LaRossa. Their presence on the shelves makes their stories and vocabularies (Good Grief!) available for selection and incorporation into the mixture of values, beliefs and symbols that influence people's perceptions and behaviors. How parents are portrayed by cartoonists immersed in American culture is a powerful indicator of what is mutually understood by most inhabitants of that culture. But that common cultural view may be very different from actuality, according to LaRossa.

More than 100 million people read the daily comics, and they come away with a variety of interpretations. While the parenting behaviors depicted in the cartoons are evidence of cultural change, we shouldn't assume that the conduct of fathers - what they actually do with their children - has changed at the same rate, LaRossa cautions."

If comic strip dads are more likely today than 20 years ago to be nurturing and supportive toward their children, that super father image can become part of people's mindset," he says. "But cultural portrayals can sometimes be more positive than everyday life."

The proliferation of domestic-centered cartoons over the years endorses the family as a familiar and effective conduit for humorous presentations of social change, strife and consequence. Families going about their familiar business are ideal channels for satire, manifestly aimed at one quarry but implicitly pointed at another.

Take the 1960s, for example. Women were making social and political strides, and there was confusion and debate about gender roles. Meanwhile, men were made to look like jerks in the comics. However, the real target of the almost exclusively male cartoonists may not have been men at all but the "battle of the sexes" that, to some pundits, epitomized the decade. The cartoonists perhaps felt that the country had "lost its gender compass" and were doing what they could to try to "set things straight."

"Fathering and the importance of fathers in the development of children is a major concern, and we are seeing a variety of scholarly initiatives addressing the issue," says Journal of Marriage and the Family editor Robert Milardo, professor of human development at the University of Maine. "LaRossa and his colleagues have opened a cultural window into the ordinary business of family life and the extraordinary challenges it represents. The view from the window has clearly changed over the decades. Parenting and child care are far more typical themes in the comic strips, and I hope this reflects the priorities of our nation as well."