Stuart Little and The Portrayal of Parenthood in Children’s Entertainment

…or in which Lizzie waxes eloquent about Deep Topics using as a springboard a children’s movie which was never meant to be a springboard for Deep Topics. Because how else would you spend a rainy summer day?

(Buckle up, because this will be pretty long. Attention span points are definitely going to anyone who reads the whole thing.)

The idea for this post was sparked when I was reading Steve Greydanus’s movie review of what sounds like a perfectly revolting adaptation of Mr. Popper’s Penguins (the original book of which was charming, by-the-by). There was a bit from his review that really caught my attention:

The phenomenon of broken-family films is one I’ve been thinking about for years. On the one hand, the intact family unit — father, mother and kids — is the ideal, obviously, and should be the norm in family entertainment. On the other hand, many children live with the reality of divorce and single-parent households. It is simply truthful for stories, including family films, to reflect the reality of divorce.

He goes on to explain his reasons for disliking second-chance romances that bring divorced couples back together again (which I haven’t determined how much I agree with and is in itself a discussion for another day). What sparked my thoughts for today is his statement before that: that the intact family unit should be the norm in family entertainment. I would go farther than that and say that, at least in children’s stories, the norm should be the “perfect family,” nice, pleasant, normal families with parents who are united, supportive, moral, &c. Enter Mr. and Mrs. Little from the late ’90s-early 2000s Stuart Little movies.

The Littles have to be one of the all-around nicest movie couples I can think of. In fact, while I’ve seen many people who appreciated the wholesome portrayal of parenthood and family life in SL, there are also some who have accused the Littles of being syrupy sweet and nauseatingly perfect. Some of this critique is fair, I admit; I think the writing and screenplay can be a weak point in these movies and doesn’t always do the Littles any favors, and if less talented actors than Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis had been chosen to play the Littles it’s possible they would have come across more as annoying caricatures than as endearing.

(And we can be very grateful that they did go with the casting that they did, since according to what I’ve heard, some of the other actors considered for the Littles would have been very strange choices. I’m not sure that Johnny Depp and Madonna parenting a cute CGI mouse is an image I want in my head.)

That being said, I think some of the reason that the Little family and Stuart Little in general get a lot of flak is simply because we live in a cynical age and the Littles are about as un-cynical as you can get. Mr. and Mrs. Little are almost a caricature of the perfect parents and the perfect couple: they’re completely supportive of and invested in their kids, they love each other and work together as a team – they’re so unified and in sync that they literally finish each other’s sandwiches sentences. It’s not subtle at all. But while I am usually all for subtlety and sophisticated storytelling, in this case I think that this lack of subtlety and this lack of cynical-ness, this naivete, if you will, really works. Before going into why I think the Littles in particular exemplify good parents for a children’s film, I should explain what exactly I think children’s entertainment should provide as regards portrayals of parenthood.

As implied by the section I quoted from Mr. Greydanus’s article, there are two things which need to be balanced in children’s media: the ideal and the realistic. Realistically, the perfect set of parents does not exist. Realistically, there are severed homes and divorced couples and marital struggles. Children are going to at some point find that out – too many will sadly experience it first-hand. Media which acknowledges broken homes and their effects can be a kind of catharsis for children who have experienced them, and if done well it can also teach important lessons and truths about the consequences of broken homes and what some good ways of handling the imperfect real world are.

Also, it’s important to remember that even families and parents that aren’t broken are still imperfect. No couple is perfectly unified, perfectly supportive, perfectly selfless. Human nature and our fallen state just don’t work that way. Even the best parents have their bad days, their weak spots. One could argue, then, that since good storytelling should reflect reality, children’s stories should reflect the fact that the best parents are imperfect.

However, I would actually disagree with that – to an extent. Children’s media is a very special kind of storytelling, as not only does it – either explicitly or implicitly – give children a message of some kind about reality, it is also formational. Childhood is when you are the most impressionable, and also when you are still figuring out how the world works. We are much more forgiving of children’s rudenesses and follies, because they don’t know yet what’s expected of them or how the world works. (There is a much-beloved story in my family of my hitting my dad over the head with a broom, then solicitously asking “you hurt?” Since I was three, the incident was rather amusing. If I did that now, it would not be rather amusing.) Part – I would argue a large part – of what informs children of how the world works is the media they consume. You can tell children truths about reality and about what’s right and wrong, and they’ll most likely believe what you tell them, but if the colorful lovable characters in their favorite books or on TV give them a contradictory message about right and wrong, it will at the very least confuse them. It may even lead them to stop believing what you’ve told them.

Traditionally, fairy tales have made up a large part of children’s media. While I don’t unequivocally love everything about fairy tales, I think they have an important place and purpose (in their original form, anyway; adaptations of fairy tales don’t always preserve this): while telling interesting, exciting fantasies which are very different from real life in superficial ways, they use broad strokes to teach children basic deeper truths about the world in which we live. Good things are beautiful, bad things are ugly, doing good deeds may be more effort in the short-term, but in the end, good always wins and bad always loses. It’s not subtle or nuanced, and it doesn’t give the whole picture, but in this context that’s okay. You can’t start by handing a child A Tale of Two Cities. You need to have a foundation to start on before you add complexities and subtleties and Sidney Cartons.

Now, part of the fairy-tale simplification of reality can lead to idealization. The fairy-tale hero is always (eventually) rewarded in this life – in reality, some heroes won’t get their reward until the next life. The prince and princess always live happily ever after – in reality, they’ll have happy days and unhappy days like everybody else. But again, I don’t think that idealization is a problem. If children aren’t first told what the ideal is, how life should be, what they should be striving for, how are they to know when life isn’t as it should be? How will they be properly prepared to make their own life as good a life and as meaningful a life as possible? It’s a heartbreaking thing for a child to grow up with divorced parents, for instance, but if the people around him try to make him feel better by telling him that broken families are fine and no big deal and nothing to worry about, won’t it be more likely that he himself will think it’s no problem to break apart his own family when he gets married? Besides which, a child in a broken family is going to inevitably feel some heartbreak and sadness because of his family’s situation, whether he’s consciously aware of the cause or not. I think it can be, in a way, relieving and cathartic when people acknowledge to that child that no, this isn’t the way it should be; you have a reason for sadness, let’s do what we can with this situation, but acknowledge that this situation is imperfect…instead of shoving it under the carpet and assuring him that everything is fine and not to worry, when he knows full well that everything is not fine.

Therefore, I think that children should first be introduced to the ideal in their media, then the realistic. It stands to reason, then, that the first kind of parents that children should be exposed to is ideal parents – fairy-tale parents. Once the foundation of the ideal order of things is set, then the exceptions and the more realistic portrayals can be shown.

Let’s go back to the Littles. As aforementioned, the portrayal of the Littles is not very subtle. However, it is unique. Let’s face it, the majority of parents in children’s films from the past thirty years are not perfect fairy-tale parents. If you’re lucky, the parents are well-meaning but stupid. There’s the very common trope of the child being more capable than the parent, the child who needs to disobey his parents to do what needs to be done, save the world, &c. And of course there’s the portrayal of parenthood in which one parent is the capable perfect parent who runs the whole household, and one (usually the father) is the useless parent or the pure goofy comic relief.

(Interestingly enough, there is a set of parents in Stuart Little who tick a lot of those boxes, but it is not the Littles and I think the implications brought up by the inclusion of these characters with these traits are very interesting. But more about that later.)

But the Littles are different. For instance, a lot of kids’ movie parents – even “good” ones who are meant to be somewhat charming – bicker or make jokes at each other’s expense, and the message about reality this sends to kids is that while married couples can still like each other, romance and respect in a relationship lessen once you get married. But in Stuart Little, it’s made very clear that Mr. and Mrs. Little respect each other, and still have love and affection for each other. There is no tearing down of each other, for comic purposes or otherwise, and as aforementioned, they are so unified they can (accurately) finish each other’s sentences. (We only see them come remotely close to disagreeing twice in the first film, and one of those was in a cut scene that didn’t even make it into the final film. They do have a bigger cause of disagreement in the second film, but they handle it in a fairly healthy and respectful way and I’ll go into that more shortly.)

As well as obviously loving and supporting each other, the Littles are also completely supportive of their children. They decide to adopt Stuart despite the fact that he’s a different species (good heavens, does that sound weird…just roll with it; like any good fairy-tale, the outer trappings of this universe are pretty different from the real world in some ways), but are determined that Stuart not feel any less important or any less loved because he’s a mouse. They do everything in their power to make him feel welcome, even inviting over the extended family for a party to celebrate his adoption. (Said party ends up being ruined, but that is due to their human child George being a brat, not due to them.) And they are just as supportive to George even though he’s really annoying. They try to urge him out of his comfort zone when he needs the extra push, but they are also understanding of his feelings and of how far they should push him. (One of the few quibbles I have about their parenting is that I personally think they should have been firmer with George when he kept giving Stuart the cold shoulder. Mr. Little did try to talk to him about it, but he was much too nice, in my opinion. But as you may have noticed, I have no great love for George, so maybe I would have been too hard on him.)

In fact, the Littles are not just supportive of their children, but selflessly so; they still want what’s best for their kids even when it’s difficult for them personally. When SPOILERS? I GUESS? the Stouts show up at the door and and say that they’re Stuart’s birth parents and want to take Stuart back, Mr. and Mrs. Little are naturally very distressed. They love Stuart, Stuart is their son now; of course they don’t want to give him up. But they’re eventually persuaded that it’s in Stuart’s best interest and that he’ll never be able to feel really at home in a human household, so they decide to let him go with the Stouts for his own good. They’re able to put their own feelings and desires aside for the good of their children, and that is truly selfless parenting. (Of course in this particular instance they were mistaken about what was in Stuart’s best interest, but they thought they were acting for his good, so the selflessness of the action is the same.) END SPOILERS

And in addition to being supportive, loving parents, they aren’t afraid to discipline their children, either. When they catch George lying to them in the second film, they make it very clear that what he’s done is absolutely not okay, and that there will consequences for it.

Another way in which Mr. and Mrs. Little are different from the usual kids’ movie parents is that the narrative and the movie itself portrays them with a certain level of respect. This is not to say that they’re never shown to make mistakes or are never given a silly line, but considering the fact that these are goofy colorful kid’s movies, they are given a certain amount of dignity – hard to express in words, but noticeable nevertheless. To illustrate what I’m talking about, take Encanto, which I just saw recently (and thoroughly enjoyed, actually, but another day to talk more about Encanto‘s merits). While Mirabel’s parents are portrayed as good, likeable characters, there’s a little running joke of Mirabel’s dad being accident-prone and running into bees’ nests and such. (Conveniently, he married the one Madrigal with the gift of healing.) That sort of humor is just not even on the table for the Littles. While I certainly don’t think they’re meant to be seen as uptight or no-fun, the movie treats them with a level of respect which I don’t think is often seen in kids’ movies and which I would very much like to see more.

And another refreshing change from the stereotypical kid’s movie parents is that they aren’t stupid. (Some of the things they do can come across as pretty unintelligent to the viewer – i.e. adopting a mouse as their son when they already have a pet cat at home – but those things are mostly universe-building things, where it isn’t as stupid within the fairy-tale universe of the movie. I.e., in this universe you can just tell your cat not to eat this new family member who happens to be a mouse and he’ll obey you.) They really don’t use the trope of the children being more capable than the parents. The only sort-of exception to this is that in the second film George very unconvincingly lies to Mr. and Mrs. Little and they believe him, but (as George’s friend Will explicitly says) the reason they believe him is because they think he’s trustworthy; he’s never lied to them before.

The second movie does also fall a bit into the trope of “the child has to do an epic important quest and the parents won’t understand so he has to do it behind their backs,” but Stuart doesn’t actually tell his parents what his concerns are or what he wants to do about it before he sets out on his quest, so it’s quite possible they would have tried to help him if he had let them. In this case, the inclusion of this trope seems to reflect more on Stuey’s need for better communication skills than anything.

While the movie makes clear that the parents deserve a special amount of respect, I also really like that we get to see a bit from their perspective as well. Especially in the first movie, Mr. and Mrs. Little are very major characters and we see a lot from their point of view. I think that seeing a little from the parents’ perspective, but still within the broadly-portrayed fairy-tale universe, can be a good way of very gently introducing children to the idea that their parents are also human and also have to deal with their own problems, without introducing them too quickly to how problem-ridden parents can be sometimes. Because while the Littles aren’t problem-ridden, we do see them having to make difficult decisions and worrying about their children and trying to decide what’s right. I think this movie strikes a great balance of presenting a fairy-tale universe with just a hint of subtlety and nuance and humanization.

Now, I do have to say that the second film falls a bit more into the stereotypical tropes for kid’s movie parents. Throughout the film we see Mr. and Mrs. Little disagreeing on a major issue – namely, how best to parent Stuart and how much freedom he should be given – and in general I think Mrs. Little falls just a tiny bit into the trope of the “ditzy parent.” While I didn’t care for that, nowadays it’s so, so often the father who’s pushed into that trope that I did at least appreciate that for once it was the father who was the less ditzy parent.

However, while I didn’t care for the inclusion of those elements, I did like how they handled them once they had included them. Mr. and Mrs. Little disagree on a major issue throughout the story, but they discuss it and communicate about it, lovingly and respectfully and without usually getting too heated. (They do get a little bit heated in one instance after Mr. Little lets Stuart do something risky behind Mrs. Little’s back (not the best idea to start with), but they make up very quickly.) They’re not portrayed as bearing a grudge or having any less affection because of their disagreement in any way.

In addition, something which really stood out to me is that neither of them tries to get the children on “their side” or complains about each other to their children because of their disagreement. I especially noticed this in a conversation Stuart has with Mr. Little, where he starts by complaining that his mother treats him like a baby. In many other kids’ movies, this would be the perfect opportunity for Mr. Little to complain about his wife and/or let Stuart know that he’s on his side. But here, Mr. Little doesn’t even tell Stuart that he disagrees with his wife on this issue. He just explains her side of things and that the reason she’s so protective of him is because she loves him so much, and then gives Stuart encouragement without even touching on the area of disagreement. Even when Mr. and Mrs. Little do disagree, they respect each other and want their children to do the same, which I found extremely refreshing to see.

I mentioned earlier that there is another set of parents who fall into a lot of the stereotypes which are prominent in kids’ media, and that is the Stouts, a set of mouse parents. I don’t know if anyone is really looking to avoid spoilers for Stuart Little, but in any case I think I can say without major spoilers that Stuart spends some time living with the Stouts partway through the story. The Stouts mean well and aren’t unlikeable, but they’re goofy, they fight, the father doesn’t have the best sense of what’s appropriate. They’re pretty common parents for a kids’ movie. In fact, in many other movies, they easily could have been the “good” parents. But here, we see that while Stuart is polite and respectful to them, he thinks of them as inferior to the Littles, and we in the audience are definitely meant to think that too. Because in real life, children want more from their parents than a well-meaning comic relief. They want a loving, stable support that will always be there for them and help them learn how to navigate the world. And like any proper fairy-tale, Stuart Little shows us that deeper truth within a superficially wacky story about humans adopting a sentient mouse.

In short, as a summary of this very long post, I think that parenthood is something uniquely important and beautiful, that children should be exposed to the ideal of marriage before they learn the more messy reality, and that Stuart Little accomplishes that in a way most children’s films don’t. There’s a bit from “I’m Alive,” the end credits song for Stuart Little 2, which sums up nicely my thoughts on how marriage should be portrayed:

I’ll be the one / Standing by, through good and through trying times / And it’s only begun / I can’t wait for the rest of my life!

Children shouldn’t be given the message that marriage is the boring period that happens after the exciting, romantic time of your life. Marriage is the exciting period; the idea of a life spent with your spouse should be so wonderful that you can’t wait for the rest of your life.

How do you think parenthood should be portrayed in children’s media? What are some of your favorite movie marriages?