Breaking them Down
Dads of yesteryear were really good at one thing: tough love. Few fictional characters pulled off this brand of the hard-ass father figure as good as Red Forman from the Fox sitcom That ‘70’s Show. Portrayed by actor Kurtwood Smith, Red was a Korean and World War II veteran and factory worker living in the fictional Point Place, Wisconsin.
As a husband, he was mostly patient and somewhat playful and romantic at times with his wife Kitty. This carried over into his relationship with his often promiscuous daughter, whom he treated like a princess. With his son Eric, however, Red was a disciplinarian. While Red never physically hurt Eric, the threats to do so were constant. Red’s signature line often uttered to Eric was that Red would “stick my foot up your ass.”
Red’s perpetual moodiness with life in general, and especially Eric, was his response to the changing world around him. It was the 70’s after all. Red was surrounded by long-haired teenage boys, frisky girls, and a lot of marijuana smoking. When Red’s only son was an embodiment of the shaggy-haired zeitgeist, what was a conservative war vet to do but call his offspring a dumbass?
While Red’s foil to Eric provided a reliably funny trope for the show, it revealed one dangerous fatherly trait: the need for the man of the house to control everything. Granted Red was a military veteran and thrived in uniformity and regimen, his parenting of Eric faltered in that the son knew where he stood in his father’s mind—and it wasn’t a good place.
The controlling, “you’ll-never-be-good-enough” style of parenting has thankfully eroded in the modern age. Now we build our kids up instead of breaking them down, yet sometimes those behavioral artifacts from our parents’ generation creep back in. That 70’s Show lets us see how it used to be and warns us what not to do, whether we were war veterans or not.
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