You just knew this was coming, or that something was coming when Haddie decided to continue dating Alex despite her parents’ unambiguous directive to put an end to the relationship. Haddie was going to get caught. And it would be ugly.
What I didn’t see coming was her father, outraged after discovering that his 16-year-old had been lying to him, removing her bedroom door because he no longer felt she was entitled to privacy. Take away the cell phone, the laptop and ground her, that all sounds reasonable, but remove her bedroom door?
Just as I thought Adam and Kristina had acted too rashly when they banned Haddie from seeing the 19-year-old with his own apartment and a history of alcohol abuse without first having a real, constructive dialog with their daughter, I thought they overreacted in this episode after they learned that Haddie had been dating Alex behind their backs.
“I did not raise you to be a liar and a sneak,” Adam yelled at Haddie. Well, yeah, you kind of did when you forbade her from seeing someone without having a heart-to-heart with your class president/good student/food bank volunteer of a daughter instead of throwing down the gauntlet with no discussion as though she’d just knocked off a convenience store.
Adam and Kristina lowered the boom on Haddie and took everything away, and Haddie went along with it. After Haddie’s boyfriend told her that he wouldn’t date her if her parents weren’t on board with their relationship, Haddie was too heartbroken to continue fighting with her parents anyway … until her mother told her she wasn’t allowed to go around “moping” any more. Really? I can see clamping down on the over-theatrical slamming of kitchen cupboards and drawers and requiring that she behave in a civil fashion, but insisting that she cease acting unhappy seemed over the top.
It was this moment — when Kristina demanded that Haddie camouflage her feelings because Kristina had had enough — when Haddie said, “Enough is enough,” gathered some of her things and fled to her grandparents’ home and into the understanding arms of her grandmother. This was unfortunate because it coincided with the return of my least favorite Parenthood character, icy Kristina, whom I really, really don’t like. It’s hard to feel sympathetic for a character when she’s irrationally lashing out at her mother-in-law whose only crime was not calling you to say that she drove her daughter to school after she found her crying at the food bank. Icy Kristina is the same person who froze out Sarah last year after Haddie and her friends had emotionally and physically abused Sarah’s daughter Amber after Amber slept with Haddie’s ex-boyfriend. Icy Kristina is the one who this season pestered another mother of a child with Asperger’s over why she hadn’t invited Kristina’s son Max to a birthday party. I’m less inclined to be on Kristina’s side when she acts like a chastening, narrow-minded human cold front and Adam acts like an autocrat.
The comic relief to all this weightiness came from Sarah and Drew as the writers took on one of my personal pet peeves: Organizations that make kids sell stuff in order to continue being a member of the organization. Wait, let me re-phrase that for accuracy’s sake: Organizations which make kids’ parents sell stuff or just buy the junk themselves. It’s like a hidden surcharge that parents don’t find out about until after their child’s already on a team or in the club.
Drew, being a clueless teen, sprung it on Sarah at the last minute that he had $500 worth of Christmas wrapping paper that he had to sell immediately in order to play in a high school baseball tournament with his team. Drew realized this in January and then tried to guilt his mother into doing what “everyone else’s” parents do, which is to just shell out the $500 and buy the paper. However, it was charmingly old school to see Sarah march Drew out to a street corner in front of a coffee shop — with that great sign — and insist that he make a go of selling the paper. I admired her for not bankrupting herself and purchasing the paper to bail out her procrastinator son. Grandpa Zeek, he of the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality, bailed him out instead.
Crosby and Jasmine’s debate about what to do when their 6-year-old said he no longer wanted a speaking part in the kindergarten play proved interesting and really could’ve gone either way, with Jabbar completely freezing on stage when his father pushed him into doing it, or the way that it did, with Jabbar overcoming his stage fright. While Crosby did prevail in the end and Jabbar seemed buoyed by his accomplishment, I kept thinking along the same lines as Jasmine: The kid is 6, who cares? I didn’t buy into Zeek’s “you’re setting a dangerous precedent” line of reasoning. It’s just kindergarten people!
Can’t wait ’til next week to see if icy Kristina and hotheaded Adam unleash their wrath against Camille, to whom Haddie is now clinging.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Jan 19, 2011 @ 11:09 EST5EDT
The main thing that they are forgetting to deal with on the TV show Parenthood is that Alex is 19 and Haddie is 16. That legally makes it a statutory rape situation. In most states, he would get put in prison for sexual contact with a minor, which is basically saying that he is a pedophile as far as most of society is concerned. I can’t believe that they haven’t brought it up yet on the show. If he actually dated her and had sex with her, she would be signing his sex offender papers for the rest of his life. What is the deal? Why haven’t they mentioned anything about that yet. I personally know of 2 people who have gotten this statutory rape charge (sexual conduct with a minor). One of my friend (male) was 19 and his girlfriend was 17. Also, a girl was dating the younger brother of a friend of mine (she was 16 and he was 18). He also is now a sex offender because of having sexual relations with a minor. I personally think the law is crap, but this show needs to be responsible and not be putting ideas in young people’s heads that could get them put into prison and give them a life sentence as a “sex offender” where they would have to register for the rest of their life and never be able to get a good job or be around children again. I love the TV show Parenthood. I think they need to be more responsible about this issue though.