Discover Top Posts Tagged with #the cohens

one show i would ACTUALLY do anything to rewatch for the first time again is def the oc. ryan atwood you will always be so special to me

#the oc #ryan atwood #my babygirl #marissa cooper #seth cohen #the cohens #ryan lowering his guard and finally feeling safe & understood by the cohens means EVERYTHING to me #found family

the Cohen family owns my heart atm and I will cry at every single family moment

#Ryan's 'my dad's right here' to Sandy got me sobbing 😭#vicki watches the o.c.#the oc #the o.c.#The Cohens #the Cohen family

what's your take on the cohens' parenting? they're treated as the 'good' parents, sandy is almost revered as a father figure but past season 1, they're somewhat absent parents, notwithstanding a scene here and there. they acknowledge ryan's violent and impulsive decision making but they don't really do anything?? but i guess this is a bit redundant because if the cohens and coopers actually gave ryan and marissa emotional support, the oc would have no plot

It’s funny…I’ve been rewatching some early S2 episodes the last few days, in which Sandy and Kirsten are fighting a lot about their separate parenting styles—namely that Sandy is the easy-going dad who refuses to discipline anyone while Kirsten is the controlling hard-ass, and they’re basically both accusing the other for Seth’s runaway adventure to Portland. And once again, this answer comes with a caveat that I’ve only really seen S1 and S2, and can’t speak to S3 or S4. Another Anon also sent in an ask about Ryan’s violent tendencies (great minds, Anons!), so I’ll address that in a future post.

Yeah, I think all teen/family soaps kind of have this problem…if you want your teenagers to get into exciting and dramatic hijinks, at some point the parents simply need to not care that much about knowing where their kids are every second of every day. And even in S1, Ryan and Seth et al are getting into trouble—lying about Tijuana, going to beach parties with drugs and alcohol—but Sandy and Kirsten are also really permissive, at least by American middle-class standards, letting the teens go to Palm Springs, Los Angeles clubs, run wild in Vegas, etc etc etc….

I’m not sure how much of it was conscious on Schwartz’s part. For one thing, he was born in 1976 and would have graduated high school in the early 1990’s…parenting was more hands-off back then than it was for kids born in the late 80’s and early 1990’s (and it’s even more hands-on now, at least for middle-class Americans.) He might also have just embraced the stereotype of uber-wealthy parents not really caring what their kids are doing (wealth functioning as a security blanket, etc). Does this mean Sandy and Kirsten are bad parents? I don’t know…parenting teenagers is hard no matter what! I think they do a decent job at communicating their expectations and boundaries and kind of a crap job at actually following through on discipline when Seth and Ryan disobey them. That being said, they function as excellent pseudo-parents for literally everyone else on the show, consistently generous and kind, so…*shrugs*

I do think the Coopers are actively bad parents by even the lowest standards of reality, because they have both basically abdicated responsibility for Marissa’s emotional and physical well-being by the beginning of S2. Jimmy is just hanging out on the boat drinking mimosas and refusing to buy an apartment like a grown man, and Julie is just like “how do I solve a problem like Marissa?” when Marissa is doing things like throwing lawn chairs into the pool and dating the yard guy…when the obvious answer is let Marissa move in with Jimmy, insist she go to therapy, and set some clear boundaries and rules.

But I also believe the Coopers’ lax parenting has more to do with the writers’ attitude toward Marissa as this kind of ill-destined wild child who is unsaveable, etc, etc. I always feel like we’re supposed to be siding with Julie over Marissa whenever the two of them are fighting, although it’s entirely possibly this is because of Melinda Clarke’s winning performance. And I do think it is telling that once the writers decide they want to keep Julie as an “independent” character, she stops doing anything serious about her daughter’s emotional struggles. At the very least, this seems to convey that they did not want a version of Marissa whose parents actually help her grow, the same way the Cohens help Seth and Ryan. I’ve said this before in an earlier post, but there is definitely another version of The OC out there where the Coopers actually parented Marissa and she worked through her issues in a compelling and realistic manner.

#the marissa discourse #marissa cooper #the cohens #the coopers #parenting on the oc