The Moral of Mary Poppins

Redirect kids to their primary caregivers; or, Auntiehood is not a competition.

Fact: Mary Poppins is a practically perfect film in every way.¹ Every song is gold (seriously, find a weak link). The cast is wonderful (Dick Van Dyke’s terrible cockney accent notwithstanding). The script is fun, well-paced, warmhearted, and engaging for kids and adults alike. For kids, the story is about two children who get to have a wonderful, magical nanny for a time and go on lots of thrilling adventures. If you haven’t watched the film since childhood, you may remember a sidewalk chalk drawing come to life, a tea party on the ceiling, dancing penguins, and brightly colored merry-go-round horses that come off the carousel and take everyone for a ride. But for adults, there’s a deeper story that kids might not clock, a story with an important lesson for Aunties. In times of conflict between kids and their parents – I’m going to be really real here – it can be tempting to try to seize the role of kid’s favorite. But when kids respond to difficulties with their parents by trying to make us into substitutes, skillful and loving Aunties help them return and reconnect.

Before we get into today’s post, a caveat. Some kids are abused or neglected by their primary caregivers.² Others are rejected for their gender expression or sexual orientation. These are complex situations in which kids may need to exit their home, and having a safe, loving Auntie around can make all the difference. However, today I’m not writing about these kinds of cases, but rather about everyday, run-of-the-mill difficulties between young people and their parents. Parent-child relationships are rarely simple, and difficult patterns often become more acute during the teenage years. Use your good Auntie judgment, but as long as kids are not in danger, one of our most important roles is helping them reconnect with their primary caregivers.

In a much earlier draft of this post, I wrote a summary of Mary Poppins that was a lot of fun to put together, but which isn’t really needed for today’s purposes. If you’d like a refresher, or just want to join me in delighting in this movie, click here.

Mary Poppins Intervenes

Mary Poppins: what an Auntie!³ Her previous acquaintance with Bert, the local jack-of-all-trades, suggests that she (literally) blows into town when needed, then moves on to some other family at a suitable time. She is, in other words, what I have called a Super Turbo Mega Auntie – an Auntie to many, with an extensive bag of tricks (literally) to her name.

Mary Poppins arrives in answer to the children’s nanny advertisement (that’s ad-VER-tiss-ment, thankyouverymuch), which their father, Mr. Banks, had torn up in disgust and thrown into the fireplace. She pulls out the somehow-reassembled paper and begins rattling off her qualifications.

Item one: a cheery disposition. I am never cross. Item two: rosy cheeks. Obviously. Item three: play games, all sorts. Well, I’m sure the children will find my games extremely diverting. Item four: you must be kind. I am kind, but extremely firm.

Within moments, she has decided to give the family a trial period and slid up the bannister to where the children stand gaping at the top of the stairs. “Close your mouth please, Michael,” she says. “We are not a codfish.” And spit spot, she’s established that she’s at the helm. Mary Poppins is not a pushover, but nor is she a hardass. She’s what we educational researchers approvingly call a “warm demander” – one who helps kids know what’s expected by being – as she puts it – kind, but extremely firm. Indeed, Mary Poppins is just as firm with George Banks as she is with the children.

In the back half of the film, Mary Poppins’s real purpose for arriving begins to come clear: she’s helping to heal the relationship between the Banks children and their father. Kid viewers may not put two and two together, but as an adult I’ve come to realize how the magical adventures in the first half of the film push George Banks out of his comfort zone and force him to pay attention to his children. They start singing “Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious” around the house, which drives him nuts but also gets stuck in his head. They come home talking about a tea party on the ceiling and telling silly jokes (“I once met a man with a wooden leg named Smith.” “What was the name of his other leg?”).

George Banks has had enough. He brings Mary Poppins into the parlor to fire her, but first he wants to lecture her (in song) about how the children need to learn discipline, and within minutes (in song) she has him agreeing to take the kids to work at the bank with him tomorrow.

At this point, the machinery of reconciliation is in motion and requires little further intervention from Mary Poppins. At the bank – one of my favorite parts of the movie – the Director tries to take Michael’s tuppence (meant for feeding the birds), which causes Michael to yell that the bank is stealing his money, which causes a run on the bank, which causes Mr. Banks to be fired. Long story short, being fired lets George Banks have a breakthrough, and for the rest of the movie he’s just cutting loose and singing “Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious” and repeating his kids’ terrible jokes and taking them to fly a kite. While they’re off having family fun together, which is what the kids wanted from the beginning, Mary Poppins leaves. The end.

The Moral of Mary Poppins

Now, Mary Poppins sets a high bar for us Aunties. She’s like the Bluey’s dad of Auntiehood, if Bluey’s dad could do actual magic. But we workaday Aunties don’t need to be able to make merry-go-round horses come off the carousel and enter a steeplechase, nor do we need to manipulate parents into spending more time with their children. The example we can take from Mary Poppins, though, is resisting the siren song of being the favorite.

Mary Poppins could definitely have claimed her spot as the kids’ new favorite. If she’d just carried on taking them on magical adventures, she could have stepped in as the fun, permanent parent surrogate and gotten tons of affirmation from kids and adults alike along the way. Instead, she sent the kids to the bank with their father and quietly left when the wind changed. Mary Poppins’s departure felt like such a bummer when I was a kid; but now, as an adult and an Auntie, it feels like the most loving thing she could do.

Unlike parents, Aunties get to be fun most of the time. We rarely need to make kids do stuff they don’t want to do, but if necessary we can do so with patience to spare. We’re the vacation, parents are the daily grind. So when friction arises between parent and child, Aunties can be a pleasant, uncomplicated refuge. This is good for all involved.

But we need to tread thoughtfully and heartfully. Sometimes when a kid feels disconnected from their primary caregiver, they might look up at us and say, “I wish you were my mom.” And this is when we need to lovingly redirect.

It feels good to be wanted. It feels good to be the favorite. If we’ve been unable to have kids of our own – and I’m speaking from experience here – we may want to just pretend for a while. Maybe we want to say, “I wish I was your mom, too.” If we’re harboring judgment about the primary caregivers’ parenting choices, the temptation may be even greater. Maybe we consider throwing a little subtle shade: “Your mom doesn’t really get it, I know.”

If we go down this road with kids, we are doing harm. We’re harming the kid by destabilizing a primary caregiver attachment that needs to be secure. We’re harming the parents by subtly questioning their fitness. We’re harming our relationship with the parents by being jerks behind their backs. We’re making ourselves the rivals of the primary caregivers, rather than their steady, reliable wingpeople – which is what parents need and kids need and society needs.

Once, a kid I love stormed angrily over to my house. He was so mad at his mom. He wanted me to commiserate and take his side, and he wanted to not let his mom know where he was and make her worried and sorry. I texted his mother, then I listened. Then I did something I hadn’t tried before: I made some suggestions for what he might say to his mom to make himself better understood, then I sent him home to try it. I invited him to come back and help me make dinner after. He came back in a much better mood, reporting that the conversation had gone well.

I definitely wasn’t the one who smoothed over the conflict between mother and child in this situation – they did the heavy lifting and there was plenty of thinking and decisionmaking on both sides that I wasn’t privy to. But I’m confident that I didn’t do harm; I’m confident my intervention helped.

Society needs networks of kinship and community care that are as secure and steady as possible. The winds of social destruction are blowing hard right now, particularly here in the United States, and we need to stand together like a forest, our roots and branches interlocked. We need to practice being genuinely, rock-solidly there for one another in our closest interpersonal relationships, or we will never be able to be genuinely, rock-solidly supportive of our neighbors, of acquaintances, of strangers. We cannot undermine one another, even for a kid looking up at us with loving, hopeful eyes.

The moral of Mary Poppins is to help kids find their way back to their parents. It requires courage and integrity, and it’s necessary, and it’s worth it.

Coming Attractions

In the Monday Kinship Snacks for paid subscribers, some upcoming how-tos:

• How to hold a newborn baby (this time I mean it – coming Monday!)

• How to befriend your elders (we’re branching out! kinship is intergenerational!)

• How to intervene when kids fight

Next Friday, I’m writing about why it’s important for Aunties to tell kids about our preferences. Don’t like to play pretend? Tell them! Want them to clean up one toy before getting out another? Tell them! Prefer reading fiction to nonfiction? Tell them! It’s good for kids to understand that adults are people and that all people like and want different things. It helps them learn to empathize with others, without needing everyone to be just like them.

Then in the latter half of March, we’ll be focusing on building loving, supportive relationships with our elders – elders in our families, our friendship circles, our communities. I’ll be running an interview with Jody Day of Gateway Elderwomen, who has heartful, lovely insights about giving and receiving care as we move into elderhood. I’ll publish the results of the Auntie Collective Wisdom “love for elders” reader survey. I’ll talk about how we can build kinlike relationships with the elders in our circles. On this, my 45th birthday – heading elderward – I am eager to have these conversations with the wise Aunties of our collective. It’s going to be good.

Speaking of Collective Wisdom Surveys…

Let’s talk about the special powers of Aunties. When Auntiehood is considered at all in our societies, it is often considered second-tier – as lesser than parenthood, and emptier, and sadder. Aunties and childless women of all stripes are viewed as deficient adults, as people who have failed to be parents.

In mainstream, dominant society, we lack asset-based narratives about Aunties – but we need them! We Aunties need them on a personal level, to help us recognize ourselves as fully valuable members of our communities; we need them on a community level, to help societies acknowledge the limitations of the nuclear family model and start to rebuild distributed models of kinship and community care.

So I am asking: What are Aunties’ special powers? What can Aunties do that parents can’t (or can’t always)? Today I wrote about how Aunties get to be the fun ones, and how we have reserves of patience that are rarely available to parents. What else? What does a family with one or more Aunties have available to them that a family without Aunties does not? I can’t wait to gather our Collective Wisdom on this one.

Be warned, these are open-ended questions, so they’ll take a little more thought and time. Feel free to think broadly and creatively, answer expansively, and answer the questions you wish you’d been asked rather than the ones I actually asked you.

I’ll be collecting your ideas all this month. As always, when you complete a reader survey you’ll be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin, which will give you access to those tasty, tasty Monday Kinship Snacks.

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1. No shade to Emily Blunt, who is great, but there is only one Mary Poppins movie and it’s the 1964 one with Julie Andrews.

2. If you are aware of child abuse or neglect, you should seek support and you should report it. For those in the U.S., this page has state-by-state phone numbers to call for reporting, as well as the number for the National Child Abuse hotline. Outside the U.S., a quick Google search should bring up the resources in your area. Wherever you are, calling a hotline is a great place to start, as they can advise on resources and next steps.

3. It’s always Mary Poppins, never Mary – except in song (e.g., “Jolly Holiday”).