I’ve been in a several month long debate with a friend regarding the meaning and tone of Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle” We agreed to toss the debate out to the Teeming Millions (or at least those luminaries on the SDMB ) to settle this bet once and for all.
Question one: How is the father viewed by the songwriter: Good or bad parent? What lyrics support your POV?
Question two: How does the songwriter portray the relationship at the end of the song between the father and the son: good or bad? Again, what lyrics support your POV?
The deal I made with my pal was that I wouldn’t tell which side of the debate I was on, so I’m forced to keep my yap shut while you debate it. I’ve got a dinner riding on this…
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Fenris *
**I’ve been in a several month long debate with a friend regarding the meaning and tone of Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle” We agreed to toss the debate out to the Teeming Millions (or at least those luminaries on the SDMB ) to settle this bet once and for all.
Question one: How is the father viewed by the songwriter: Good or bad parent? What lyrics support your POV?
**
[quote]
By the “songwriter” do you mean the actual Sandy Chapin…or the first person “writer” who is the father? I think that the song is about a busy father commenting on the idea that he is missing his son growing up. The father seems to be portaying himself as too busy to be a significant part of his sons life…which I think can be characterized as a “bad thing”
"My son turned ten just the other day.
He said, “Thanks for the ball, dad, come on let’s play.
Can you teach me to throw?” I said, “Not today,
I got a lot to do.” "
No effort to re-schedule.
Well to the extent that there is a distance in the relationship…that can be described as “bad”
"I’ve long since retired and my son’s moved away.
I called him up just the other day.
I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind.”
He said, “I’d love to, dad, if I could find the time.”
There doesn’t seem to be an effort to re-schedule a get together…
I can’t imagine interpreting that song to indicate anything other than that the father’s character as a parent is bad, as is his relationship with his son at the end. That’s the whole point of the song.
What lyrics support this POV? All of them, except for those who are irony-impaired. All the positive statements in the song are blatantly insincere.
well, as ms chapin wrote the lyrics to mr chapin to get him to see that he was missing out on his kids lives… i would go with:
absent parent. neither good nor bad, just not there at all. “bills to pay, he learned to walk while i was away, he was talking before i knew it…”
his son does look up to his dad, impressed by what he does. “and as he grew he’d say: i want to be like you, dad, you know i want to be like you”
absent, neither good or bad. “at least dad does tell son that his is proud of him. son, i’m proud of you. can you sit for a while?”
“and as i hung up the phone it occured to me… he’d grown up just like me, my boy was just like me…”
the son becomes like the father he never sees and idealizes. because he never gets to know his father there is no good or bad. there is only what his son imagines. at the end of it all his father has many regrets, and understands that when his son gets to his age he will have the same regrets and so on, and so on…
a very good thing ms chapin wrote this, after reading it mr chapin would take his kids with him on tour. with the way things turned out… sigh…
The father didn’t make time for the boy, and now that the boy is grown, he doesn’t make time for Dad.
He turned out just like his father. Distant, uninvolved.
Q1: I think the writer’s implication is that the Father was more focused on his career, etc. than doing the things that Fathers should do with their offspring. My feeling is the writer views this as a bad thing. “But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay.
He learned to walk while I was away”.
and:
“Thanks for the ball, dad, come on let’s play.
Can you teach me to throw?” I said, “Not today,
I got a lot to do.”*
Q2: Son is distant, just like his Father. I think the writer sees this as a bad thing. "I’ve long since retired and my son’s moved away.
I called him up just the other day.
I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind.”
He said, “I’d love to, dad, if I could find the time.”
It’d be nice to work for a company that thought it more important for you to get to your kid’s soccer game than working late to get that project finished according to schedule, but it ain’t too likely.
It is a sad song about a dysfunctional relationship. The relationship is portrayed negatively, and we can boil this down to “bad” for the completely stupid. This isn’t a close call.
Yeah, I would like to hear someone try to justify an alternate meaning. It seems clear to me that this is a story about the sins of the father coming back to haunt him.
I agree: “the sins of the father coming back to haunt him” – very well put. Common situation. When the child is young, the Dad is too busy to spend time with him. Later, Dad has time on his hands, wants to get more involved with his grown son. Son is (a) too busy, and (b) has no example to follow of any good relationship with a parent.
I’m not sure if a “bad parent” is the same as a “busy parent”. But, he has passed along the absentee mind-set to his son, who at the end has “grown up just like me, my boy was just like me” and so the cycle continues.
I always thought this was such a sad song…It always reminded of my father and me.
I dont think were really talking good or bad here, as much as unfortunate. Sometimes, a parent cant spend the time with thier children as much as they would like, or need. I feel guilty that I cant, and I know my father feels a great deal of guilt that he was away so much when I was a child, but thats life in the real world. My boy is lucky, because my father is semi retired now, and so my son gets to spend a lot of time with my dad. My grandfathers both lived to far away, so I only got to see them occasionally.
“He’d grown up just like me.
My boy was just like me.”?
The protagonist’s son hasn’t neglected his own son. He’s rejected his father, a very different kettle of fish. True, like his father , the son doesn’t make the effort to make time to see the other. But it’s hardly the same thing as being an absent father, the subject of the song.
I think it’s definitely not portraying it as a good thing. The dad seems to want to be around his son, but can’t because of his job/life. When he gets the chance to talk, his son can’t.
I wouldn’t say it’s bad in a strong way. I’d say it’s not ideal, he’s an absent Dad who foolishly misses out on his son’s childhood. Twenty years pass and he thinks “what the hell happened?”
It is a sad song. Excellently encapsulates an entire lifetime in a few verses.
A busy parent is not a bad parent. A busy parent who doesn’t make an effort to make time with his kid/kids is a bad parent. This dude was a bad parent, in my opinion. But this is just a song, not a great debate…
It is a song about regret, a song about opportunities lost. He has reached his old age and now sees how much pleasure he missed. And I think, he is offering a warning to others. I suppose that we can boil that down to “bad.” But we can infer that the boy had enough to eat and he was clothed and he grew to be able to start his own family - and those things are good. The man is most guilty of thinking that there will always be time tomorrow. Is he a bad man? I don’t think he is.
There are several themes:[ul][]Irony: As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined. The father does have an influence on his child.[]Regret. []Reflection on gender roles: the silver spoon. There were bills to pay, and part of the job of being a successful father is to sacrifice the precious time with your child to make money. []Alienation: At his end of the process the father feels like the game wasn’t worth the candle. His sacrifices have produced a life that - like his own - will be empty. At each stage the father puts off time with the boy for good reason - that later will be better for and with his son - but the trade-off was an illusion.[/ul]Mainly I see it as an appeal to reject the traditional role of fatherhood. And yeah, it’s a great song.
Did one of you guys involved in the bet think that the song was about the value of hard work, and that the dad is content that he has produced such an overachieving son by the end of the song?
That’s the only counter-viewpoint that I can seem to come up with that could be argued against the more traditional interpretation of the song already outlined above.
Which one of you guys went with that side? Pay up already!
You’ve come pretty close: the idea is that the father did what he had to to make sure the kid is fed and clothed, and the kid understood ("he smiled and said ‘that’s ok’ ") and now that the son is grown, he’s doing the same thing: taking responsiblity for his own kid’s welfare even if it means he has to put his own wants and needs aside.
I still stand mute on who’s on which side until the bet’s over later in the week.
) to settle this bet once and for all.