Basic Trope: A parent doesn’t know their child as much as they think they do.
- Straight: Al doesn’t know who his son Benny’s teacher is.
- Exaggerated: Al doesn’t know anything about Benny, even his own name.
- Downplayed: Al forgets a detail about Benny’s personal life here and there, but otherwise on the ball when it comes to knowing his son.
- Justified:
- Al is The Workaholic who prioritizes work over knowing miscellaneous stuff about his son’s life.
- This detail is not significant enough to matter, at least in Al’s mind.
- Al has retrograde amnesia from an accident years ago and is unable to remember any new information about his son from a certain point in time, causing him to miss important details.
- Al is a narcissistic parent whose grandiose ideas about his children’s personal lives (to make himself look better by comparison to the other parents) makes him believe that they are a lot more perfect than they actually are. When they try to tell him this, he ignores them.
- Al has Alzheimer, we're lucky if he still knows anyone.
- Inverted:
- Benny doesn’t know anything about his father Al.
- Al knows everything about Benny.
- Subverted:
- When Benny asks if Al knows his best friend’s name, he answers correctly with “Chris”.
- Benny’s mother Diana remembers that he has school picture day tomorrow, having last been reminded the week before.
- Double Subverted:
- Al then forgets that Benny has a boyfriend.
- Diana then forgets that Benny’s birthday was yesterday.
- Parodied: Benny turns out to be an extraterrestrial from a different galaxy and timeline. Al responds with “I truly don’t know my kids!”
- Zig Zagged: Al knows Benny’s school schedule, his teachers, and friends, but doesn’t quite understand his personal tics, habits, and routines, meaning Al knows Benny on a detail level but not so much on a personal level.
- Averted:
- Al doesn’t forget any detail about his son’s life.
- Al has an eidetic memory, making him unable to forget Benny or any insignificant detail about him.
- Lampshaded:Al: I know everything about my children!Benny: Oh yeah, when’s my birthday?Al: Uh...July 10?Benny: February 12. Dad, it’s like you don’t know me at all!
- Invoked: Benny’s younger sister Ellie pretends to have a boyfriend to blindside her father and claim that he doesn’t know her as much as he thinks he does.
- Exploited: Benny takes Al’s lack of attention to personal details about his life and makes things up in order to hide certain things that he doesn’t want his father to know.
- Defied: Al was a victim of Parental Neglect growing up and resolves to be a better and more thoughtful parent than either of his parents ever were.
- Discussed: “What type of parent would forget their child’s birthday?” “One with a kid who’s gonna need a lot of therapy when they grow up.”
- Conversed: “Why is it on TV you sees all these parents not understand a single thing about their kids?”
- Deconstructed: Al’s lack of attention to his son Benny during his childhood leads to their estrangement during his adulthood because Benny doesn’t think Al cares about him (whether or not that’s true).
- Reconstructed: ???
- Played For Drama: When Benny goes missing, Al is disturbed to learn that he doesn’t know his son well enough to tell the authorities where and with whom he could possibly be.
- Played For Laughs: Al forgets Benny’s very appearance and has The Talk with a plant for several minutes before being told by his daughter Ellie that he’s talking to a plant, to which he responds “I know that!”
Back to that trope page my child sometimes goes to for homework or some stuff like that.
