"The Good Place" proposed that adult cognitive work overcomes bad parenting.
Warning: This blog post assumes you are fully caught up with The Good Place and have watched the finale. If you do not like spoilers and are not caught up, you’ll likely want to stop reading… now.
The Good Place touched on many topics near and dear to the hearts of academics. What does it mean to be a good person? Where do our duties to the people around us begin and end? What about to the people we love? How can you resolve the trolley problem? (Easy! A long sword held out the window of the trolley will kill the single person while you run over the five people at the same time.)
While talking about big questions in moral philosophy and psychology, perhaps on purpose or perhaps without meaning to, The Good Place also took a strong stance on parenting and its long tail to adult behavior. Essentially, the show argued that while early bad parenting can leave you with deep scars that last through adulthood and make you, essentially, who you are, adult connections with others and cognitive work can repair you.
One of the central theories of the psychology purpose of fiction is that it exists to simulate the social world for its viewers. It does this through abstraction—clearing away details and providing viewers with central themes and ideas. This can help create a way for people to make sense of their own experiences. I wonder if people watching the show were meant to see the clearly presented through-line from parenting to adult behavior. While much has been written about The Good Place’s approach to moral philosophy, both western and eastern, significantly less time and discussion have been spent on a critical reason the characters act the way they do—their childhoods and the ways in which they were parented. The central hypothesis of the show seemed to become: You can become a better person through connections with others in your adulthood. If your childhood left you with scars and a lack of nurturance, this can be replenished in later relationships.
Each of the characters’ major flaws, the reasons they did not get into the good place originally, come from bad parenting choices, perhaps with the exception of Jason. The ways each character grew and changed over the four seasons came from fulfilling a gap left by their childhoods.
We see, starting in Season 1 but really in Season 3, that Eleanor was not parented. She was neglected, she was left alone and put in the center of her parents' constant conflict. Both of her parents were addicts, and Eleanor was the sober, level-headed, adult-like child. Eleanor was left to both parent herself and parent her parents. As a result, she shows avoidant attachment to everyone around her, calling herself a lone wolf. Her lack of connection comes from no one taking care of her, and her therefore not caring about herself or anyone else. Her job over the course of the series is to learn how to depend on others and ask others for help truthfully, not just to get something out of them. Her job then becomes a cascade into fully helping others, not selfishly, but in the way that they most want to be helped. Her growth is shown as cyclical—by helping others (faking at first, and then for real) she also gains a sense of self-worth, and finally, peace.
Chidi was given a great lie from his parents, given with love but still a lie—that his parents were going to divorce, and through his own thinking and reasoning, he was able to convince them not to get divorced. This sets him up to be completely indecisive for the rest of his life. To be fair, the writers do establish him as a child who was already reading heavy texts and working through complex material, but it is this lie, we’re told, that makes him want to reason himself through every decision in order to come to the right conclusion. This indecisiveness drives everyone around him crazy. His job in the afterlife is to learn to be solid in his decisions and to go with what he wants, rather than trying to reason through what he thinks he should be wanting.
Tahani is repeatedly pitted against her sister by their parents and always losing in comparison. Like Eleanor, she does not get a sense of connection and love from her parents, and is neither enough for them on her own, nor is she enough when compared to her sister. She spends her adulthood trying to raise money to burnish her reputation and gain admiration and attention from others. She is constantly working to gain approval from the people who were supposed to care for her and never quite reaching it. The competition leads her to be constantly striving for connection and completely unable to handle it. Her job in the afterlife is to learn to do things for herself and to gain a sense of self-confidence that is less connected to what others think.
Finally, Jason, like Chidi, is raised with love and affection. But his father is not an adult and raises him to be childlike. We actually get the least amount of information about Jason’s home life and how it might have affected him, but we do get a considerable amount of information about his schooling and lack of education. He’s presented as sweet and loving, caring deeply about other people but with no common sense and no educational sense. This is traced back to subpar schools. His job is to overcome a sense of impulse control, which never developed due to his home life. To be fair, this is the weakest connection from childhood deprivation to adult issues, but Jason as a character is also meant to be comic relief, necessitating broader strokes for his personality development.
The work of each character over time is to overcome their lack of attachments—in Eleanor and Tahani’s case—in order to attach to other people, care for them, and work to help them. Chidi is tasked with being able to see that he does not have complete control over every decision and in order to truly be with others, he needs act. Jason learns that he can and should control his impulses to just act (the opposite of Chidi). To be fair, he only learns in the finale—even when they are redesigning the afterlife, he still says he’ll be the one to do it when it’s obviously Chidi. Jason is dumb until the end, but always sweet, and in the finale is finally able to have impulse control.
The multiple afterlives the characters lead, and the problems they overcome during the course of the series is meant to be a philosophically driven cognitive change—a way to reason themselves out of deep emotional reactions to the worlds they lived in. What’s interesting is the show’s endorsement that learning is the solution to childhood neglect or emotional manipulation. This learning is shown to be needed because the fundamental issues to resolve come from a directly attributable source. The way they were parented made them into adults worthy of torture.
In this way, the show also proposes that each adult is in charge of their own development. We must take the childhoods we were given, forgive the parents who made mistakes, even if they were grievous in nature, and knowledgeably change how we approach the world and each other. This is a good lesson not only for adults, who may reflect on how they could become better, but also for children, to see that eventually, they will be in charge of their own reactions and relationships.
This blog was originally published in Psychology Today.