Becoming Our Parents

By now you have probably seen Progressive’s satirizing generational commercials featuring Parentologist Dr. Rick. The mustachioed mentor on the scene has gently pulled a homeowner aside to remind him that the plumber is the expert here “You hired him,” or haphazardly thrown pillows on the ground while cautioning a woman that people aren’t sure where to sit. He tells her, “You have too many, and you’ve turned into your mom.”

For nearly a year now, Progressive’s ad campaigns with Dr. Rick –a tough-love Dr. Phil type, helps millennials and Gen Xers avoid taking on their parents’ behaviors when they buy (and insure) their first homes – have been delighting audiences and then, often to their further delight, sucker-punching them with the cold truth about themselves. Not only have the commercials managed to stand out in TV’s strange, highly competitive world of humorous insurance ads, but these ads have also carved out a space for themselves in the modern cultural lexicon. “You need Dr. Rick” has become an affectionate shorthand for “You’ve become everything that irritated you about your parents.”

In one roundly beloved bit, two of Dr. Rick’s patients struggle not to stare at a stranger with blue hair. “We all see it,” Dr. Rick tells them under his breath, as they continue to gape. “We all-l-l see it.” Introjection is the phenomenon of humans absorbing the attitudes, values, or traits of the people they spend the most time with and it has never been one of the sexier psychoanalysis terms. Lacking the titillating mythological wink of the Oedipus complex, introjection had never seeped into the popular consciousness, but now we have stumbled across the concept of parental introjection — the absorption of the traits of the adults we’re around first and most frequently. Behavioral scientists found that there was a ‘grown-up switch’ that everybody has, and nobody had really understood when that switch turned on. It was initially thought it was when people had kids, but research shows it occurs when people buy homes. Soon, homeownership-induced parental introjection was recast by Progressive as “parentamorphosis.”

We’ve all had a good laugh at our parent's or grandparents’ expense. Privately chuckling at my mother’s insistence on using her iPhones with her index fingers rather than her thumbs, or my father screaming into the drive-thru window thinking he wouldn't be heard otherwise. But now, here they were laughing at it too. Dr. Rick addressing groups of Parentamorphosis sufferers on topics such as: not having to grunt just to sit down; how to pronounce “quinoa”; printing out driving directions; and what #hashtagging is.

But, after spending the last year at home, many of us probably feel like we need Dr. Rick more than ever. I certainly do. After spending so much time with my mother during quarantine, I realized that there are worse things that could happen than becoming her. For the time being, I will continue to try and teach her how to pronounce words like quinoa and Chipotle while reminding her that being “woke” has nothing to do about her sleeping habits.  While Gen Xers may continue to laugh and rudely quip “Okay Boomer,” we all can learn a lot from our parents. Remember even Karen wasn’t always a Karen.