The failure to allow children to fail is the biggest failure of all....

There's one recurring theme in the strip that really annoys me: Elly's failure to let her children fail. Whenever a child was about to grow as a person in his or her own right by dealing with and learning from the consequences of a foolish mistake, Elly barged in and protected [hysterical squeal]HER BABY!!!![/hysterical squeal] from the "unnecessary" pain of having to be human. This could take the form of racing around shrieking in a panic packing things for her kids or trying to help them weasel a way out of a punishment her Big Hateful Meanie husband imposed. His referring to things as "accepting the consequences of bad behavior" and "learning to be responsible for themselves" meant nothing to her; he was just some cruel ogre who wanted inflict needless pain on children who said they were sorry. Since Elly was and is a flake who never understood why Jim and Marian got in her face and punished her when she bleated about how sorry she was for letting them down (because that was supposedly good enough), she was and is unsuited to be trusted with children. The sad end result is a group of soft, weak, dependent, arrogant children filled with entitlement and a dimwitted cow of a mother who doesn't understand why they're like that.