“Flying cake pops for everyone” is Oliver’s greatest fear and he’s definitely right to be worried in this American Housewife episode about helicopter parenting.
Katie is getting sick of Oliver’s and Taylor’s non-responses to her every question on the ride to school in the morning. While Anna-Kat is more than happy to regale her mother with stories about her fawn friend (not named Bambi because she’s better than that), Oliver and Taylor remain mum about their lives. This leads to Katie believing she’s not mothering hard enough and going to her friends for help. The second Doris recommends reading her children’s texts, Katie gets a gleam in her eye. Now, at dinner, she can ambush Oliver about his crush and Taylor about her friend drama.
Katie’s actions all come from the right place. She wants Oliver to attract the attention of the girl he likes, and isn’t afraid to throw cake pops at her to do so. She wants Taylor to have friends, and is genuinely upset on her behalf when everyone starts randomly ignoring her. Unfortunately, Katie’s abrasive parenting style stops her kids from confiding in her about their actual problems.
For Oliver, this involves his big secret – he’s taking cotillion classes for the networking opportunities. Instead of letting Katie know that parents can attend the big cotillion event, he just confides to Greg and blackmails him with the promise of a better future father-son relationship to take him tuxedo shopping.
Greg just wants to be the cool parent and lets Oliver manipulate him into first helping him prepare for the dance and then letting him off the hook when Oliver decides not to attend. Unfortunately, Greg is too smug about his role as the cool parent and Katie immediately catches on to Oliver’s schemes. Katie may ask too many questions, but Greg doesn’t ask any. He doesn’t press Oliver on why he didn’t want to attend the dance. As Katie tells Greg later, “You can’t listen to our children. They’re children!” She admonishes him for being a friend before being a parent and confronts Oliver about the cotillion.
Katie was right on the money with her suspicions. Oliver has a pretty horrible reason for not wanting to go to the dance – he doesn’t like his particular dance partner. Greg and Katie present a united front and chew Oliver out for being a pretty horrible human being and making poor Kimmie Wu feel bad. Katie may be a smotherer, but she realizes that being a parent is about inspiring your children to be decent people. She inspires Greg to push Oliver to attend the dance and Katie graciously allows Greg to give Oliver the big pep talk about having actual cotillion-taught grace and manners. It’s a great moment where Greg gets to show his own parenting skills and pushes Oliver to stop hiding in the bathroom and be a gentleman.
Too bad that Katie ends up ruining it with her own mission. Greg gets to fix Oliver’s problem with Kimmie Wu but Katie wants to fix Taylor’s problem with the mean girls at her school. She marches up to the mother of the teen queen bee, Sophie. Katie, unfortunately, didn’t have much a plan beyond “Hi Sophie’s Mom,” and, after a couple of back-and-forths, tells the queen bee’s mother that “You’re about to be part of something called 'making a scene'”.
It is unclear what exactly happens next, but everything ends up ok. Taylor bonds with Sophie over their embarrassing mothers and Oliver gets kudos from his crush, Alice McCarthy. Katie and Greg end the episode feeling very good about themselves and vowing to remain active in their children’s lives, even as Anna-Kat smuggles her deer friend through the house.
“Westport Cotillion” takes a step back from the wacky Westport lifestyle to tell a simpler, more universal tale about the trials of parenting. Like last week, Greg and Katie had to learn to combine their skills to help their children, but that most likely is not going to stop Katie from entertaining us all with cake-pop throwing antics in the near future.
What did you think of tonight’s episode? Let me know in the comments!
