Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom Spotlights Abuse

TV movie titans collide in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom (1981), an Afterschool Special starring Patty Duke and Nancy McKeon. It begins in the typical style of such films, with McKeon’s Nancy Parks comically flying over the handlebars of her bicycle. Sprawled on the ground, she’s introduced to brothers Mike and Brian Reynolds (Lance Guest and Sean Astin). In the rare meet cute that intersects with child abuse, Nancy and Mike learn they’re new neighbors and will attend the same high school.

While the teenagers make eyes at each other, Barbara Reynolds (Patty Duke) angrily drags the younger Brian inside. The camera rests on the home’s exterior as she yells at him. We feel unsettled, a condition that extends to Nancy’s conversation with BFF Judy (Deena Freeman) about prom wear. “I blew my clothes allowance this month on a fantastic sweater,” Nancy admits. “So what do I wear to the prom?” She envisions unaffordable designer jeans.

“Jeans?!” Judy exclaims. “Parks, has your brain stopped functioning? You can’t wear jeans to the prom.” That’s where Judy lost me. If anyone in the ’80s could’ve gotten away with wearing jeans to prom, it would’ve been a McKeon character. (We might as well acknowledge here that I wanted to wear jeans to my wedding, but 6,000 Judys intervened.) Nancy protests that with her new sweater, she’ll look great. Judy shoots her down. “Look, the time has come, you’ve got to get a dress! Just one. Everyone will forgive you.”

Another small problem, as her friend eagerly points out, is that Nancy is dateless—if not for long, with Mike on the periphery. A sportswriter for the school paper, she arranges his midseason tryout for the basketball team. He wins a spot, but logistics are a problem. Barbara’s a single working mom who relies on Mike to watch Brian after school. The industrious teens devise a swap in which Nancy will assume his babysitting duties, and he’ll pay her with money from a weekend job. Barbara signs off on the scheme.

Nancy quickly comes to learn that Brian’s a jittery, secretive kid covered in a whole helluva lot of bruises. “I fell down,” he offers weakly. “Must have been a bad fall,” Nancy presses him. “I guess I’m pretty clumsy,” he replies. “That’s what my mom says.” Barbara says a lot about Brian, none of it pleasant. She frequently complains that he doesn’t listen to or obey her, and misrepresents him to his new babysitter as “quite a handful.” When angry at her sons, she unfavorably compares them to their father, her ex-husband.

The ex never makes an appearance, but Mike tells Nancy “I don’t miss the arguments they had.” When asked about his mother’s behavior towards Brian, he makes excuses: “She’s under a lot of pressure, so she gets upset.” Nancy sees some of this herself, particularly on her first day with Brian. When she warmly asks Barbara how her first day at work went, Mrs. Reynolds snaps: “Awful. I’ve never had a job before. I thought being a telephone operator was going to be easy. I feel like I need an extra set of hands.”

She also casually mentions she’s starving herself after Nancy says she put a casserole in the oven. (If that sounds a little familiar, it’s because Duke tackled unhealthy weight loss two years earlier in Before and After, which we’ll get around to here this summer.) Later, “hanger” seems to get the best of her before she shakes and shouts at Brian. It’s a cringeworthy scene not because of the acting (Duke throws herself into it), but because of the implication that a Snickers bar might’ve spared her son a beating.

Nancy: You’ll feel better after you eat and relax.

Barbara: Thanks, but I’m not eating.

Nancy: Why not?

Barbara: I’ve gotta get rid of some of this weight. I’m not going to eat again until I absolutely can’t stand it anymore.

Nancy: Sounds kind of extreme.

Barbara: Well, that’s the only way I can diet. All or nothing.

Nancy: I’d probably die if I did that.

please don’t hit me, mom (1981)

Nancy’s suspicions about what’s happening in the Reynolds home reach a boil during a field trip to a children’s hospital, when a kindly doctor (Leah Kates) interacts with a mute patient whose severe beatings necessitated brain surgery. Afterward, she confides in her supportive parents, and to Judy, and is moved to visit the doctor again to ask some very Afterschool Special questions about abusive households. Only then does she feel empowered to take charge of the situation by calling Child Protective Services.

Patty Duke gives an intense performance in this slight, 45-minute presentation directed by Gwen Arner. McKeon’s a bright, relatable lead, and Sean Astin, who was 10 at the time, knew what it was like to withdraw and shield oneself in response to a volatile parent—and then comfort her. My qualm is with the conclusion of Jeri Taylor’s teleplay, which includes this exchange when Barbara finally breaks down and sees the error of her ways:

Barbara: I don’t want to hurt you anymore. Any of you. Oh God, I need help.

Brian: I’ll help.

Mike: Yeah, we all will.

Please don’t hit me, mom (1981)

Barbara then tearfully prays that the CPS social worker will help make things better. Feel free to say “It’s just a TV movie,” but it was aimed at kids, and I question the wisdom of presenting child abuse as a problem for children to pitch in and help solve, as if the family is simply cleaning out a garage.

Programming Note: Mother’s Day Marathon

This review kicks off our 2022 Mother’s Day Marathon feature. We’ll add more films throughout the week and you can click here for more information.

Streaming and DVD availability

Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom isn’t currently available on DVD, though bootlegs sometimes appear online. It’s not on any streaming platforms as of this writing, other than a very grainy VHS transfer on YouTube.

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… But wait, there’s more!

In her memoir In the Presence of Greatness, Patty Duke devotes a chapter to her son, Sean Astin. It begins:

I was adamant that none of my children ever enter into show business, probably because of some of the bad experiences I had as a child actor. From about the age of six, Sean kept saying, “Mommy, let me do it! Mommy, let me do it!” Truth be told, Sean was a pain in the ass with all of his begging.

When Sean was ten, I got an offer to do a television special called “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom” (1981) about an abusive mother and her child. The bell went off, and I said, “Oh my God, maybe acting really is what he wants, and maybe he can get to see that it’s not such a piece of cake.

Patty duke, in the presence of greatness

She explains that she “did a naughty thing” and asked producers to audition Sean:

I told them they didn’t have to give him the part, that I’d do it one way or the other. Of course they were just in their glory, having a real-life mother and child to play the roles. The kid auditioned brilliantly because this was the kind of life he was living at home.

Beside the fact that Sean is a good actor, I was very abusive at that time when I would go into one of my manias, the ugly parts of my manias, particularly. I was verbally abusive and, eventually, physically abusive, as well. So, this boy actually gave a Method performance, drawing from his own experiences.

Patty duke, in the presence of greatness

Duke, who died in 2016, shares a bit more about the making of the film, and expounds on Sean’s career. As a gay bonus, she devotes a couple pages to By Design, a now-forgotten lesbian film from 1981. (If you scroll to the “…But Wait, There’s More!” section of my Fatal Memories review, it was briefly referenced there.) While discussing it, she expresses her longstanding support of the gay community and notes that her Billie (1965) “could have been either straight or a lesbian.”