Nanny McPhee Movie Reaction

“When you need me, I stay..when you want me yet you need me no more, then I must leave”
--Nanny McPhee

Not too long after his wife's death, widower Cedric Brown is at his wits' end about how to go on bringing up his seven children with the assistance of a nanny. Rowdy, destructive, disobedient, quarrelsome, disrespectful, they have so far managed to scare the wits out of 17 nannies. Since then, no employment agency nor any caregiver is willing to fill the vacancy. This is when Mr. Brown reads an ad and begins to hear a voice about hiring a Nanny McPhee, but she is nowhere to be found. Suddenly she appears on the desperate father's doorstep, a rather scary, weird-looking and stern woman. However the children are not that easily intimidated and are ready to do what they could to send her out of their life. This time the children have met their match.
She does an impressive job of being McPhee, the nanny who needs to be stern and unmoving, if the children are to learn what is good and right. The father is just as convincing as the bumbling, hesitant and helpless dad who never learned how to relate to his children. The cast of children contributed their part as the disobedient and unruly "fiends", always acting in unison. Contributing to Mr. Brown's difficulty with his children, are the insufficiency of his means to support the seven of them, and the command of his Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury) that he must marry within a month or she would not only stop helping him with child support and but also drop him as heir to her estate.
The lack of a mother is emphasized by the deficiencies of a father who did not have to deal with the children when she was around. Thus he is helpless when he needs to relate to them--he does not know how. In a common family setting, we often assign the task of caring for the children to the mother and that father's, one the other hand, are out of this job. Fathers, therefore, tend to be less attached with their children than mothers do.
Irregardless of gender roles in the family, children need affection, attention, and love from either parent. In the story, the father does not see that the children miss and want him to be there for them. There is an implication in the story that parents are irresponsible when they have many children. The father, due to this “large” number of mouths to feed, becomes preoccupied on finding ways to still be able to feed them the next days without realizing that “food” does not only refer to what is digested in the stomache. Because the father's main concern would be on sustaining his children's physical need, for, in most society, the father is always a breadwinner. The negative things that the children do in their very naughtiness--like tying up the cook, turning the whole kitchen upside down, open defiance and utter rudeness to elder—only shows that the major cause of deliquency among children is the lack of love and attention.
With her magical walking stick, Nanny McPhee does something beyond the normal to teach the children to behave. This is not spectacular Harry Potter type magic, however--it is used more as an allegorical device to demonstrate that in real life, parents need an extraordinary degree of righteousness, firmness and love in order to mold their children into upright and responsible human beings.