Surprised No-one Has Mentioned... *Poss Spoilers*
...the obvious Science vs Religion, Mum vs Dad thing..
The result? In the end........
both are useless when you come up against demon kids!!!
To be fair, the mother was a psychologist, and psychology is just a soft science. A physicist would have won ;)
sharethat's funny, and you're right; both religion and psych**y have too many irrational/mutable elements.
hard science relies on detached, rational thought and observations, like "hey honey, the pets seem to be missing," and "i sure am spending a lot of time and effort pretending to be happy."
"Ugh! I don't like this." --Ambrose Bierce
Or "Studies show that children who torture animals are likely to graduate to humans; the common procedure for dealing with such children is getting their little behinds into a hospital fast."
I saw the possibility that the parents were equally as weird as the kids. The woman was a self professed doctor. No degrees on the wall of her 'home-office'. The father wore a collar as yet ANOTHER costume. The whole family was nuts.
Smoke me a kipper. I’ll be back for breakfast
She was a psychiatrist - she prescribed medication for the kids.
Thus, she went to medical school and was a doctor of medicine.
PSYCHOLOGY is more subjective - but treatments with medicine are more empirical and quantitative. Medicinal treatment hs been studied for a long time in terms of psychiatry. (Though, opinion will still differ among different doctors...but that happens with ANY kind of doctor).
However, there are some treatments within behavioral therapy (psychology) that have been studied extensively but people still seem to brush those therapies aside as "soft science". Psychology can really differ depending on the individual you go to for treatment (take my fiance for example - he went to a psychologist and got hypnotherapy and "treatment for his aura" ....whatever the hell that means). Psychiatry...not as much.
I think the parents seemed like very nice, positive people who loved their kids and were desperately trying to provide a happy, supportive environment. But they were in serious denial about how warped the kids were.
They thought they could fix everything with love, religion, psychiatry, time together, games and celebrations. It seemed from the dialogue like they had already had fairly serious problem and had bought the country home for a more wholesome family environment to start over.
They were in serious denial about how bad things were and what the kids were really like. When things went from bad to worse they just continued with their usual strategies and hoped for the best. A lot of people are like that to one extent or the other. They were an extreme example of a common human failing.