Few people, if any, would claim that raising children is easy. And while moving your young family out of a major city and into a small town with a strong sense of community can seem, on paper, to be a winning decision, it can come with some unexpected complications. Just as an example, say your son develops a worrying obsession with the paranormal, or your daughter decides she wants to become a journalist and keeps starting riots among the elderly so that she has interesting stories to cover for her school newspaper.
Marshall insists that what he's doing constitutes scientific investigation, and Syndi swears that pensioners in Eerie are just unusually high strung, but there's a disturbance at the Bingo Parlour every single time she stops in and Mars refused to participate in his school's penpal exchange because there might be ghosts sealed in some of the envelopes, so it's hard not to see it as a couple of uprooted teens acting out.
There's also the fact that half the kids in your children's classes seem to have no parents worth the name, to the point where it's harder to remember not to make a third packed lunch to give to the little boy next door on Monday mornings, and sometimes you have to stop yourself from mowing down the Holmes when they cross the street in front of you as you wait for the lights to change.
Maybe the horrible parenting is a reaction to the number of children who go missing after being spotted near the scene of an incident at the Eerie Dog Pound, or who are killed by milk trucks that routinely speed down Main Street, as if the world has such an urgent need for milk and stuff that it trumps basic road safety, or just vanish one day, leaving nothing behind but a laundry room covered in half-finished sketches.
Whatever the cause, when you're waiting to be seated at the Eerie Bus Terminal and Supper Club on a Saturday evening, and the family with two red-haired little girls in front of you are holding tight to their eldest daughter and exclaiming how good it is to have her back and how much they missed her and love her, your first thought isn't "Thank God a lost child has been recovered safely," but rather, "Thank God somebody else in this town actually gives a shit about their offspring."
When you get back home, your eldest is attempting to make tuna casserole in the kitchen and when you hug her tight and tell her how much she means to you, how proud you are of her and how you hope she knows she can tell you anything, any time, she's confused and a little awkward but returns your hug and wishes you goodnight. Your youngest is watching TV with his friends and he squirms with embarrassment and mutters "Jeez, Dad, go away!" when you kiss him goodnight.
As you're heading up the stairs, you can hear Marshall's little goth friend mutter, "You're an asshole, Teller," and you wonder how many more kids like him and Simon and Tod McNulty there are out there in the night, and the next morning you suggest to your wife that it might be nice to have the Donners over for dinner one night.