ABSTRACT
Expanding the context for the development and exercise of the virtues, the author moves from the dyadic interaction found in the romantic friendship of African Queen to the larger context of family. In Ron Howard's film Parenthood, the author examines the dialectic interplay between parents and children, as the process of child–rearing affects the virtues and vices of both. The complex virtue that enables parents to deal successfully with their children in a changing, sometimes threatening, world is a kind of interpersonal adaptability. Parenthood shows why social adaptability is valuable throughout the radical alterations that occur during the parent-child relationship and into the child's adulthood. Interpersonal adaptability, attentiveness, and humility are the moral virtues of parenthood central to the film. But Parenthood also does a good job of showing how an array of auxiliary, non–moral virtues supports the central virtues.
