I took my toddler to see the new 'PAW Patrol' movie. She adored it, and I saw myself in the pups.

The dad of two took his oldest child to see the new "PAW Patrol" movie. He saw himself in the characters, and in the tired faces of other parents.

• The new "PAW Patrol" movie debuted the first weekend in October at the top of the box office. 
• I took my toddler daughter to see it because she loves the mighty pups so much. 
• I saw myself in every parent who was in the theater, looking tired like myself. 

Before we had kids, my wife and I were screen-time purists — but it's easy to be a purist about parenting before you're a parent.

Then our daughter turned 2, we had another child on the way, and we were working and tired and overwhelmed, and as so often happens, we let a deranged Canadian children's show take root in our lives. Rather than blame me, I'm going to blame my daughter's day care classmate, a French boy who wore lots of long-sleeved T-shirts from this show and liked to say, "Je suis Ryder."

In case you somehow haven't been within 100 miles of a child in the past decade, Ryder is the spiky-haired prepubescent leader of the "PAW Patrol," a gang of search-and-rescue dogs whose eponymous show airs on Nick Jr.

My daughter loves the show

Ryder has no last name, no parents to speak of, and no authority above him. The safety and social fabric of Adventure City, a Tokyo-scale megalopolis seemingly of at least 10 million souls, are entirely reliant on Ryder's billion-dollar weaponry and nap schedule. My daughter can't get enough.

What speaks to her about "PAW Patrol?" "Cuz cuz cuz cuz," she begins, as she does when she's emphatic about her response. "Cuz the pups are so good at saving the day."

So, of course, for her first movie in a theater, we took her to see "PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie," which debuted last weekend at the top of the box office. I'm told this should feel like a moral failure of parenting. It felt fine to me and felt rapturous to my nearly 3-year-old kid.

This 10-year-old character is always saving the day

The hero of every single "PAW Patrol" storyline — which now includes two movies and over 230 TV episodes, and creator Keith Chapman has suggested another decade of episodes are to come — is privatized, tech-driven law enforcement.

In the "PAW Patrol" universe, the state is virtually nonexistent. Ryder is every citizen's first and only call in any emergency, be it exploding gas tanks, election theft, or meteors hurtling toward Earth. Rather than attend the 4th grade, he lives and works with his six pups in The Lookout, a tower with an actual cop slide in the heart of the city.

In the show and especially in the "Mighty Pups" movie, law and order in Adventure City is wholly contingent upon Ryder making grandiloquent speeches about duty to his pups as he works them to the bone. "My job is to keep you safe," he says to his cockapoo, Skye. Ten minutes later, he dispatches her to throw her four-pound body into not one but about 400 flaming meteors. Ryder also has an endless arsenal of futuristic vehicles and surveillance tools: to name a few in the "Mighty Pups" movie alone, he has an aircraft carrier, a meteor-detecting watch, a drop-top cop car, and a pink-rocket-fueled supersonic jet that would vaporize an F-35. How this one child has the budget of the entire Department of Defense is never explained.

And this billionaire boy despot is a near-daily fixture and revered figure in my toddler's life. I mean, sure, that does feel a wee bit like negligent parenting. Maybe I should be getting tips on fatherhood from Bluey's dad, Bandit.

I see myself in the show

There's someone else I see in Ryder: myself and all parents.

These days, Ryder, Marshall, Rubble, Chase, Rocky, Zuma, and Skye look after my toddler most weekdays from about 5 to 5:30 p.m., sometimes 6 p.m., and sometimes in the morning scramble, too. Flicking on Apple TV, I always feel deficient, like this is a colossal shortcoming of my own time management and how there are about 80,000 more nutritive things to be doing.

But when I see Ryder and the dogs fumbling to respond to yet another crisis, I identify with their world-on-their-shoulders demeanors. I identify with their hackneyed, endlessly repeated jokes. Like any parent, they're too damn tired for original material. More than anything, the bizarro society of Paw Patrol is a mirror to the Western society that has lost the village that used to raise its children, where most everything now relies on parents and their ability to work and earn enough to buy a semblance of a village.

In our sold-out theater, the look on every single parent's face I saw suggested it had been a long, arduous journey to get to the AMC theater. They reclined into the red leather seats, more than ready to sit in a dark room for 88 minutes.

My editor's friend, who took her sons to see the film, said "PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie" was the best nap of her life. You won't find a better review for a movie from a parent in 2023.