Returning home to an ineffectual father (Mr. Balaban) is out.

Though their ineffectual father seems vaguely sympathetic to their plight, he never stands up to their tyrannical mother.

"Or at least, they weren't so visible," said Mr. Zahn, who ages 15 years and goes through heroin withdrawal in the role of a well-meaning but ineffectual father of a young boy.

She is on very good terms with her ineffectual, but loving father (John Rapley), but not with her critical, abrasively selfish mother (June Brown).

Nourished, braced, standing firm, Betty asks that the world come at her, and come it does: fink boyfriend, vain sister, ineffectual father, trampy neighbor.

A controlling mother who can't let him go, a sweet but ineffectual father, and a sister whose two children and unemployed husband are also a burden.

Dismissing Anne's vehement protests, the Queen is delighted, a feeling not shared by Anne's loving but ineffectual father.

And like Jeremy, he has an ineffectual father, who covers sports for a suburban California newspaper and obsessively rehashes details of the Rosenberg trial in his free time.

"I'm knocked up," she tells her loving but ineffectual father.

Sylvester, for example, grows up to be an ineffectual father and husband.