Susan Heffley (Diary of a Wimpy Kid)

Susan Heffley is Greg, Rodrick, and Manny's mother. She is also a major character in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise.

Why She's (Intentionally?) A Clueless and Obnoxious Mother

 * 1) Susan is an overprotective and clueless mother who is very much against technology:
 * 2) *In Rodrick Rules, Greg’s friend Rowley injures himself, and he was practising magic for a talent show with a first-grader named Scotty Douglas. Greg did not want to fill in for Rowley after this incident, yet Susan says that he’d love to go and forces him to fill in.
 * 3) *She is overly obsessed with being together as a family, as shown in books such as The Long Haul.
 * 4) *Another thing she’s obsessed with is making a trip somewhere educational:
 * 5) **In The Long Haul, one time Greg and his family were on a trip to his Gramma’s house, and one of her cats scratches him. Susan, instead of treating his injured hand, decides to instead teach him how to spell “cat”.
 * 6) ** In The Deep End, while they were riding in the RV, she locks Greg and Rodrick’s devices in a container and instead tells them to play an educational Bingo game.
 * 7) *Speaking of being obsessed with being together as a family, she gets lots of bad information from a magazine called “Family Frolic”.
 * 8) She does nothing to protect Greg from his older brother Rodrick, who always blackmails, deceives and poorly treats him.
 * 9) She also spoils Greg’s brother Manny to death and almost never disciplines him.
 * 10) She constantly embarrasses Greg as shown in most of the books.
 * 11) *She embarrassed Greg by handing over her coat at school.
 * 12) She lets Greg's spoiled brother get away with everything like drawing on Greg's wall, not punishing Manny at all, and letting him get away with almost freezing the entire Heffley family in Cabin Fever.
 * 13) She is also a hypocrite:
 * 14) * Susan got onto Greg in Rodrick Rules the Invisible Chirag prank that he and a lot of other boys pulled because he lied about it and made sure he never told another lie again for a while, yet she isn't exactly female honest Abe Herself, as she has told some lies herself throughout the books.
 * 15) **In fact, she even asked Greg to lie over a phone call that she wasn't home, thought it backfired when Greg, not wanting to lie again, asked her to step outside the house so he technically would be telling the truth, resulting in her presumably going back on her word.
 * 16) *She chastises Greg and Rowley for trying to sell water to the volunteers at the town park cleanup, claiming they are taking advantage of people sacrificing their weekend, yet when the Girl Scouts start selling cookies, Susan is the first customer in line to buy some. (Though to be fair, Greg and Rowley only showed up to sell water and not to help out, while the Girl Scouts actually volunteered to clean up the park.)
 * 17) *In that same book, she even petitions for the town to voluntarily unplug for 48 hours, yet when Greg runs away from the cleanup with a kid named Frew and a community service inmate named Billy, Susan uses her cell phone to track him via a tracker planted on his shoelace.
 * 18) She is the reason the Heffley's are on disastrous vacations in The Long Haul, The Getaway, and The Deep End are vacations that caused Frank to lose his boat and the family losing almost all of their stuff, the family getting hated at a luxurious place, and almost causing Greg to get in trouble with the camp director. Yet she still wants to have family bonding time, showing she has learned nothing from the past experiences.
 * 19) In The Long Haul book, she lets Manny keep the pig even though she should have known that pigs cause lots of problems.
 * 20) *Although in Susan's defense, she wanted to win the pig for fun, and didn't know she'd actually keep it as a pet. She tried explaining why she needs to reject the prized pig because it'll cause problems in their vacation, but people running the contest are having none of it.
 * 21) In The Last Straw, Susan shows no emotion when Rodrick swears at her while Manny does that.
 * 22) She is very unlikable in the book Dog Days.
 * 23) In The Long Haul movie, Susan was at her absolute worst, first of all, she was nothing like the other films. Alicia Silverstone gave a threatening performance and wasn't like Rachael Harris who gave the character a sweet performance, and secondly, she does many infuriating moments, which include:
 * 24) *Taking away her family's phone.
 * 25) * Not telling Greg and/or Rodrick that she had already pack healthy food, which leads into her pulling a cheap move by given them it when the latter ask if they could stop by to eat.
 * 26) *Embarrassed Greg at the expo and grounded him for life.
 * 27) * Near the end of the film, Susan embarrasses Greg, and shows no concerns about his sadness.
 * 28) Not only does she embarrass Greg, but she is also shown to have embarrass other people too, for example, in "Rodrick Rules", she started dancing during Rodrick's concert, which embarrassed him all over the entire internet.
 * 29) She gave Greg the advice to make the right choice and then gave him stupid advice to ruin his reputation.
 * 30) In Dog Days, she tries to make a reading club for Greg and the rest of the neighborhood, ultimately embarrassing Greg yet again.
 * 31) She also never believes Rodrick or Greg (mostly Greg). An example would be in the Rodrick Rules movie, in an animated scene, in which an obscure cat the Heffleys own named Frisky, pushed off a lamp, breaking it. As a result, Manny told Susan that "Bubby (Greg) did it", causing Susan to be mad at him.
 * 32) She thinks Manny's imaginative friends are real (although, to be fair, she didn't want to make Manny upset by telling him his friends weren't real), and she takes it too far. For example, when Manny broke a plate, he told Susan that Johnny Cheddar did it, and instead of punishing Manny for lying and breaking a plate, she punished Johnny.
 * 33) Another example of how unlikable she is in The Long Haul movie is the scene where Greg almost gets hit by a car and looks at what she said  Be more careful! You almost woke up Manny!. This scene shows how bad of a mother Susan is.
 * 34) She ruined Greg's chance of being with his crush, Holly Hills.
 * 35) *She even messed up Greg's friendship with Rowley too.
 * 36) Most of the time, she relies her parenting on opinionated parenting magazines as an only source of advice and discipline and also tells her how to do her job rather than teaching her kids the good lessons that they need herself, in which case, proves that Susan isn't exactly ready to be a parent.
 * 37) *She even returned an Action Walker that Greg really liked just because she read an article that prevents kids from learning to walk.
 * 38) She forces people to do things based on what she and Manny like. This proves that she can't let people do exactly what they want to do and constantly over spoils Manny too much.
 * 39) *In addition to that and as mentioned in BQ#10, in Old School, she forced a petition for people to sign to go without technology for at least 48 hours/2 days by her standards.
 * 40) *While her bonding options seem like good ideas, that doesn’t mean that you force people into doing it just because you want to.
 * 41) *She even made up a new system known as "Screen-Free Weekends", where she doesn't allow Greg, Rodrick, and Manny to use screens on Saturday and Sundays just because she thinks screens are what makes them misbehave. When in actuality, it's her and Frank's fault due to their terrible ideas. This results in Greg and Rodrick intentionally misbehaving on weekends to try and convince her that they aren't working, with Manny joining in as well, presumably because he wanted to do whatever his older brothers were doing.
 * 42) In “Wrecking Ball”, she always stalls people who criticize her furniture, proving that she can't handle criticism.
 * 43) *In fact, a little bit after this, she ends her friendship with Mrs. Laghari all because she criticized her furniture.
 * 44) She even threw a paper flower away, which poor Greg made when he was young.
 * 45) She is extremely impatient. For example, when on vacation trips, she always takes pictures of random people and puts them in her family’s photo album, which proves that she hates standing for a long time, in addition to that, she even forged a signature of the author of one of Greg's favorite book (which forgery is a criminal offense), just because of the wait time.
 * 46) In “Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure”, Rowley cried because Greg didn't find Rowley's tap-dancing good and instead of just talking to him on what is an opinion, she took his side and punished Greg, proving that when it comes to people that Greg is friends with, she always takes their side.
 * 47) She killed Greg's pet fish, due to her putting Rodrick's fish in the same bowl as Greg's because she thought Greg's bowl was cleaner.
 * 48) In the Third Wheel, instead of sharing a crib with Rodrick, she forced Greg (when he was a baby) to sleep on the top drawer, which is a large safety hazard for Greg in which case could've killed him.
 * 49) *Another example of when something very dangerous happened to Greg was when she put a bar of soap in Greg's mouth because he spelled a swear word that Rodrick said. While it is justified, it is a bit too dangerous to do that.
 * 50) In "Double Down", when Greg bought a bunch of stuff for himself at a book fair, she made him return all the stuff he got and made him get books, making it clear how overbearing she is.
 * 51) It's mentioned that she doesn't let Frank buy anything without her permission and that she gets mad at him when he does, yet again showing how controlling she is.
 * 52) One word! Karen. She commits these unlawful crimes and she just embarrasses Greg and Rodrick so badly. She just pretends that her husband Frank is a neat freak and an unloving father and she likes Manny and wants to be his evil side and she just hates technology where these could be the reasons Greg got his sociopathic behavior.
 * 53) *Speaking of letting Manny get away, she even spoils Rowley too.
 * 54) She hates when things don’t go her way.
 * 55) *She hates being wrong.
 * 56) She made decisions for her family while not letting them make their own decisions.
 * 57) She is very cynical as she only likes people who has the same interest like her.
 * 58) For no reason, she wants to find role models who has the same interest like her for Greg, even though Rowley is technically Greg's role model.
 * 59) When people bully Greg, she doesn't stop them and gets angry at Greg instead of the people who bully Greg. She has a bad habit of misjudging people around her, due to seeing what she wants to see.
 * 60) She gets in Greg's way and ruins the events.
 * 61) She's a psuedo-boomer, as she fails to live in the present time and she wants to live in the 1950s.
 * 62) Speaking of getting her and her family into disastrous vacations, she has terrible planning skills and she has no idea what she's doing which causes trouble for her family.
 * 63) She cares too much about what others think of her and she wants her and her family to be the face of modern family of this generations; however, it fails terribly and she gets angry about it instead of being happy of herself and not caring what others think.
 * 64) In Rodrick Rules, Susan's mom bucks was a terrible idea unlike most parents' money system, and it caused Greg and Rodrick to cheat her system.
 * 65) *In The Long Haul, she forces her family to learn Spanish (which Manny had learned) when she is literally terrible at speaking Spanish, for example, she made Greg think that Te amo (which is Spanish for "I love you") is "What's your name?", which even Greg felt embarrassed about it.
 * 66) She was really terrible at Christmastime and here's what happened: Manny Heffley wants tons of toys for Christmas and writes a letter to Santa. Susan gets the toys and wraps them up in presents. However, she mixed up her family's presents again and gave it to charity.
 * 67) She is sometimes the reason for Greg getting bullied at school, such as when she told the people going to Greg's party to give him books against his will, not only did this effectively ruin Greg's birthday party, but a bunch of other moms ended up doing the same things, which caused people to blame Greg for this, turning him into a punching bag even though he was innocent.
 * 68) She's also pretty oblivious as well at times. Not only does she constantly unknowingly embarrass Greg, get him bullied, and ruin his friendships and potential relationships as mentioned before, but she also gets a lot of things wrong, such as assembling a photo album that gets a bunch of details incorrect, but even calls it the "Best Summer Ever", when it was anything but it.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) These can be mostly blamed on Gramma Heffley, Susan's mom, as she was responsible for Susan being a horrible parent.
 * 2) * Her mother seems to have no respect at all and to rub salt to the wound, she shows favoritism towards the family's pet dog Sweetie.
 * 3) *Plus, she's at least nowhere near as bad as her mother.
 * 4) She is able to be a caring mother when she wants or has to.
 * 5) In the first three Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies (especially the 2021 movie), her character is much more relatable and likable.
 * 6) Rachael Harris (live-action) and Erica Cerra (voice) did a good job portraying her as a good mother.
 * 7) She helps her children at times.
 * 8) Although she rarely grounds Manny for his behavior, Susan has shown sometimes that she is willing to correct or reprimand Manny if his behavior isn't the best, as shown in Rodrick Rules when she talks with Manny and convinces him to make a gift to Greg (though a really useless and dangerous one, a spiked aluminum ball which ends up hurting Rowley) for breaking his console and while she doesn't punish Manny for nearly getting all of them killed in Cabin Fever, she isn't shown to be happy with him when she ties him up to his shoes
 * 9) Additionally, she does actually have a point where she tells her children to be a lot more mature and responsible (another example of decent parenting).
 * 10) Sometimes she means well with her ideas and has every right to try to convince Greg to spend more time outside the house so he can enjoy summer instead of spending all day at the house playing video games.
 * 11) She gives Greg and Rodrick lots of advice to help them such as the time in Hard Luck where Greg was feeling sad that Rowley isn't his friend anymore.
 * 12) Diary of a Wimpy Kid would probably not be as good as it is without her.
 * 13) Her design can be seen as cute to some people (both the live action movies and the 2021 movie).

Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt_Wno2_yXg&t=19s