You can't "pull rank" until you create and hand out some ranks!
Comments
One thing I love about this show is that the kids are as emotionally immature as kids really would be, unlike in most anime with child protagonists.
I'm not sure if the nuclear family had collapsed as much in Japan by 1980 as it had in the USA; googling it, divorce rates had sharply risen by 1980 but they'd only got to 20% of marriages, while it was double that in the USA. Given how fast it had risen it would probably still have been concerning.