Growing Pains Characters: The Whole Seaver House

Wednesday night, ABC, and a house on Long Island where the dad worked out of a home office and the son could not stay out of trouble for eleven straight minutes. If you were a kid in 1985, you did not watch the Seavers so much as move in with them.

The Growing Pains characters are the Seaver family of Huntington, Long Island: psychiatrist father Jason, journalist mother Maggie, and their kids Mike, Carol, Ben, and later Chrissy, plus Mike’s friend Boner Stabone and, in the final season, a homeless teenager named Luke Brower played by a fifteen-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. Created by Neal Marlens, the show ran on ABC for seven seasons and 166 episodes, from September 24, 1985, to April 25, 1992. Here is everybody in that house, and the thing most people forget about each of them.

The Seavers

• Dr. Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke): the dad, and the whole reason the show exists. Jason Roland Seaver is a Boston College graduate with a doctorate in psychology who practiced at Long Island General Hospital, then moved his practice into the house so his wife could go back to work. He also volunteered at the local free clinic. The thing casual fans forget: before he was television’s model father, Thicke was a songwriter credited on theme songs for other people’s shows, including Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, and the original Wheel of Fortune theme. He came to Growing Pains straight off the collapse of his own syndicated late-night talk show, Thicke of the Night, and by the final season he was an executive producer on the series itself.
• Maggie Seaver (Joanna Kerns): Margaret Katherine Seaver, born Malone, the reason Jason works out of the den. Maggie met Jason at Boston College, majored in child psychology before switching to journalism, and had been a researcher at Newsweek before she married. She goes back to work as a reporter for the Long Island Daily Herald and for the television news program Action News on Channel 19, and she keeps using her maiden name professionally because that is the name she made in journalism before she married. The thing casual fans forget: Kerns directed on Growing Pains while she was still starring in it, got hooked, and turned directing into her second career. She has since directed episodes of ER, Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, Pretty Little Liars, The Goldbergs, This Is Us, and Fuller House.
• Mike Seaver (Kirk Cameron): the oldest kid, the ladies’ man, the schemer, and the reason half the plots happen. Michael Aaron Seaver coasts through Dewey High on charm, cycles through an incredible run of jobs (waiter at the World of Burgers, salesman at the Stereo Village, car wash attendant, night man at a convenience store, singing waiter at Sullivan’s Tavern), wants to be an actor, enrolls at Alf Landon Junior College and later Boyton State College, and eventually, improbably, becomes a teacher of remedial studies at a community health center. The role made Cameron a teen heartthrob and earned him two Golden Globe nominations. The thing casual fans forget: Mike’s girlfriend Kate MacDonald was played by Chelsea Noble, whom Cameron married in 1991, and his sister Candace played D.J. Tanner on Full House, where Cameron himself guest-starred in 1988 as her cousin Steve. After Growing Pains ended he starred in the WB sitcom Kirk, which premiered in 1995 and ended two years later.
• Carol Seaver (Tracey Gold): the honors student, the one with the actual future. Caroline Anne Seaver was a 1988 Homecoming Queen candidate and president of the Future Nuclear Physicists Club at Dewey High, went to Columbia to her parents’ mild disappointment (they wanted their alma mater, Boston College), dropped out to work as a computer page breaker at GSM Publishing, then went back to Columbia for law and worked alongside her father at the free clinic. The thing casual fans forget: Gold auditioned for Carol and lost. The part went to Elizabeth Ward, who had starred alongside Gold in the 1983 ABC Afterschool Special The Hand-Me-Down Kid. Test audiences did not find Ward suited to the role, Gold promptly replaced her, and Ward’s scenes in the original pilot were reshot with Gold for the broadcast version.
• Ben Seaver (Jeremy Miller): the little brother, and a full-time Mike Seaver apprentice. His name is Benjamin Hubert Horatio Humphrey Seaver, which is a lot of name for a kid whose business ventures ran to a newspaper delivery route and an attempt to manage a rap group. He went to the same elementary and high school as his siblings and treated his older brother’s worst instincts as a curriculum. The thing casual fans forget: Miller won a Young Artist Award for the role in 1985, for Best Young Supporting Actor in a New Television Series, in the show’s first season.
• Chrissy Seaver (Ashley Johnson and the Dohring twins): the fourth Seaver, born at the beginning of season 4, one day after Ben’s twelfth birthday. Chrissy was played as a newborn by two uncredited sets of twin sisters, then as a toddler by alternating twins Kirsten and Kelsey Dohring, and then, for seasons 6 and 7, her age was advanced to five years old and Ashley Johnson took over. The thing casual fans forget: Johnson grew up into a two-time BAFTA-winning video game performer. She provided the voice and motion capture for Ellie in The Last of Us, The Last of Us: Left Behind, and The Last of Us Part II, winning two BAFTA Games Awards for the role, for the first game and Left Behind, and she played Ellie’s mother, Anna, when The Last of Us was adapted for the screen. She also played Patterson on NBC’s Blindspot from 2015 to 2020.
• Luke Brower (Leonardo DiCaprio): the last addition, and the one nobody saw coming. In the seventh and final season, Luke is a homeless teenager who has been masquerading as a student at the high school where Mike is substitute teaching, and Mike talks the family into taking him in. DiCaprio was fifteen when he was cast, brought aboard in a bid to appeal to teenage female viewers the same way Cameron had years earlier. He earned a Young Artist Award nomination for the role. The thing casual fans forget: Luke gets written out toward the end of season 7 so DiCaprio could start work on This Boy’s Life. Joanna Kerns remembered him as “especially intelligent and disarming for his age,” but also mischievous on set.
• Boner Stabone (Andrew Koenig): Richard Milhous “Boner” Stabone, Mike’s friend and co-conspirator through the first four seasons, written out when the character left to join the United States Marine Corps. The thing casual fans forget: Koenig was the son of Walter Koenig, who played Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek. Andrew Koenig died in February 2010, at 41. He had been reported missing in Vancouver, and after police found his body in Stanley Park on February 25, his father told reporters at a news conference that his son had taken his own life, and that he had been suffering from clinical depression. Walter Koenig used that same conference to ask anyone in that condition not to ignore the illness and to seek help.

The Rest of the House

Seven years is long enough to build a neighborhood around a family. Kate MacDonald (Chelsea Noble) arrived in season 5 as Mike’s girlfriend from Alf Landon Junior College. Eddie Ziff (K. C. Martel) hung around Mike for the full run, and Stinky Sullivan (Jamie Abbott) filled the same job for Ben across seasons 2 through 6. Principal Willis DeWitt (Sam Anderson) started out as Mike’s history teacher in season 1 and got promoted to run the school from season 2 on, which is a rough deal for a man whose job now included managing Mike Seaver. Maggie’s parents, Ed and Kate Malone, were played by Gordon Jump and Betty McGuire, and Jason’s mother Irma was played by Jane Powell.

Two more recurring names still surprise people. Julie Costello (Julie McCullough) was hired by Jason as Chrissy’s nanny in season 4 and became Mike’s girlfriend. And in that same fourth season, Carol’s love interest Sandy was played by a young Matthew Perry, in a three-episode arc that ends with Sandy dying after a drunk-driving accident. This was a Wednesday night family comedy, and it did that.

Remember when the family stood in front of the house in the opening credits, and one of them always lagged a beat behind before following everybody inside? In seasons 2 and 3 it was Jason, every time. In seasons 4 and 5 the show started rotating which Seaver got left standing there. You probably never consciously noticed it, and you would absolutely notice if it were gone.

What the Show Was Carrying

Two things happened behind that front door that the episodes could not hold.

Tracey Gold gained some weight over the hiatus between seasons 3 and 4, and the season 4 scripts responded by making Carol the target of fat jokes from her brothers, for many episodes in a row. Gold wrote about what followed in her 2003 memoir Room to Grow: An Appetite for Life. Her eating disorder deepened over the next few years, she was admitted to a hospital for treatment in early 1992, and she was suspended from the show during season 7, with Carol written into a studying-abroad-in-London storyline to cover the absence. She came back for the show’s final episodes, including the two-part finale, recovered, and then played the lead in the 1994 television movie For the Love of Nancy, drawing on her own experience with anorexia.

And starting around season 6, Jeremy Miller, who was about fourteen, began receiving letters from an older male stalker. The man was later arrested and convicted on stalking charges.

The Theme Song and the Spin-off

“As Long As We Got Each Other” was written by John Bettis and composed by Steve Dorff, and it changed shape almost every year. B. J. Thomas sang it alone for season 1, then with Jennifer Warnes for much of the rest of the run, and with Dusty Springfield over a rock orchestration for season 4. It picked up a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Music and Lyrics in 1986. Season 6 and four episodes of season 7 used an a cappella version by an uncredited quartet, and that is the version that opens the series finale.

The show also threw off a spin-off almost nobody remembers: Just the Ten of Us, built around Coach Graham Lubbock (Bill Kirchenbauer), the gym teacher at Mike and Carol’s high school, who gets fired and moves his enormous family to California to teach at an all-boys Catholic school. And in September 1992, five months after Growing Pains ended, Alan Thicke turned up as himself in the pilot of Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, in a scene that joked about the new show being shot on the set that used to be the Seaver house.

Where the Seavers Went Next

The cast came back twice. The Growing Pains Movie premiered on ABC on November 5, 2000, as a two-hour episode of The Wonderful World of Disney, jumping eight years forward: Mike is an advertising executive married to Kate, Carol is a corporate lawyer, Ben is an entrepreneur coming off a failed California company, and Maggie, working as a press secretary, gets fired and decides to run for office against her old boss. She wins. Growing Pains: Return of the Seavers followed in 2004, and Warner Archive put both films out together on DVD in December 2011.

Why It Endures

Growing Pains landed at the exact right moment. The premise was a mother going back to her career and a father moving his job into the house, which in 1985 was still novel enough to be a premise and familiar enough to be true in a lot of driveways. Then it did the thing the best family sitcoms of the decade did: it let the kids be genuinely annoying. Mike is not lovably mischievous, he is a menace. Ben is worse, because Ben is studying. Carol is smarter than the rest of the house and gets no credit for it. That is not a sitcom family, that is a family, and it is why the show sat at number 8 in the Nielsen ratings in season 2 and number 5 in season 3, and stayed inside the top 30 through season 6, right alongside the rest of the decade’s 80s pop culture icons.

The Honest Bottom Line

The ending was not kind. For the 1991 to 1992 season, ABC pulled Growing Pains off Wednesday, where it had spent six years, and dropped it on Saturday nights as a centerpiece of a short-lived block called I Love Saturday Night. The show fell from 27th in the ratings to 75th, and the network and the producers agreed to end it. The finale aired April 25, 1992, the same night Who’s the Boss? and MacGyver also signed off, which is about as clean a tombstone as an era ever gets.

But look at what is left over. A show cast around a Canadian talk show host coming off a flop, and an actress with one season of a canceled CBS sitcom behind her, put a houseful of kids on television for seven years. One of the late arrivals turned into Leonardo DiCaprio. One turned into a two-time BAFTA winner for a video game that did not exist yet. And the mom turned into a working television director with credits running into the 2020s. The Seavers were never the biggest family on 80s television. They were the family whose living room you could actually picture yourself standing in.

Seven seasons of Seaver trivia invite guesswork, so each date and credit above was checked against the record before it went in.

FAQ

Who are the main Growing Pains characters?
Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke), Maggie Seaver (Joanna Kerns), Mike Seaver (Kirk Cameron), Carol Seaver (Tracey Gold), Ben Seaver (Jeremy Miller), Chrissy Seaver (Ashley Johnson and the Dohring twins), Luke Brower (Leonardo DiCaprio), plus, in a recurring role, Mike’s friend Boner Stabone (Andrew Koenig).

How long did Growing Pains run?
Seven seasons and 166 episodes on ABC, from September 24, 1985, to April 25, 1992.

Was Leonardo DiCaprio really on Growing Pains?
Yes. He joined the main cast in 1991, at fifteen, as Luke Brower, a homeless teenager taken in by the Seaver family in the seventh and final season. He was written out near the end of that season so he could begin work on the film This Boy’s Life.

Who played Boner on Growing Pains?
Andrew Koenig, son of Star Trek actor Walter Koenig, played Richard “Boner” Stabone through the first four seasons. The character was written out to join the Marine Corps. Andrew Koenig died in February 2010, at age 41.

Where was Growing Pains set?
The Seaver family was in Huntington, on Long Island, New York, where Jason ran his psychiatry practice out of the house.

Was there a Growing Pains reunion?
Two of them. The Growing Pains Movie aired on ABC on November 5, 2000, and Growing Pains: Return of the Seavers followed in 2004. Warner Archive released both together on DVD in December 2011.

Did Growing Pains have a spin-off?
Yes. Just the Ten of Us followed Coach Graham Lubbock (Bill Kirchenbauer), the gym teacher at Mike and Carol’s high school, after he was fired and moved his large family to California.

For the rest of the lineup, from the Wednesday night families to the Saturday morning survivors, browse our 80s TV shows guide. And if you want the other great family sitcom of the exact same era, spend an evening with Family Ties.