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You Are Grounded / Western Animation

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Characters being grounded in Western Animation Television Series.

  • 3Below: Invoked by Aja and Krel's guardian/bodyguard Varvatos Vex when he confines them to the ship for protection after they nearly give away their alien identities in a chaotic scene on a class trip.
    Varvatos: I have learned another Earth phrase! YOU ARE GROUNDED!
  • The Adventure Time episode "Hitman" has Finn grounding the Ice King for 4 weeks (at first it is just 1 but the Ice King argues with him causing it to escalate to 4) after he goes princess stalking again. At the end of the episode, we get a Dog Bites Back ending with the Ice King sitting on Finn and Jake waiting for them to thaw out after he froze them earlier and tells them "You're grounded. Underneath my butt!".
  • The Amazing World of Gumball:
    • In "The Remote", when Nicole makes Anais help her get her own remote for the TV:
      Nicole: Anais, I need you to tell me what brand the TV is.
      Anais: OK, but does this mean I can watch Daisy tonight?
      Nicole: No, it means you won't be grounded for 6 months.
      Anais: What?! But I'm 4! That's, like, 1/8th of my life!
      Nicole: Then you don't want to spend it locked up in your bedroom.
      Anais: Fine.
    • What Nicole didn't realize however was that Anais was working a Batman Gambit to ensure that she can watch Daisy The Donkey that night... that culminates in locking the rest of the family out of the house.
    • In "The Mothers", when Gumball and Darwin inform Nicole that they have put her through a Secret Test, she does this and banishes them to the car. It's quickly forgotten about.
  • American Dragon: Jake Long:
    • The title character in the episode "Hero of the Hourglass" gets grounded for being on TV during a baseball game as he was just fighting the Huntsman and his family thought that he was still studying in the library. He was also punished for no TV and video games for two weeks. After a time traveling adventure in the past when Susan first met Jonathan, his Dad lets him off with a warning, but when his Mom finds her photograph with Jake on it, she grounds him for two weeks once again, much to his dismay.
    • Also in "Haley Gone Wild", Jake gets grounded and can't go to the comic book convention with Trixie and Spud, so he convinces Haley to break the rules by helping him sneak out. Trouble starts when Haley mysteriously turns into the rebel wild child and Jake discovers that the twisted host of a magical children's show is turning all of his young viewers bad. In the end, he manages to snap Haley out of it to get home but they both get caught by their parents. As a result, the two end up getting grounded for disobeying them and worse, they are not leaving the house ever again, prompting them to say "AW, MAN!".
  • Arthur:
    • In the episode "Arthur's Big Hit", Arthur was grounded for a week with no TV after punching D.W. for breaking his model airplane even after he told her a million times not to touch it, in which she wouldn't listen to him.
      Arthur: That is so unfair! You don't even care about what she did to me!
      Mrs. Read: We'll deal with what she did. But what you did is wrong, too!
  • Batman Beyond: In 'The Winning Edge', when some slappers Terry put in his bag to investigate accidentally fall out at home, his mom sees them, and thinking he has been using them, grounds him with a strict curfew.
  • Ben 10:
  • Big City Greens:
    • In "Space Chicken", Bill wants Cricket and Tilly to try to "make an impression" around their new neighbors, but Cricket misinterprets his advice and literally tries to impress the citygoers by launching a chicken into outer space. When he accidentally launches one into Big Coffee next door, Bill explains this is exactly what he's talking about, and in return, Cricket is grounded for not listening to him properly and has to stay in his room for the rest of the day. Luckily, he manages to escape his room via a secret escape passage and continue to disobey him.
    • "Big Trouble" sees Tilly getting grounded for the first time ever after she let her pet goat, Melissa, leave muddy hoofprints all over the house shortly after Bill cleaned it. Bill is used to doing this to Cricket, but for Tilly, there's a first time for everything. While Cricket decides to start being more well-behaved, Tilly decides to go bad, and ropes her best friend, Andromeda into it. Eventually, her guilty conscience gets the best of her after she shoplifts a Pez dispenser from a convenience store, and then returns it, at which point she resumes being her normal well-behaved self and Cricket is back to being a troublemaker.
    • In the Shortsgiving special, Bill finds out about the events of the Random Rings short "Cricket Pranks Wishes" and as punishment for prank calling a live-action celebrity against his wishes, Cricket has to work the projector for the rest of the show. Unsurprisingly, Cricket is not upset about it.
  • Big Hero 6: The Series:
    • "Issue 188": Barb does this to Juniper for trying to abandon her after the team captured her.
    • "The Bot Fighter": Hiro is grounded by Aunt Cass for going back to bot-fighting.
    • "Legacies": Chief Cruz grounds Megan when she argues with him to release Big Hero 6 after arresting them, then extends it for accepting it.
  • Big Mouth: Happens often due to the show focusing on pre teens who have the tendency to get into a lot of trouble.
    • Judd and Leah Birch get grounded for three weeks in "I Survived Jesse’s Bat Mitzvah” for throwing a party at the Birch house without their parents consent in the previous episode.
    • Andrew Glouberman gets grounded in “How To Have An Orgasm” after he gets caught taking inappropriate pictures of himself and sending them to his cousin Cherry, using up his family’s data plan in the process.
    • Missy gets grounded in the “Thanksgiving” episode when she smokes a joint of marijuana that she takes from her cousins Lena and Quinta and gets high off of it, causing her to misbehave during Thanksgiving dinner in the process.
  • The Boondocks: In the episode "Home Alone", Huey assumes parental responsibilities for his younger brother Riley in his grandfather's absence. After much disrespect and backtalk from Riley, Huey calmly grounds him and forbids him from leaving the house, which he enforces with kicks to the face and airgun pellets to the knee. The conflict between the brothers becomes so great that Huey eventually resorts to duct-taping Riley's hands together and treating him like a criminal.
  • In Code Lyoko Milly and Tamiya end up grounded because the former had a temper tantrum in front of Jim after getting caught trying to find her teddy bear by attempting to go into a garden shed (which is off limits to students). Even Tamiya admonishes her for her behavior because they were slated to do a newscast in the middle school prom.
  • Danny Phantom:
    • Not so much grounded as she was put under house arrest, Sam sneaks out to save Danny—currently brainwashed by Freakshow— and is praised (along with her friends) by her parents for capturing the villain...But they're still grounded, because it was their disobedience that started the whole thing in the first place.
    • In "Fanning the Flames", Jack and Maddie are outraged by their kids' behavior—Danny for being lovesick, Jazz for being obsessed with Ember. They are both grounded. Which is better than what their punishment could have been. At the very least, the "Fenton Stockade" appears to be nonfatal and merely uncomfortable to stand in, considering Jack gets shoved in there by Maddie for trying to suggest using it again.
    • In "Pirate Radio", Danny gets blamed for using Emergency Ops Center without permission and for a party that Dash and Kwan threw at his house, and ends up grounded for a month and forced to clean up from the party.
  • Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: In "Lens a Hand," Dastardly has Muttley take photos of the squadron in action to prove to the General they're not slacking off. When Muttley's camerawork results in mishap after mishap, Dastardly grounds him and orders him to do his photo shoots there. The Squadron's efforts are even worse without Muttley whose photos from ground zero nets him a medal by blackmail.
  • The Defenders of the Earth episode "The Frozen Heart" ends with all the second-generation Defenders except Kshin grounded for bringing unauthorised personnel in the form of LJ's girlfriend (who, unknown to them, was under Ming's control) into the Defenders' Space Station, leading to the Station being taken over by Ming's forces.
  • Dexter's Laboratory: In the episode "The Old Switcharooms", the title character suffers this at the hands of his dad, who makes him switch rooms with Dee Dee as punishment for both running into him, causing his bowling trophy to break, in an effort to teach them a lesson about respect for other peoples' property. Dexter knows Dee Dee will find some way to get into his laboratory and destroy it like she always does, and fearing there is no way to stop her destruction, he makes a stealth suit to sneak out and investigate, all the while retaliating by destroying her bedroom. When Dexter investigates after destroying Dee Dee's room, he finds out Dee Dee never even entered his lab and was asleep the whole time. After Dad fixes the trophy and Dee Dee is let out, the episode goes down south when Dad condemns Dexter to the doghouse after seeing the destruction he caused to Dee Dee's bedroom, though not before Dee Dee breaks the trophy again. Dexter assumes their dog won't do much harm to his lab...after which the scene cuts to the dog flooding the place with nuclear waste.
  • Some of Disney cartoon shows from the 90s to early 2000s have this trope too.
    • Goof Troop: Pete grounds PJ often, and threatened to ground him for life if he failed his math test in "Axed by Addition".
    • Pepper Ann: The eponymous character deserves this trope twice. First time for sneaking out in the middle of the night to attend a party in "P.A's Life In A Nutshell" and second time for secretly allowing Moose to see Sean in "Moose In Love".
    • In the Recess episode "Me No Know", Vince is caught by his parents coming out of the movie theater after deciding to see Nitwits 3, a film they had forbidden him from viewing. He ends up being grounded for a week without TV privileges but still has to go to school.
    • The Proud Family also fits this trope, with Penny Proud being grounded on a regular basis, even on her birthday in The Movie!
    • Lloyd in Space In the first episode, the main character, Lloyd is grounded for a month after he inavertably causes a crash in the space station with a Police Cruiser.
    Nora Nebulon: Lloyd, you leave me no choice. YOU'RE GROUNDED FOR A MONTH!!!
    Lloyd Nebulon: A MONTH?! BUT...
    Nora Nebulon: Wanna shoot for TWO?!
  • Doug:
    • In the Nickelodeon episode "Doug Rocks", Doug and Skeeter win tickets to a Beats concert, but when Skeeter rocks out at the dinner table, resulting in food falling on his father, Skeeter gets grounded and can't go. Doug decides to stay with Skeeter instead of going to the concert, and they jam to music... annoying Mr. Valentine so much that he makes Skeeter un-grounded. But at this point it's too late for them to go to the concert.
    • Doug is grounded the end of the Disney episode "Doug's Movie Madness" after fessing up to his parents that he saw an R-rated scary movie without permission and had nightmares as a result.
  • A variant in Dragons: Defenders of Berk; in the first half of the second season finale, after Snotlout's recklessness almost results in Astrid getting killed, Hiccup tells Snotlout that he's grounded, as in he's on probation and can no longer ride Hookfang, but during the conversation Hiccup sounds exactly like a stern father and Snotlout compares him to his father.
  • DuckTales (2017): Louie is grounded by Della after he nearly puts the entire Duck Family in danger with his scheme of stealing treasures across time towards the end of the episode "Timephoon!". The following episode "GlomTales!" shows that Louie is still grounded and is banned from going to the Big Candy Mountain Trip with the rest of the family.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy:
    • The episode "Three Squares and an Ed", which provides the quote for the main page, involved Edd and Eddy attempting to bust a grounded Ed out of his house. However, it all goes south when they are found out, and the episode ends with all the boys grounded.
      Eddy: This stinks. I got grounded forever. Over.
      Edd: Three days for me, Eddy. A little quality time with my ants and some...
      Eddy: THREE DAYS?! WHAT MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?! Over.
    • Kevin is grounded in "A Case of Ed", and Ed and Eddy take advantage of this to play various pranks on him, such as toilet papering his house, mooning him, and even surrounding the entire house with bricks. However, Kevin gets out early for good behavior and ultimately beats them up for it with Edd's help out of revenge after his friends pranked him into thinking he was dying.
      Edd: Oh look, Eddy's spare house key. (drops keys on the ground and turns away with a smug smile) Oops. How careless of me. I seem to have misplaced them. (Kevin picks up the key with an equally sadistic grin, enters the house and proceeds to beat up Ed and Eddy) Kevin's Justified Pummel Disorder: symptoms are a bruised right eye, followed by a sore rear end, and a rapid release of hot air from an overinflated ego!
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • At the end of "Dream Goat!", Timmy's parents ground him for five months for lying to the town about Chompy the Goat's disappearance. Not that he minds, since he did the right thing.
    • At the end of "Ruled Out", Timmy is grounded and confined to his own bedroom jail cell for disobeying his parents when they care for him again, cancelling the wish he made earlier in the episode.
    • In "Boys in the Band", Timmy's mom announces that if Chip Skylark doesn't show up, she'll ground Timmy for no reason.
      Timmy's dad: (scared) Timmy, if you're watching this, RUN!
    • In "Smarty Pants", Timmy takes it gracefully after his Acquired Situational Narcissism, even suggesting it.
      Lawyer: You figured that out on your own? Well, I still get paid!
    • Early on in the movie "Channel Chasers", Timmy is grounded from watching television after copying a stunt from Maho Mushi which destroys the city.
  • Family Guy: Played for laughs in the episode "Undergrounded", when Lois decides to teach her double dealing husband a lesson by grounding him.
  • In one episode of Fievel's American Tails, Fievel is grounded (or "Ground-hogged") when he arrives home late for dinner.
  • Subverted on Futurama in the episode "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", when Leela (having been turned into a teenager through age-altering tar) wants to have a genuine teenage experience with her parents, whom she didn't know as a child. Towards the end of the episode, her parents, who she claims grounded her for her and Fry accidentally destroying a cardboard high school, tell her to go with her friends, to which she replies "No! A grounded teenager must be confined to her room!" The shot changes to her climbing out the window of her room, saying "Until she sneaks out."
  • In the Garfield and Friends U.S. Acres episode "Holiday Happening", Orson runs behind the barn after he hears a loud splatter. Orson asks what they have to say for themselves. After the boys explain, Orson thinks that what they did was so out of hand that he punishes them, which meant no TV, stories around the campfire or pistachio nuts for a month. To get revenge for this, Roy and Wade write to Congress in order to create a new holiday, "Paint A Pig Purple Day". The episode ends with them chasing Orson while carrying cans of purple paint.
  • Invoked in the second season premiere of Gravity Falls, when Grunkle Stan grounds Dipper for disobeying him and trying to contact government agents about the weirdness in the town. However, the grounding never takes effect when zombies attack and Stan is forced to admit that he knew about the weird goings-on all this time and was trying to protect the kids. This is notable for being the only time in the series that Stan acts like a disciplinarian.
  • Happens to Harvey Beaks in the episode "Anti-Valentine's Day". His dad grounds him for writing a rude letter to his mom.
  • Home Movies:
    • In the episode "Guitarmageddon", Dwayne's dad takes his guitar away right before the guitar contest.
    • The episode, "History" ended with Brenden getting grounded and getting his video camera taken away after horribly failing a history test (he got a 0).
  • Happens to Beezy on Jimmy Two-Shoes. Unfortunately, in Miseryville, it means being Buried Alive. In a sandbox.
  • Really, it's easier to list the episodes where this doesn't happen to the main character and his sisters on Johnny Test. Usually, it's less to do with the kids doing anything particularly reprehensible and more to do with their dad being a restrictive Jerkass. Though their actions with the genius twins' lab and Johnny's recklessness sometimes result in the house being destroyed, so Hugh Test's punishments aren't always without reason.
  • Jorel's Brother: Mrs. Danuza grounds Jorel's brother without playing toys for not eating his broccoli in the dinner.
    Mrs. Danuza Go to Your Room!. You're grounded without toys.
  • Kim Possible:
    • The detention variant is used in the episode "Tick, Tick, Tick", where Kim gets detention for being late to class three times. She escapes twice: once when Mr. Barkin evacuates the room after mistaking Rufus for a mutant escapee from the science lab, and once when she realizes that Drakken's nano-tick is stuck to her and she runs off to get it removed before it detonates. Ron soon joins her in the punishment after Drakken and Shego are defeated.
    • In "October 31st", Kim is grounded for a month at the end of the episode (shortly before Ron gave Josh the other half of his horse costume) after her parents and Ron found out that she'd lied to each of them— to Ron to get out of trick-or-treating with him and to her family to get out of helping them with their haunted house at the hospital— to go to a party instead.
  • Occasionally happens to Bobby in King of the Hill, notably at the end of "The Buck Stops Here", where Hank grounds him for the rest of the Summer after all the chaos with Buck Strickland at a poker game. Unlike most examples however, Bobby actually takes it in stride.
    • Another example occurs in "Yard She Blows", when Peggy accuses Bobby of breaking her gnome despite Hank's pleas to the contrary and grounds him to his room for a week. It gets lifted early after Hank buys another gnome and mistakens this as a sign of gratitude from him despite it being Bobby's idea.
  • The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: In the episode "I'll Get By with a Little Help from My Elf", Juniper ends up getting grounded as a result of actions from a helper elf.
  • In The Little Mermaid (1992), Ariel and Arista are "beached" for a week after disobeying Triton on something important.
  • The Loud House:
    • The Loud House:
      • At the end of the episode "The Sweet Spot", after Lincoln's scheme to snag the titular seat in Vanzilla for an upcoming long family road trip blows up in his face when his sisters catch on and beat him and themselves up over it, which ends with the van being destroyed, the trip is cancelled and all of the kids are forced to sit on the couch for the entire weekend until they can learn to get along. Lincoln tries to go for another sweet spot on the sofa during the punishment.
      • In "Sleuth or Consequences", Lincoln and his sisters are grounded for supposedly clogging the toilet until the perpetrator is found out. With his trip to the Ace Savvy comic book convention in jeopardy, Lincoln along with his goth younger sister Lucy decide to go around the house to find out who the culprit is. Lucy later admits to Lincoln she was the one responsible for clogging the toilet with the "Princess Pony Book" she reads in the bathroom late at night and she hides the book in the toilet when Lincoln comes in and flushes the book down without knowing. Feeling sorry for Lucy and not wanting her to become a laughing stock to her sisters for reading the book, Lincoln decides to take the blame for Lucy, resulting in the girls let off the hook while Lincoln remains grounded, forgoing his chances of going to the convention. Lucy later cheers up Lincoln by drawing him a creepy comic book as thanks for helping her.
      • In "A Tattler's Tale", Lola takes the blame for all the disasters the other siblings confessed in their Secret Secrets Club, resulting in her being grounded for a month.
      • In "Suite and Sour", the kids are grounded to their hotel room for the rest of the weekend for causing mayhem for their parents.
      • In "Stall Monitor" when Lincoln and his friends are caught trying to delay his parent-teacher conference out of fear of bad reports from his teacher, he ends up grounded for a week, plus a week of detention, and Rusty is punished with attending a week of yoga lessons with Mrs. Johnson's mother. On the plus side, though, Lincoln does get praised as a clever, resourceful student and does take his punishment rather well.
    • The Casagrandes:
      • Averted and parodied in "V.I.P.eeved". While it has Rosa saying this to Maria word-for-word when she overhears her whispering to Carlos she used to sneak out and go to concerts, Maria is too old to be subjected to this.
      • Played straight in "Silent Fight". An ongoing feud between CJ and Carl while they're playing El Falcon occurs while Carlitos is sick with the flu and has been crying for over 24 hours as a result. Frida and Carlos, already exhausted enough with their youngest son's crying, warn their elder two sons if they awaken him again, they will be grounded for two months. CJ and Carl then try to keep their arguing as quiet as possible, but their attempts are in vain when they get into a fight over the El Falcon toy again, causing one of its elote to shoot out and awaken Carlitos. While sent to their room, the two eventually make up, and while Carlos is overjoyed at this, this wakes up Carlitos again, and he gets grounded.
  • Miraculous Ladybug:
    • Happens to Marinette in the episode "Simon Says", when her parents find out about her many unexcused absences due to her secret heroics. This causes her to have to sneak out to help stop an Akuma attack. In a rarity for this trope, her sneaking out is never discovered and the grounding is lifted after a week when she avoids missing class, due to both her parents fitting the Reasonable Authority Figure trope.
    • Although he's never formally grounded or punished, elements of this trope frequently happen to Marinette's co-lead Adrien Agreste. His stern, overprotective father likes to keep him confined to home where bodyguards watch him so he'll be safe, so Adrien is frequently forced to sneak out to operate as Chat Noir.
  • Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends:
    • In "Stumped!" adoptive siblings Shimmer and Squirt were "stumped" — forced to sit on a tree stump and not allowed to leave until they resolved the argument they were having. Once they did, they started having fun with each other and had so much fun that they decided not to leave the stump for the time being.
    • In "Fungus Among Us," Wiggle figures that he'll be grounded after admitting having brought a mushroom into the Hollow Tree, the result of which being spores spread everywhere and a bunch of mushrooms growing. He is instead sentenced to help in the ongoing chore of cleaning Sunny Patch of mushrooms.
  • A few times on My Life as a Teenage Robot. For moral reasons, the main character doesn't just blow a hole in her wall and escape every time (though in one episode she climbs out her window to meet up with her forbidden love).
  • The Owl House
    • In "Escaping Expulsion", after finding out they've been expelled, Gus and Willow's fathers ground them for 1 and 3 years, respectively. All while the two are being carried away by calling birds. It is implied that the punishments were rescinded once it became clear the expulsions were due to the Blights throwing their weight around.
    • In "Clouds on the Horizon", Odalia grounds her children for sneaking around the Blight Industries factory, forcing Luz and her friends to save them.
  • Phineas and Ferb:
    • In "The Secret of Success," when Candace attempts to show Linda the ATV, she mentions she was driving it which causes Linda to assume she drove a car without adult supervision, resulting in her being punished.
    • Later, in "Candace Gets Busted," Candace ends up, well, busted for the intimate get-together.
  • Robotboy: The episode "I Want That Toy" has this where Kamikazi opens up a toy store to attract Tommy and Gus as part of his plan to steal Robotboy, and Tommy was falsely accused of stealing a robot toy (Robotboy, of course). Tommy's parents grounded him for two weeks as a result.
  • Rugrats:
    • In one episode, Angelica is grounded for having drawn over several important prints from her father. She's unable to accept the punishment, so she decides to escape from her house. She learns this isn't a good idea.
    • In the TV movie "All Growed Up", Tommy spends time in his room for stealing his father's scorpio medallion. While Stu is using it for disco dancing, Tommy created a fake one out of a dog treat and stole the real one for Angelica so she could use it to get picked onto stage at a concert, but Spike eats the fake one and, after mistaking the real medallion for another dog treat, buries it in the sandbox in the backyard, where the friends eventually find it and return it.
      • The Spin-off series, All Grown Up!, has "In the Family's Way". When Charlotte becomes fed up with Angelica's complaints after their planned vacation to Hawaii gets cancelled, she sends Angelica to live with the Carmichael family for a week to teach her daughter some discipline. While struggling with the Carmichaels' "family rules", Angelica manages to catch up, much to the displeasure of Susie, who made a bet with their friends that she'll fail. With the help of her brothers, Susie makes up a fake chore list for Angelica in hopes that the latter will give up. Unfortunately, the plan backfired when Lucy and Randy (the Carmichael siblings' parents) witness Angelica fell off the roof while the latter was cleaning the rain gutters. After Angelica explains what had happened, a furious Randy and Lucy ground their kids for a month for putting Angelica in danger.
  • She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Played with in the pilot as Queen Angella upbraids one of her military commanders for taking unnecessary risks in a mission and endangering the troops. She enumerates the commander's sins, rises to deliver the punishment, and thunders "You're grounded!". The commander is her teenage daughter Glimmer.
  • The Simpsons: In the episode, "Postcards from the Wedge", Bart Simpson is grounded after causing the school to be demolished. Now this was a first for the series as a whole, due to the fact that usually Bart is sent to his room, or punished in other, different manners. The only time Bart really was grounded was in the comic book story, "When Bongo's Collide". But this episode marks the first time this trope was acted upon and stood for the rest of the episode, as we see Bart suffer from this punishment in the episode's final scene. It would remain the last grounding in the series, until Season 27's "The Marge-ian Chronicles", where Lisa Simpson would be grounded for the first time ever.
    • Homer attempts to do this with regard's to Bart's shoplifting in Season 7's "Marge Not Be Proud", but his punishment (which included no leaving the house, not even for school, no egg nog and absolutely no stealing for three months) leaves a lot to be desired, and it turns out he was just doodling a robot barbequeing a wiener the whole time.
  • On Sofia the First, Wendell is grounded for stealing all the flying horses in "Minimus is Missing" and also punished to no dessert for a week, no crystal ball-gazing for two weeks and spending the rest of his day cleaning out the cauldrons.
  • Happens a lot in South Park:
    • An extremely common fate for Butters, and one that scares him more than even worse consequences. Especially in earlier seasons, he would be grounded for things that he either had nothing to do with, or were so minor it didn't warrant a grounding, but his parents are incredibly abusive, and worst of all, believe that they're Parent of the Year material. In more recent seasons, Butters is only grounded when he actually does something reprehensible, such as pressing his penis against a glass door, or using Facebook to spread misinformation. Otherwise, his parents have become much nicer.
    • Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman will also go to absurd lengths to avoid being grounded: for example, in "Butt Out," they decide that getting swept up in a battle between big tobacco and anti-smoking activists and facing down a torch-and-pitchfork wielding mob would be less trouble than getting grounded for three weeks.
    • There's also "Fun With Veal", where Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Butters (Kenny had been Killed Off for Real at this point) rescue baby cows and hid them in Stan's house, then eventually resort to terrorism to get their way. It led to a Bittersweet Ending — they got the word "veal" renamed to "little tortured baby cow", but they end up grounded anyway. Their parents still offer to go out for some hamburgers first.
    • Also used in the movie. Remember the Mole: "You realize that by doing zis, we could be grounded for two, maybe even three weeks."
    • Also used in the Coon Trilogy, Cartman is grounded and sent to his room by his mother at the end of "Coon 2: Hindsight" for beating up his friends, but is eventually ungrounded at the beginning of "Coon vs. Coon and Friends" after he convinces his mother by using the "Lebron James" trick on her.
    • Also in the Black Friday trilogy episode "Titties and Dragons": Cartman gets Stan grounded after he takes a dump in his neighbors yard and puts the blame on Stan to prevent him from warning Princess Kenny and his followers about the Red Robin wedding trap to lock them in so Cartman and his followers can get Xbox Ones during Black Friday.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: Happens to Mr. Krabs in the end of "Mid-Life Crustacean", despite that he is an adult. His mother sends him to his old room even after joining SpongeBob and Patrick's panty raid as a result, although they didn't know they were doing it in Mr. Krabs' mother's house.
  • Static Shock:
    • Virgil is grounded by his father after the latter finds out that his son ran away from the police due to him having his superhero costume in his backpack.
  • Steven Universe:
    • Steven is this at the end of "Mirror Gem" after disobeying the Gems and freeing a Gem imprisoned in a mirror (amusingly, Amethyst takes it literally and says they were going to bury him alive), only to be let off the hook almost immediately into the follow-up episode "Ocean Gem" before setting off to undo his mistake.
    • In "Space Race" Greg grounds Steven, then clarifies that he's not grounded, he's "grounded," as in unable to go into space with Pearl.
    • Steven is grounded again near the end of "Fusion Cuisine" for trying to elope with Connie, with no dinner for 1000 years (Pearl realized this was too far since Steven needs food while the Gems don't, and then changed the punishment to just no TV...for 1000 years). The punishment is active and brought up many episodes later, until it's finally lifted in "Joy Ride".
  • Super Best Friends Forever: The third short has Supergirl grounded and Batgirl and Wonder Girl try to bail her out. Problem? Her Cousin. And his mother.
  • One episode of Teamo Supremo has the title heroes getting grounded and luring the latest villain in town to Crandall's house where they ambush him.
  • Teen Titans Go!:
    • In the episode "Gorilla", Robin attempts to ground Beast Boy after he becomes disobedient from deciding that as a gorilla he does not need to follow any of Robin's rules. Beast Boy calls Robin out on his pathetic attempt at using child psychology on him.
    • In the episode “Beast Man,” Beast Boy, having turned into an older version, treats the Titans like he’s their dad and says the trope if they don’t have the tower cleaned up by the time he gets home from work.
  • Thomas & Friends: Happens in the end of "The Sad Story of Henry / Come out, Henry!", after everybody (including Thomas) tried to get Henry out of the tunnel and it failed. Sir Topham Hatt gave up, and grounded Henry by hiring construction workers to take out the rails and build a brick wall over the tunnel's entrance. No other train engines would bump into Henry. Now Henry was sad and miserable (he believed he would never see green paint and yellow stripes again!) Toned down a little in the US version, where Henry is bricked up until he's "ready to come out of the tunnel."
    Narrator: Now all that Henry can do is watch the trains go by the other side of the tunnel. He was very sad, because he believed nobody will never see his green paint and red stripes again. As time went on, Edward and Gordon would often pass by. Edward would say,
    Edward: PEEP-PEEP! Hello!
    Narrator:....and Gordon would say,
    Gordon: Poop-poop-poop! Serves you right!
    Narrator: Poor Henry had no steam to answer. His fire had gone out. Soot and dirt from the tunnel had spoiled his lovely green paint with red stripes, anyway. He wondered if he would ever be let out to pull trains again. But I think he deserved his punishment, don't you?/(US: How long do you think Henry will stay in the tunnel before he decides to come out again?)
  • Happens about two times in Totally Spies! The first is where Clover ended up grounded due to a violated late curfew (due to a mission). She manages to sneak out thanks to a WHOOP gadget that displays holograms. The second was in a movie where the girls' moms forbid their spy work after discovering their secret. Doesn't help that a brainwashed Mandy and her friends are trying to kill them at the time.
  • Parodied on Turbo FAST: In "Deuce is Wild", when Turbo sees Deuce and Edvard committing petty debauchery he tells Deuce that he's grounded, but Deuce is quick to point out Turbo doesn't have the authority to punish him because he isn't his father...but then says that he can become his father if he wants to.
  • In the Uncle Grandpa episode "Grounded", a boy is locked in his room for a week and tricks Uncle Grandpa into letting him out to go hang with his friends in a forest. Uncle Grandpa promptly scares him straight.
  • W.I.T.C.H.:
    • This happens to Will all the time, as her mom gets stricter as the series goes on. Because the series is arc-based, Will's groundings usually carry over between episodes, to the point where by about the mid-point of season one, she's perpetually grounded. Seeing as how the consequence of staying home (the girls' powers depend on Will being there to transform them) are nothing less than the end of the world, Will usually just sneaks out of her room anyway, accepting the consequences of being grounded as an unfortunate consequence of her great responsibility as a heroine.
    • Happens also in the original comics where it's happened to all of the girls at least once, sometimes because of legitimate reasons and other times because they can't explain their super-heroing to unsuspecting parents. Taranee got her own grounding in season 2 of the show because her mother didn't like her boyfriend and suspected she was involved in his buddies' pranks (she wasn't), and this outraged her so much that she snuck out to meet him just to spite her mother.
  • WordGirl:
    • In an episode, the main character's parents hire a babysitter who just happens to be one of the villains—Granny May. Granny May quickly sends Becky and her brother straight to bed, then sneaks out to commit her crimes, hoping to use babysitting as her alibi. Becky suspects she's up to no good and transforms into WordGirl, chasing after Granny May. However, every time Becky's brother leaves his room, a sensor that Granny May had placed goes off, causing BOTH the hero and the villain to have to race back to the house and pretend as if they had been where they were supposed to be the entire time.
    • Another episode featured her being grounded by her Bumbling Dad, who was surprisingly competent at keeping her in her room, forcing her Non-Human Sidekick to have to save the day.
    • In the two-parter "Dinner or Consequences," Becky gets "mega-grounded" for a month after missing two of her father's special dinners. This means that not only does she get sent to her room, but her room has been wiped of all her favorite things and she's basically not allowed to go anywhere or do anything fun. It gets rescinded at the end after she requests a trial and gets Doctor Two-Brains to eat one of the special dinners.

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