Children of a Lesser Clod

"Children of a Lesser Clod" is the twentieth episode of Season 12. It aired on May 13, 2001.

Plot
Some citizens of Springfield go to the YMCA to play some sports. Lisa goes on a gymnastics class with Lugash, who ended up yelling at her. Bart enters a "proper young man" class thinking it was cool, like a gangster-like man outside told him. While playing basketball, Homer's leg gets stuck on the basket and badly injures his leg. He is taken to the Springfield General Hospital to fix his leg, but Dr. Hibbert tells him he has to stay at home a long time in order to recover from his broken leg. He he becomes bored with staying at home. When Flanders requests he babysits for Rod and Todd, Homer accepts and enjoys their company, so decides to start a daycare.

Homer's daycare gets many new clients, who run and laugh around the house enjoying Homer's jokes and his broken leg. However, Bart and Lisa start thinking Homer is ignoring them. They try to catch his attention, but Homer ends up taking their attempts of attention to make his daycare children laugh and have fun. Eventually, some reporters discover Homer's daycare and want to take some videos of him showing his love to his children, including some paper hearts he says he makes himself, but are actually made by Bart and Lisa. Homer is nominated for a "most caring person" award.

At the nomination ceremony, when Homer receives the award, Bart and Lisa sabotage his footage with home videos of Homer attempting to strangle Bart. Seeing how Homer treats his children, the parents get angry and decide not to send their kids to Homer's daycare anymore. Thinking this will ruin his business, Homer takes all of his kids and loads them all into a van. Escaping from the police, Homer crashes and tries to get into a pipe to run away, but gets stuck and Chief Wiggum arrests him. Homer is let off the hook after three mistrials, and promises to stop looking after the neighbour's kids to care for his own.

Production
The episode is written by Al Jean, who had a few different storylines and decided to put all of them together into this episode. Milhouse tells Bart he knows his father better than Bart. This is a reference to Mike Reiss's real life experience where a person said he knows his parents better than him. Homer places his daycare permit on a picture frame replacing a photo Bart and Lisa gave to him. This is based on Dana Gould's real life experience in which he gave his parents a newspaper article about him winning a Boston comedy competition and later found out that it was replaced by Larry Bird dunking butterfingers.