The topic of this thesis is a pedagogical analysis of the representation of parental roles in Croatian advertisements. In the theoretical part, parental roles are placed in the context of the gender theory. In other words, what is discussed is the gendered division of child care tasks as a result of the social construction of desirable behaviors of mothers and fathers. Furthermore, the paper discusses the transformation of the concept of parental roles, after which the roles of mother and father are discussed through traditional and contemporary paradigms. Also, the theoretical part of the paper provides an overview of domestic and foreign research on different representations of parental roles in the media, with an emphasis on the lack of domestic research. The paper also discusses the position of pedagogical science and pedagogical experts in the issue of representation of parental roles in the media and emphasizes the importance of critical reading of media content. In the research part of the paper the research question about how parental roles are represented in Croatian television commercials is answered with the help of thematic analysis of 117 commercials. The results of the thematic analysis are pointing out the present traditional understanding of maternal and paternal roles, according to which the mother is dominantly portrayed in the family context, where depictions of child care and depictions of the mother in the context of preparing meals for the whole family dominate, while the father is dominantly depicted as a passive and incompetent parent who dominates the extrafamilial sphere. However, the thematic analysis also detected contemporary, egalitarian representations of parental roles, which could be the result of the transformation of the social understanding of parental roles and the concept of parenthood in general.