The film is about helping the father connect with his children but it completely ignores how utterly absent the mother is.
I was watching "Saving Mr. Banks" and there's a line about making the mother a suffragette in the film (she wasn't in the books) because they needed to justify and explain why she doesn't spend any time with her children.
The father at least has the excuse of work and the pressures it brings.
The movie presents both parents as absent and uninvolved.
Which is why they need a Mary Poppins.
But they focus on the father being the problem. They ignore the mother.
Saving Mr. Banks at least addressed it a little.
Yes, the father was given all the dramatic attention, he was given all the crises and saved at the end. The mother is a secondary character, neither the writers nor the other characters treat her as important.
So while both were presented as indifferent parents, only the father was given a real character arc and depth of feeling, at the end the mother just said she'd pay more attention to her family and that was that. After seeing "Saving Mr. Banks", it kind of makes me feel sorry for Travers' mother.