The Trouble with Parents

Open any adventure book. Read the first few words. If we aren’t told in the first paragraph that the adolescent hero is living with an evil stepmother, then we may as well speculate in what manner one or both parents will be killed off, left behind, or kept out of the story. Because even if there are two parents at the outset, chances are there will only be one later, or none at all.

Our folk tales are full of young characters with mysterious parentage: the child of noble descent, raised by a stepmother or by wolves. Surprise! The unsuspecting youth is suddenly told that she has access to a privileged class or magical abilities, or she is the focus of a prophesy. Or perhaps all three! And what child doesn’t secretly long to be told that he isn’t as ordinary as he feels? It’s wish-fulfillment at its finest. Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Tangled - this trope is so standard in fantasy stories that no effort is made to disguise it. The child-of-mysterious-parentage trope meshes so perfectly with the quest and Cinderella tropes that it is hard to find such a fantasy story for children in which the main character has mundane parents.

Even in science fiction, the trope persists. Incarnate: the main character’s father goes missing at her birth, and only returns at the end to reveal that he is the reason that she is not the reincarnation of another person, as everyone else in her society is. House of the Scorpion: the young protagonist is revealed to be the clone of a dictator, created as a source of spare organs. His parentage sets him up to take over as the next dictator. Cinder: in this retelling of Cinderella, the protagonist is revealed to be the missing heir to the moon, with psychic powers to boot, and rumors that serve as a science fiction stand-in for prophesy. The Giver: the kindly mentor figure turns out to be the real father, and the source of the protagonist’s ability to store and share the memories of others. And of course there is Star Wars.

An alternate use of parents in stories for children is emotional ammunition. The parents are built up as awesome, wonderful, compassionate protectors - and at a key moment the parent or parents are killed. The resulting emotional turmoil launches the protagonist into the story or moves the plot further along. Bambi, Percy and the Lightning Thief, the Lion King, Divergent, Frozen, Babar, Gathering Blue. Not to mention all of the stories in which the death occurred before the story began: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Harry Potter, the Thief, Delirium, the Hunger Games, and far too many others to mention. I suspect that this trope is used in large part because it is so easy. Not only does the author have one less character to write, and thus less conflict to arrange among secondary characters; but that it also immediately gives the young hero a depth of character that a happier and more sheltered child would not have.

Perhaps because death was seen as too traumatic a subject for young readers, children’s literature of a few decades past seems, outside of retellings of Brothers Grimm stories, to have shied away from using parents as disposable plot-impetus. It seemed more standard for parents in adventure stories to be treated as something for the young protagonist to venture away from, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Thus there are stories such as Alice in Wonderland; the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; My Father’s Dragon; and quite significantly in the picture book realm, Where the Wild Things Are. This trope continues to be used in more recent works of fiction aimed at a younger audience, such as Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Howl’s Moving Castle, but does pop up, as well, in stories intended for an older audience, such as the Legend of Korra and Ender’s Game.

The parents are removed from coming-of-age-tales because they would otherwise be in the way. These are stories about young people making their way in the world for the first time. They must be alone and unprotected in order to have an adventure and to experience self-discovery. It would be inappropriate for their parents to be hovering about, making the fictional world a less frightening place, especially considering that the audience of these stories is all-too-often kids who are dealing with helicopter parents at home. For these young readers, such coming-of-age tales are their introduction to life as an independent young adult. When overprotective parents are involved, a child needs stories of other children acting alone and triumphing against seemingly insurmountable odds, so that they can envision venturing forward themselves.

That said, it seems to me as if there is much room in children’s literature for more parental-character involvement without squelching the independence of the protagonist. It seems simply too trite to forever be doing away with the parents. As grown-up writers, we can do better than this. And some writers do.

Current stories for children that involve two parents for the duration of the story fall into two categories. By far the larger category involves parents who are there to provide conflict with the child. This arrangement is more typical in straight-up fiction, or historical fiction, such as the Evolution of Calpurnia Tate; Wringer; Monkey Town: the Evolution of the Scopes Trial; and Dead End in Norvelt. No doubt being freed from the structures of fantasy tropes leaves the author feeling more free to explore the complex relationships between parents and their children who are entering adulthood. These relationships can be rich enough to carry the story without having to resort to MacGuffins or FedEx quests or parental death.

But fantasy has its roots in such conflicts, too. One doesn’t have to look much farther than Hansel and Gretel to see parental conflict being central to a fantasy tale. Even though the story focuses on the witch and candy house adventure after the children have been abandoned by their parents, the element of conflict between the parents and children is vital to the story. And, like Hansel and Gretel, modern fantasy and science fiction stories that use parental conflict also tend to mix in other tropes, giving us powerful results such as Brave (in which Merida, fighting with her mother over her impending betrothal, turns her mother into a bear, and then searches for the way to turn her back), the Giver (the adoptive parents of Jonas come to represent the increasingly disturbing society), and Iron Hearted Violet (although Violet’s mother is killed in the story, her father continues to play an important role as he pines away and becomes a lousy leader, whom Violet must replace.)

Personally, of all the story examples here, I find these last three to be some of the strongest, because they make use of fantasy tropes in intelligent ways, instead of being dominated by them.

There is one other category of children’s adventure story that involves the parents, and it is a category in which I have had the most difficult time finding examples. In this case, the entire family is fighting some outside threat together. This category includes Swiss Family Robinson, in which the family is stranded on a tropical island and fights pirates together, and the Incredibles, in which family conflict over the use of their super powers drives the plot of the movie, but by the end the family has united against a common villain.

I suspect many writers don’t go with the entire-family-versus-enemy because it runs the risk of overshadowing the story of the star child with the adventures of the parents. I can see how a writer who is feeling intimidated at the thought of managing the additional characters might default to getting the parents out of the story. And much like the issue of action movies usually choosing to go with a male lead, the problem has less to to with any individual story, and more to do with the aggregate. In other words, it’s great that one story features a child who is surprised to learn that his father is a god, and in another the child receives an invitation to Hogwarts. What isn’t okay is that a child who focuses on the fantasy genre may find herself wishing wishing she were an orphan so that she could be gifted with magic powers or the keys to the kingdom. Rarely does a fantasy story demonstrate that hard work and quick thinking are sufficient tools to free a character from a bad situation, and rarely does a fantasy story demonstrate that working with one’s family, rather than fighting them or running away from them, can have a good outcome. The fantasy genre has spent decades obsessively focused on stories of individuals being individuals.

There is a fabulous essay entitled A Plea for Radical Children’s Literature, in the book Should We Burn Babar; Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories, by Herbert Kohl. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to write stories for children. In his Plea for Radical Children’s Literature, Kohl makes the observation that children’s books are swamped with children characters who are overcoming repressive situations. Which on a book-by-book level is great - but Kohl points out that rarely do the the youngsters in these stories act as part of a movement to overturn a situation that is repressing an entire class of people. The young protagonists save only themselves, repositioning themselves higher in the same repressive social structure, while the larger problem remains unsolved.

I see the largely unused family-versus-outsiders trope as being a perfect vehicle for telling such a story. And indeed, his essay is twenty years old; surely by now there must be many examples of exactly this. The Incredibles would be one, as in the process of uniting their family and fending off the super-villain, the family helps to convince the larger society that “supers” should be allowed, once again, to openly fight villains. Another Pixar film, A Bug’s Life, is another example of individuals inspiring a repressed class - this time a colony of ants - to rebel.

In traditional science fiction and fantasy, there seems to be a growing trend of having the child character save herself in the first books of a trilogy, and then change the entire broken system as the conclusion of the series. This can be seen in Knight’s Age of Fire series, in which three dragons from the same nest to live their lives. The first two dragons save themselves, but it is the third dragon in the third book who changes an entire dragon society. In Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a god is dethroned and a repressive religion is overthrown. The recent trend of dystopian novels seems to be all over this, starting with Katniss at the figurehead for the rebellion in the Hunger Games.

It looks like writers have taken up Kohl’s challenge. My next challenge for writers of children’s adventure stories would be to find more ways to our young adventurers to gain their independence without leaving their parents entirely behind. The fantasy genre, in particular, features enough rugged individualism. Our young, sheltered readers could use some reading material that shows them how to work within the structure of their families, forging alliances and exhibiting diplomacy and leadership with loved ones, instead of simply fighting with them and heading out to face the world alone.