WORLDS WITHOUT PARENTS
From fairy tales to comic books, why are the children alone?
Bambi’s mom. Cinderella’s parents. Katniss’s parents. The Boxcar Children’s parents. Snow White’s mom. Peter Parker’s parents.
Why do so many stories for children feature a brave young boy or girl, alone? The plucky orphan(s). The tragic but fierce princess who would survive against all odds (including those mean stepsisters). The fawn who survives the fire when its mom doesn’t.
In so many stories, the parents are missing, or long dead.
There’s a reason for this: Adult stories are so all-encompassing, and adults so powerful in children’s lives, that removing the parents gives children their own space to be strong. Other times, it allows a secondary character to act in loco parentis — often with magic cloaks and pumpkins that transform into carriages. And it’s an important message to kids everywhere that what they’re born into isn’t what they’re stuck with.
But there are other forces at work in literature, from fairy tales and fiction to comics, that are driving this process. The perceived need for drama and, often, trauma, to help motivate the main character, or shape or mark them in some way, often starts with the parents, or loss of parents. It’s tough to be a parent of superheroes in the DC Comics Universe. See: Spider-Man, Batman, Superman. They’re buried before the story begins, or, in the case of some stories, rendered too dense, greedy, or depressed to put their own shoes on or connect in any way with their kids. Fairy tales do it: Cinderella’s father is so distraught that he makes bad decisions. Also popular fiction: Katniss’s mom in Hunger Games is so incapacitated with loss that her children nearly starve to death.
Of course, bad things happen in real life. And this kind of story is vastly important. But the lack of corresponding stories in popular culture where multiple generations are working together without being tragically dead is rather striking.
Lately my daughter has noticed it too. She asked me once why a particular book had all the adults on one side and all the kids on the other. Why things were so black and white. She’s been writing her own stories and studying story structure in school, and she came up with some reasons pretty quickly. “Conflict, right? It makes for easy conflict. And plot. Plot means drama. Parents make for lots of drama.
“But it’s not always true, right? We get along sometimes and sometimes we don’t,” she said. “And there are other adults who I get along fine with, too. Who listen to me, and think about what I’ve said. But that’s harder to write, isn’t it?”
She’s right: Complexity is sometimes harder to write. And sometimes it’s necessary to write a traumatic parental relationship because those happen. But it’s disheartening, because the Gone Mom is a prevalent trope.
I started looking for stories with complex, if not strong, relationships across multiple generations in families, and I found a number of them, often in secondary characters, and not always for the better, as those present parents are advocating for and protecting their kids in an unfair balance against the story’s protagonist (as with Cinderella).
Science fiction reviewer Aidan Moher has made a list at Tor.com of kick-ass moms with a reminder that Harry Potter’s own Mrs. Weasley is among them: present, active and living her own story while parenting her kids. Not to mention all the mothers in Game of Thrones. Catelyn Stark, anyone? (OK, that doesn’t always end well, but it starts out awesome.)
So, too, the parents in the Kevin Henke’s children’s book Chrysanthemum (Mulberry, 2008). And the divorcing parents in Laurel Snyder’s Bigger than a Breadbox (Yearling, 2012). And the parents in Steven Gould’s EXO (Tor, 2014). They’re present. The kids still get to work out stuff on their own, and they have a full arc. But it is potentially a more complex one because more characters are involved.
Hayao Miyazaki movies feature parents in many different aspects — Kiki’s Delivery Service has parents letting their witch daughter make her first solo broomstick flight. Spirited Away has parents turned into pigs. Howl’s Moving Castle has a young woman and an old woman conflated, loving and parenting at the same time.
And one of our last visions of Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings? He’s a proud and caring dad.
I get it. Things happen. Often, in fiction, bad things. But there are stories out there where parents are perhaps not perfect, but present — and that’s important too.