Bec Says

Contains Adult Themes

I’ve been talking to people about the role of parents in some YA books. In John Marsden’s popular Tomorrow series, adults are kept in the background, while the teens face all the challenges and conflicts themselves. This creates an independent world for them to inhabit, where they think for themselves and are masters of their own destinies. Fantasy writers are able to achieve this absence by allowing their young characters to disappear into other realms or to go on adventures without their parents’ knowledge (CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Patricia Wrede’s The Enchanted Forest Chronicles are two examples). Sometimes, they’re there but have little or no input (Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games), while, in other cases (such as Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book), the parents are missing altogether. The missing or diminished parent creates a separation/opposition between the adult/teen worlds.

I can remember, as a child, being thrilled that the parents in Peanuts were distant, pretty much irrelevant beings (reduced to that hilarious ‘mwah mwah mwah’ speech), and that Charlie & Co inhabited their own, far more important universe. How crucial is it to maintain this distance from the adult world?

Today I read Julie Just’s thought-provoking article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Just-t.html She talks about the rise of the ‘bad parent’ in popular culture and the ‘distracted, failing parent’ in YA novels. Bella’s (‘erratic, hare-brained’) Mum in Twilight is one example she uses.  This bad, or distant, parent still creates a barrier between the adult/teen worlds; it’s just being constructed a different way. Who are the worst parents you’ve encountered in YA literature so far? Do you prefer stories that include or exclude parent characters?