Saturday, April 3, 2010

Where is Mom anyway?

The absent or dead parent has been a long tradition in children's books. Many of the favorite characters have adventures in a world free from parents. Think of Tom Sawyer or Alice who never gives a thought to her parents as she wanders in Wonderland. But as the N.Y. Times book review editor Julie Just points out, in the past parents weren't pictured as being bad parents, just absent ones. During the 1990s and 2000s, however, parents became more problematic. Teen novels in particular began to feature parents who were too preoccupied to pay attention to their children or were lost in mists of drugs, alcohol, or mental illness. Should librarians worry about this trend? Surely it does not reflect the true state of parenting today when many schools (though surely not all) worry more about hovering, interfering parents than about negligent ones. Most likely the portraying of parents in a popular book like Coraline who are too preoccupied with their computers to notice their daughter leaving, indicate that many children love the idea of such independence. Unlike authors of a century ago, authors today no longer kill off the parents, but they still manage to get them out of the story. This frees up the young protagonists to enjoy the independence they crave.

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