The Parent Problem in Young Adult Lit

New York Times ^ | April 1, 2010 | Julie Just

[reaganaut1]

...

Judging from The New York Times children’s best-seller list and librarian-approved selections like the annual “Best Books for Young Adults,” the bad parent is now enjoying something of a heyday. It would be hard to come up with an exact figure from the thousands of Y.A. novels published every year, but what’s striking is that some of the most sharply written and critically praised works reliably feature a mopey, inept, distracted or ready-for-rehab parent, suggesting that this has become a particularly resonant figure.

...

Sometimes the parents are very, very busy, and sometimes they’ve simply checked out. The husband of the accident-prone mother is never home at night. It’s not that he’s with another woman; he’s working late at the Johns Hopkins bio lab. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s best-selling “Wintergirls,” about a dangerously anorexic high school senior, the mom is a sought-after surgeon too pressed to notice that her malnourished daughter is a bit shorter than she was four years earlier.

Like the clownish adults on the Disney Channel or “Modern Family,” the not-in-charge, curiously diminished parent is just sort of there, part of the scenery. You can even spot the type in three best-­selling fantasy series: “Twilight,” “Shiver” and “The Hunger Games.” In “Twilight,” the only reason Bella meets the supernaturally good-looking Edward in the first place is that she has moved to her father’s place in gloomy Forks, Wash.; that way, her mother can follow around after her new husband, a minor-league ballplayer. “I stared at her wild, childlike eyes. How could I leave my loving, erratic hare-brained mother to fend for herself?” (Edward’s own parents are charming, competent and rich, but they are vampires.)

Afflicted by anomie, sitting down to another dismal meal or rushing out the door to a meeting, the hapless parents of Y.A.

[reaganaut1]

There is no reason some fiction should not feature lousy parents -- they do exist. But the predominance of incompetent parents fits in with the liberal distrust of families, especially the married, two-parent traditional family and the belief that caring for and educating children is primarily the job of the state.

I generally don't trust recently-published "young adult" literature, although some of it may be good. I'd rather my children read classic literature that has stood the test of time. If homeschooling Freepers have reading lists to post, I'm interested.

[cookiedough]

Here’s a link to the 1,000 Good Books List. It is not an exhaustive list.

http://www.classical-homeschooling.org/celoop/1000.html

[Tribune7]

There is no reason some fiction should not feature lousy parents -- they do exist.

And since the hippies are now parents and grandparents maybe they exist in far greater numbers than they did in the 50s.

That surgeon and that mom following the ballplayer sound like they are just following "free to be you and me" principles.

[vladimir998]

Thanks for that list!

[kimmie7]

Here is a site that has several lists. I have found it to be very helpful. You’ll be able to see where to find the other lists, this link is to the 3rd and 4th grade books.

http://sbees.blogspot.com/2008/03/third-and-fourth-grade-homeschool-book.html

[kimmie7]

A great list!

[9YearLurker]

I never really understood ‘young adult’ literature. I think it’s a rising genre because they muck up the teaching of reading now and we’ve got generations of teens who are poor readers. Just average kids who are taught correctly should be reading at a regular adult level by junior high—and then who wants to read watered-down pap?

[Calm_Cool_and_Elected]

You have no idea how many times I’ve heard, “but at least he/she is reading!”.

[Polybius]

But the predominance of incompetent parents fits in with the liberal distrust of families, especially the married, two-parent traditional family and the belief that caring for and educating children is primarily the job of the state.

I disagree with your interpretation.

All of the dysfunctional family situations described in the body of your post are OUTSIDE of the traditional family norm.

The traditional family norm has parents who provide for their children financially but do not sacrifice their kids for the sake of an even greater amount of money. The traditional family norm has a mother (or nowadays even a father) that is cooking the family dinner and not traveling around with her boyfriend. The traditional family norm has parents who eat the family dinner with their kids and are not so wrapped up in their jobs that they do not even notice that their kids are not eating at all.

If anything, the examples you gave in the body of your post are a longing for the days when Ward and June Cleaver were seen as the middle class American norm.

Face it. America is filled with bad parents and "parents" have absolutely nothing to do with "Family". Even the cockroach that you sprayed Raid on last week has "parents".

The examples you cite are a longing for "Family". .... The way most middle class "Families" used to be.

I watched a lot of Leave it to Beaver re-runs in the 1960's and I never heard the lines:

"Well, Beaver, I know it's true you haven't seen your mother for months because she is travelling around with her boyfriend, but that does not mean that June is a bad mother."

or

"Ward! I need to leave. Grand Rounds start in 30 minutes. Could you look at the Beaver before you leave for work? He may have lost 20 pounds since the last time I ever noticed him."

[9YearLurker]

Sometimes low expectations aren’t even bigotry!

[scrabblehack]

I was leafing through a kid’s book at church not too long ago (secular theme but published by “Scholastic Book Club” or some such)...it had misspelled words galore...I suppose the author was trying to be funny with some of the misspellings but I couldn’t call the book scholastic at all.

[Dianna]

The examples you cite are a longing for "Family". .... The way most middle class "Families" used to be.

I think the answer is very simple. Just as news stories don't report, "Hey everything went well at Dianna's house today!", books must contain some kind of problem to be solved. Otherwise, who cares?

I have an almost 12 year old son and he's starting to read some of these books. Who would write about his life? He has married parents who look after his physical needs and help solve problems if need be. His problems are minor (some kid wouldn't throw a ball to him in gym class the other day) and if a major one comes up, we're here to help him deal and get the problem solved. That makes it 10 pages, instead of 100.

There is no story in, "My brother died 3 years ago and we're all ok." It's only a story if "my brother died and my parents freaked out and now I have to deal with them and the world by myself".

[discostu]

It’s always been a genre, tweens want stories about tweens, not little kids and not adults. It got huge when Harry Potter proved there were truckloads of cash in the market.

[Jakarta ex-pat]

IF kids are reading nowadays, they will generally inherit the earth. Or at least that's what I tell my students (grade 6).

This year I Introduced the warrior series ( based on cats) and at least got 20% hooked. It might seem a feeble number, but the majority of kids don't read unless it's on a computer screen or handphone.

[caseinpoint]

It was huge before that too. Back in the mid-90s, my daughter was in the second grade. Suddenly she started balking at going to school. When I finally identified the problem, it turned out to be book reports being given at school by kids reading the scary R. L. Stine books. She was afraid—not of going to school but of leaving me alone at home in our upper-middle class neighborhood.

[discostu]

I always thought Goosebumps was more kids than YA, but the dividing line is always hard to find, and certainly Stine proved there was a fat load of cash in the under 18 market. In the early 80s when I was in the target market YA was Hardy Boys and Judy Bloom, and they kind of sucked. I’m glad the market is finally being addressed.

[caseinpoint]

You may be right about the Goosebumps target market. I didn’t let my daughters read them (not that they wanted to, it seemed to be a boy’s series like I guess Twilight is a girl’s series). The test of any series for kids, though, ought to be whether it leads to adult reading habits beyond the latest romance or Stephen King novels.

I have mostly given up on fiction these days, partly because of their inanity but also to avoid frequently profanity and immoral “heroes”. Besides, I tend to read in quick snatches of time and nonfiction fills the bill. I have my car book, my family room book, my living room book, my bath book, all being read whenever a find a moment to pick to up. I have hundreds of books in my library and find no problem avoiding insipid television or popular fiction.

[9YearLurker]

Harry Potter could just as well have been likened to the earlier Hobbit, Lord of the Rings or Watership Down phenomena as being due to the kids in the school. But there are plenty of adult-level classic literature novels about children of various ages. I know it’s long been a genre but it really has exploded from a bit before Harry, I think, and I still hold that strong readers never really go for them—’cept maybe precocious 5th graders reading about naughty high schoolers!

[NativeNewYorker]

Useless parents are a justification for kids orienting themselves along the lines dictated by the public schools and the mass media. Gee...who benefits from that?

[Toki]

I didn’t touch YA books unless I had too with a ten foot pole (We had these points we had to earn for reading books and taking tests and so I’m sure I read some). I couldn’t stand them. Books like Andersonville and Dune series were my playground in middle school and High School.