About Parents Present and Absent in YA Literature by Patty Blount

 This month's topic is parents...

It got me thinking about how literally every Disney movie ever has dead parents or the "evil" step-family. And so many popular stories have at least one dead parent, i.e., Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, A Court of Thorns and Roses, the Nancy Drew books, and so on...

Why is the absent parent such a popular theme in these stories? 

If I had to sum it up in a single word, it would be "SUPERVISION." Or, to be precise, the lack of it. 

Parents provide protection, authority, and control over children. For authors writing fiction in which children are the main characters, an absent parent leads to a main character able to get away with performing the various tasks our plots demand. It also hastens our readers' ability to sympathize with characters. 

But many critics call this 'lazy writing." 

I don't know if I agree with that. Yes, I will concede that a dead parent makes plotting easier. But it also makes character development harder. Death is a heavy issue to write well. It requires a whole group of emotions for authors to master in order to tell this character's story (i.e., Kubler-Ross's stages of grief).

And those emotions have weight, have strength -- hell, sometimes, they have their own pulse.

In my latest YA novel, THE SMELL OF SMOKE AND ASH, a dead father was crucial to the entire premise: teen Riley has visions of his father. Disturbing, violent, often dangerous visions that provide the catalyst to the story's main goal - figure out who murdered Dad. Despite this, I deliberately gave Riley two loving parents -- his mother remarried and his step-father is a solid father figure in his own right. 

But in my earlier novels, I played with this theme. Grace, for example, in SOME BOYS, has a father whose absence plays a critical role in the story's trajectory. His new wife is someone Grace despises. How Grace navigates that tension is part of her transformative arc. In SOMEONE I USED TO KNOW, Ashley's entire family play pivotal roles in her story, as well as her brother, Derek's. Derek is the co-main character in this dual-POV story. 

In SEND, main character Dan did a terrible thing. I deliberately wrote two loving parents for him, parents who stand by him despite this horrible thing, because I wanted him to eventually OWN that rather than somehow be excused for it. 

Essentially, the absent/dead parent theme provides SEPARATION. So if you agree it's lazy writing, what other ways can authors provide the separation that's required for their child characters to embark on whatever journey their stories require? Hit me up in the comments!