Kiddie Lit Review Reveals Ugly Truth: Adults are Expendable (and/or Evil)

Have you noticed the books young readers enjoy most tend to place adults into three categories?  We olds are fools, fiends, or dead.  Huck Finn’s mother was dead and his dad was a bigoted drunk (Tom Sawyer was an orphan who routinely outwitted elderly Aunt Polly, his guardian).  Harry Potter was an orphan raised by buffoonish and abusive relatives, who later was forced to save the wizarding world from the evil Voldemort.  Oliver Twist was an orphan who escaped an abusive orphanage only to be manipulated by criminals.  Matilda had fools for parents and a tyrant headmistress.  Jem and Scout ? Motherless, as was Nancy Drew.  Sure, Atticus Fitch and Carson Drew were decent enough, but not exactly hands-on parents.  The kids would have been fine without them.  Pippi Longstocking had no mother and a weird father. Katniss Everdeen, the pride of District 12, had an ineffectual mother and her father died in a coal mine explosion. Laura Ingalls Wilder appears to be the only kiddie lit author who wasn’t out to settle a score against the adult world: it seems she was too busy dealing with her middle child issues and extracting revenge from whoever inspired the Nellie Oleson character than to turn her pen on Pa and Ma.  The conclusion is obvious: our children are plotting our demise to create their independence and thus accomplish great things when free from our meddling and interference!

Or maybe our children only fantasize about becoming emancipated (let's just assume that we died fighting for a noble cause ) and thus are free to accomplish great things without our meddling and interference. Wait. That's kinda what we hope will happen if we do our jobs as parents correctly.  And that's what every kid in the world is hardwired from birth to want.  So maybe it's no surprise that independence and self-sufficiency are such popular plot components in kiddie lit.  Our kids don’t really want to overthrow us, at least not yet.  They just want to imagine what it feels like to be (improved) versions of us.  Which is what we want for them too.   So Huck Finn and Harry Potter inspire them to save the imaginary world but, at least for now, they still come back because they need $20 to go to the movie with a friend in the real world. No doubt a movie about a kid saving the world for villainous adults despite well-intended-yet-unproductive meddling  for her surviving parent (the other having vanished at sea while trying to save a dolphin from the fishing nets of a heartless tuna boat captain).  

I am reminded my own reading-inspired escapist fantasies whenever I sneak a look out the kitchen window into my backyard and see Book Monkey Syd, my blogging partner, her Mockingjay novel bookmarked and resting on the arm of chair on the deck where she had been reading moments ago.  She’s alone and whirling and swinging a sword-length scrap of PVC pipe at enemies unseen (by me), battling forces of evil and probably saving her little sister from peril while her father frets helplessly from the sidelines.  So I stay in the kitchen and try not to interfere. She’ll be in soon enough, asking me to air up her bicycle tire or let her download a new book on her Nook. If I'm fortunate, I'll get a hug out of the deal. 

RCM