Get Rid of the Parents? Nancy Werlin.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association

Source: Booklist
Year: July 199
Version: 95
Issue: i21
Page: 1934

When my editor read the initial draft of my first young adult novel, Are You Alone on Purpose? (1994), she returned it with the comment, "Get rid of the parents!" And, indeed, it's universally acknowledged by authors and editors that a YA novel with parents as central characters will soon be in want of an audience.

By definition, a YA novel must be tightly focused on the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of its teen protagonists. In Chris Crutcher's Ironman, for example, Bo Brewster's struggle with his father may be the linchpin of the novel, but events are presented entirely from Bo's point of view. Readers never get to know Bo's father or understand his motives except, perhaps, by reading and extrapolating between the lines.

In reality, however, Crutcher hasn't even come close to getting rid of the parents: Bo's father, as the antagonist, is vital to the plot. So, as with many rules initially presented as absolute, leaving parents out of a story has some subclauses. The truth is that parents and parental authority figures are usually of great importance in YA novels, even, and perhaps especially, when they are not present in the story at all. By examining some of the ways YA authors use parents and parent substitutes in their books, we can open the door to some interesting questions about the nature of YA literature, its authors, and the needs of teen readers, and explore the notion of whether parents are as important in YA fiction as adults think they are.

As a writer of YA fiction, I find it difficult to conceive of a novel that doesn't at least mention parents. After all, children have to come from somewhere, whether in real life or novels. Most fictional teens actually do come equipped with parents--usually married, heterosexual ones--whose personalities and flaws, though touched on perhaps only indirectly (as in Crutcher's novel), still affect their teenager's life. Of course, there are other kinds of parents in YA fiction as well--from the near perfect to the just awful. The best example of near perfection can be found in Madeleine L'Engle's Austin family novels. In these stories, Vicki and her siblings can count, absolutely, on their parents' love and wisdom. Lois McMaster Bujold uses a witty twist on this idea in her sf The Warrior's Apprentice: Miles' parents are as rich as the Austins in love and wisdom, but they are also famous warriors in a society that values military skill above all. Physically disabled Miles feels compelled to prove--to himself--that he's worthy of being their son.

But the vast majority of parents in YA books occupy a middle, more realistic ground. They are kind, responsible, loving adults who may sometimes make mistakes, but who, nonetheless, provide a healthy environment for their teens--one in which trust, communication, and growth are possible despite problems. Good--if imperfect--parenting is common in YA novels, with parents ranging from married couples to single parents to parent substitutes.

Ellen's Case, by Lois Metzger, provides a good example of sound parenting from an ordinary married couple. Everyone's life changes when Ellen's new baby brother is born with cerebral palsy, but Ellen's parents are still willing and able--when Ellen will let them--to provide their daughter with guidance. By the end of the novel, Ellen is able to listen to her mother's advice. In Rita Williams-Garcia's Like Sisters on the Homefront, it's a single-parent mother who effects change. She forces teenage-parent Gayle to visit relatives in Georgia, where Gayle's family circle expands to include a huge assortment of relatives. This new family changes Gayle's vision of the world and her place in it, and, ultimately, helps her mature. Similarly, in Trudy Krisher's Kinship, Pert learns to see her idealized father more clearly, and comes to value her strong mother and the parent surrogates in the Happy Trails trailer park who have always been there for her. Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate presents, perhaps, the ultimate example of good, non-traditional parenting: Vivian's werewolf mother not only verbally discourages her daughter's human instincts but also sets a wild example of her own. As it turns out, Mom really does know best. Loving a human boy and acting human aren't the best choices for Vivian.

In all these cases, separation from parents--that necessary emotional journey all teens take--is supported and aided by the grownups. Sometimes, however, as in Ironman, the most powerful dramas about separation are about a struggle between a teen and a parent who does not have the teen's best interest at heart. And sometimes that struggle literally becomes a matter of life and death. In Cynthia Voigt's When She Hollers, Tish uses a knife to confront the stepfather who has raped her, and in Edward Bloor's tangerine, Paul's parents refusal to face the truth about their older son puts Paul's very life at risk. In these novels, the directive "get rid of the parents" comes straight from the teen character and is the heart of the book.

A subtler version of this can be found in books with parents who abandon their children. In a wide variety of novels, including Amy Bronwen Zemser's Beyond the Mango Tree and Heather Quarles' A Door Near Here, flawed parents force their teenagers into premature adulthood and into a position that requires them to step into a parental role. In Quarles' book, for example, Katherine takes on the responsibility for her three younger siblings and their household as her alcoholic mother deteriorates. In these books, the teenager's maturity is a silent indictment of the parents. Readers conclude that these adults are no good and have no business being parents at all. Such parents may be integral to the story, but the point is that the kids would be better off without them.

From books featuring dangerous and irresponsible parents, it's a short step to ones in which teenagers are shown fending entirely for themselves. These novels are the ones that spring to mind most strongly when getting rid of the parents is mentioned, and it's fascinating to look at what happens when parents are, indeed, completely removed.

Consider "fantasy household" novels, stories in which parents have been killed in some sort of accident before the book opens. From S. E. Hinton's classic The Outsiders to more recent examples such as Marsha Qualey's Thin Ice, these books depict siblings caring for each other very effectively, barely missing or needing their parents' guidance. It's interesting to note, however, that the coping strategies used by the teens in these books differ very little from those advocated by the good parents and parent substitutes in the novels mentioned above. Teens in these books like their cousins in books in which parents don't function well, have transmuted into adults. This is startlingly evident at the end of Thin Ice, when Arden's adult brother, who raised her and has run away from his own impending parenthood, explains that he knew she would step in and help care for his child. The new adult cedes parental responsibility to the teenager that he cared for when he was but a teenager himself.

An opposite view of teens taking responsibility can be found in books such as William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Brock Cole's The Goats, and Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, which reveal the vicious underside of the kids-alone fantasy. These books, all set in a school-like environment in which adult supervision has been eliminated, scream out with the need for parent/adult intervention. It's dangerous, they argue, for kids to be alone; they will self-destruct.

The underground truth, then, is that despite the demand for and appeal of books without parents, parental figures in various forms, including the form of a teenager, are alive, well, and very necessary in YA novels. Indeed, disaster seems to strike whenever there is no one in a parental role.

In her controversial book The Nurture Assumption, psychologist Judith Rich Harris suggests that peer groups, not parents, are the strongest environmental influence on child development, particularly for teens. The "get rid of the parents" directive, if it were followed literally, would be entirely in line with this thinking. Yet, as we have seen, it isn't. Is this because the adults who write YA novels are, like parents themselves, desperate to consider adults as necessary to teens? Let's look again at The Outsiders, written by Hinton when she was a teenager. Yes, the novel is a romantic fantasy about life without parents, and it features some responsible teenagers who resemble grownups. It certainly seems to belong in the same category with Thin Ice. However, it may actually be part of a category that Harris postulates would exist if more teenagers wrote publishable novels, a category that shows a vision of the world in which parents are simply not important, a category it seems adults who write YA fiction can't or don't want to believe in enough to create.

In May of this year, readers had another opportunity to see how teens felt about the role parents play in their lives. Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, now 14, published a vampire fantasy called In the Forests of the Night [BKL Je 1 & 15 99], which she wrote at age 13. While reading it, I couldn't help noticing that although Risika, the teenage vampire protagonist, has some fond memories of her father, her strongest emotional tie is with a peer--her brother--and that parents have been effectively removed from her daily life.

When Harris asked teens directly if parents were important, they said no. And as I search my own very strong memories of being a teenager, I recall feeling the same way. I longed for my own house and my own space, free of all parental influence--the very fantasy enacted in The Outsiders and In the Forests of the Night. But in revisiting my childhood as a grown-up, I also see that my parents were a vital shaping influence. I strongly suspect most adults looking back see things the same way; that, in the end, is why parents keep appearing in teenage characters' lives, even when the fictional teens don't want them there. Adult writers know that they can't really get rid of the parents. They can pretend they're not there, but at the same time, they have reason to be glad that they are.

Nancy Werlin's most recent book, The Killer's Cousin (Delacorte), is a Booklist Books for Youth 1998 Editors' Choice.