K
Kamaduck
Guest
That’s true, it takes a really big crisis to get a good kid into the kind of trouble necessary for a good story. But I still think there should be more adult, married protagonists. Why are they all children and single people nowadays?There is also the fairytale dilemma, which I explained to my kids when they were young to let them know why the mother so often dies in fairytales.
Children’s stories are often about children acting in bold or independent ways. If you look back at many fairytales, you realize that children who had good parents would have to be quite naughty to even get into such serious situations in the first place. If Hansel and Gretel’s parents hadn’t abandoned them in the forest, after all, then the audience would not have a lot of sympathy for their plight, because they would be foolish little twerps who wouldn’t have their troubles if they had been good children. In order to create a situation where the child is forced to take an independent role, the author has to eliminate or hogtie the parents somehow.
That is not what is happening in the entertainment where the fathers are made out to be uniform in their incompetence, with the only variation being the particular collection of character flaws and personal failures they exhibit.
For the issue at hand, maybe we are dealing with two different-but-connected issues in reality and media.
In reality, many children are growing up in single-parent homes, or with parents who are emotionally distant. Both of these problems seem to be more common for fathers than for mothers. This could be fed by a media-induced image of fatherhood as useless.
In medialand, fathers who ARE present in their children’s lives are shown to be weak, incompetent, and useless (moreso than mothers). This is rarely challenged because many people already believe that real-life fathers (who may have abandoned them or are emotionally distant) are “useless”. So we get an generalized sense that all men who father children, whether they stick around or not, are useless. We get something of a vicious cycle- art responds to reality, and reality responds to art.
And I do think your posts make sense, too. (You always put things really well, Easterjoy.