When I was a kid, I read a lot of children's and young adult books. But the kids in those books always seemed to have way more freedom than me. Despite the fact that they lived in the suburbs, they could get places by walking or biking. They could have adventures or romances after school, because they never seemed to have to take a schoolbus, or to have parents who would worry if they were home 20 minutes late. They could go over to a friend's house without asking permission (or, if they did ask permission, the answer would always be yes), they could have private conversations on the telephone without being overheard, they could poke around in the attic without the parents coming and asking why they're poking around in the attic, and they could sneak out of the house without getting caught. They could babysit at 13 or easily get any other job the plot required them to. When their parents went out to do boring grownup stuff, they always left the kids at home alone so the kids could forward the plot unsupervised. None of this rang true in my own life, and it was very frustrating to me that my life at age 8/11/13/16 was never as free as that of the protagonists in my books.
While I can understand why the author would do this for plot purposes, I think it would be very interesting to see children's/YA books where the kids are fully supervised. They have to take the schoolbus to and from school, they have to get a ride to go anywhere else, they always have parental supervision when at home or when going out in public, their parents forbid them from going over to a friend's house if the friend's parents won't be there, parents can tell approximately where everyone is and what they're doing in their own home (you can usually do this if you've lived in a house for several years, unless the it's a particularly large or especially well soundproofed house), the parents sometimes make plans for the kids that prevent the kids from doing what they want to do at that particular time, and if the kids bend or break the rules they get caught a reasonable amount of time, with corresponding loss of parental trust. Then take all these limitations, and create a decent plot within them.
2 comments:
This is very interesting to me, as I write for children and young adults.
The reason you don't see much supervision in children's books is because those books are a world where children are in control - where they have adventures and explore on their own - they take risks they probably couldn't in real life, and get home safely. In that respect even realistic children's books are to some extent fantasies.
Good children's literature shows parents and other authority figures as minimally as possible. Remember the voices in the TV Peanuts cartoons? That's the idea. A children's-only world, or as close to it as one can get.
I could go on all day about this. I'll force myself to stop now.
I see why it needs to be done. Whenever I endeavour to write fiction, my protagonists always end up independently wealthy (which is why my fiction never sees the light of day). But I'd love to see someone actually make the plot work with realistic supervision.
Actually, the Ramona books more or less did that, although they were set in the mid-20th century. The last one was written in 1999, and it just didn't work nearly as well as the older ones.
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