As we discussed the Cybils nominees, one of the Middle Grade panelists noted that she disliked a particular book because the mom in the book was so dysfunctional. I started to notice how many of the moms in the books were either bad moms or dead or seriously ill. It was a lot.
Dysfunctional or mentally ill mom:
Thank You, Lucky Stars by Beverly Donofrio.
Waiting for Normal by Leslie Connor.
Itch by Michelle D. Kwasney.
The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry.
Greetings from Nowhere by Barbara O’Connor.
Masterpiece by Elise Broach.
Meeting Miss 405 by
Man in the Moon by Dotti Emderle.
Mom runs off and leaves kid:
Tennyson by Lesley M.M. Blume.
Itch by Michelle D. Kwasney.
The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry. (dad, too)
From Alice to Zen and Everyone in Between by Elizabeth Atkinson
Greetings from Nowhere by Barbara O’Connor.
The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets by Nancy Springer.
Window Boy by Andrea White.
Bringing the Boy Home by N.A. Nelson.
Diamond of Drury Lane by Julia Golding.
Mom seriously ill or dies:
Secrets of the Cirque Medrano by Elaine Scott.
Don’t Talk To Me About the War by David Adler.
Dog Lost by Ingrid Lee.
The Floating Circus by Tracie Vaughan Zimmer.
The Book of Nonsense by David Michael Slater.
My Dad’s a Birdman by David Almond.
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountain by Laurel Snyder.
Chancey of the Maury River by Gigi Amateau. (Main character is a horse whose mom has died.)
Eleven by Patricia Reilly Giff.
Bringing the Boy Home by N.A. Nelson.
The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall.
The Postcard by Tony Abbott. It’s the main character’s father who has mother issues in this one, but same abandonment motif.
The Walls of Cartagena by Julia Durango.
The Youngest Templar: Keeper of the Grail by Michael Spradlin.
I didn’t keep a list. but there are far fewer bad dads and dead dads in these books. I’m also no psychologist, but it must say something about the problems that children’s literature authors are working through or think children are working through that there are so many books with broken mother/child relationships in these nominees.
That would be a fascinating study for a master’s thesis in literature or library science… But when you start thinking about it, this issue goes way, way back – at least to the Grimm stories, and all those “fairy tales.” Which Disny princess had a functional mom relationship – Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid, Jasmine (from Aladdin)?? Sleeping Beauty is closest, and her mom sent her away and lied about her identity for 16 years. Also look at parental relationships in anything by Roald Dahl, or …. most others!
I think it didn’t bother me until the end, when it just seemed that every book I picked up had some sort of deadbeat mom. Maybe it’s a knee-jerk reaction against deadbeat dads? Authors showing kids that dads can be okay, too?
But, MamaSteff is right, this goes all they way back to the Grimms. Moms just get a bad rap, sometimes.
this is so interesting!
i’ve thought a lot about what i call “orphan syndrome” in books. this doesn’t address all the titles, but for myself i can say that i think the instinct to orphan,to take away the mom when a child is young, comes from the need for tension. a book has to have some underlying edge to it, right? and losing a mother is hard, but as long as it happens in a non-traumatic way (for the reader and orphan both) it doesn’t make a book too scary. so its the perfect solution to wanting tension, but not trauma. angst and confusion, but not the need for a mental hospital.
oddly, in my own case, the orphanhood entered the book in a late revision but that’s a looooong story.
maybe you’ll be happy to hear that the next book (the next two, actually) features two families, both with moms and dads intact.
🙂
“Parents disappeared, presumed dead, actually dead – parents don’t fare very well in children’s stories these days, I’m afraid. Best to be a child and not a parent, then.”
I brought that up to my own mom when I was younger and she seemed to be under the impression that you get the most drama from mom problems. I think it’s the worst thing imaginable for a child to lose a mom, or have a mom or mom figure who isn’t there for them, or is terrible to them. It doesn’t get any worse than that, does it? A child has to take charge when he or she doesn’t have a mom to fall back on. I guess it is the ultimate character building exercise.
I think it’s an interesting topic to bring up. I like mom-child issues in books because I have my own mom issues but it is rather sad how widespread the problem is in literature!
I should probably say a word in defense of writers. There is no drama without conflict. A writer first creates a character, and them puts the characer into a conflict situation where he or she has to find the solution. When the protagonist is a child, one has to come up with a situation where the child goes through the conflict without the aid of parents. If Mark Twain had written Huckleberry Huckstable (using the family from the Cosby Show,) Huck would never have run off on a raft in the first place.
Marcia Calhoun Forecki
Better Than Magic
http://www.eloquentbooks.com/BetterThanMagic.html
You know, I was musing in the shower a week or so ago, and it occurred to me: every single one of the books on the Middle Grade list has an intact family. That made me smile.
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