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You know, I’ve been thinking about this lately. And while I wish there were better parents in fiction, I can, to an extent, understand why a lot of authors choose to remove them from the picture. Plainly put, they’re lazy.

I’ve been planning an adventure story about a 10 year old girl with a set of functioning parents, and the reoccurring problem I keep running into is that no parent in their right mind would let their child go into the kind of danger this girl needs to go into. Not only that, but they take the burden of the plot off her shoulders. She doesn’t call the shots, so she doesn’t have that kind of responsibility to make her decisions interesting. Is there a dramatic choice she’s faced with? Well too bad, because her parents are making it for her. And WHAT kind of character-based trauma can I give a 10 year old, other than her parents dying??? With them in the picture, she’s been mostly sheltered from the cruelties of life.

Basically, I have to think ten times harder to make a convincing plot. All of the above can be circumnavigated, but it takes an extra dose of brain power and a whole lot of headdesking. Frankly, it’d be ten times easier to just kill them off.