Young adult fiction almost always features a protagonist who is a teenager or young adult for most of the story or series. This means that one of the largest problems YA authors face is the “Parent Problem,” that is, the problem of how to get their protagonists to have adventures without the adults of the community stepping in to protect them, the way actual responsible adults are supposed to.

Logically, there are really only four options: 1) The adults behave like responsible grown-ups who take on appropriate parts of the adventure and/or plot; 2) The adults behave like responsible adults, but the story problems revolve around things that most reasonable adults would expect a teenager to solve for themselves; 3) There are no adults around; or 4) The adults are irresponsible, incapable, incompetent, or outright evil.

Many story problems revolve around things that are too large for anyone, adult or not, to handle alone. There are plenty of books in which the dam breaks or a hurricane inundates the town; while the adults are busy coping with rebuilding, the teens and younger children cope in their own way with their parts of the problem. The problem is large enough that everybody has an appropriate piece to handle, so the young protagonist has plenty to do even though there are lots of adults around.

The second option is the method of choice for an enormous amount of present-day-setting YA. Adults cannot actually be on the high school basketball team; they can only coach. So if the story-problem is about winning the state basketball tournament, it’s fairly easy to keep the adults out of it (or make them part of the problem, see #4) Young adult and teen romances usually deal with high school dating problems; while an adult might reasonably give advice, one wouldn’t expect an authority figure to dictate who a teen could date or follow a pair of teens around to tell them when they should hold hands (and even if they did, there’d still be plenty of room for “but does he/she really like me?” angst). There’s a vast array of so-called “problem novels” that deal with teens coping with difficulties ranging from abuse to the death of a family member to their parents’ divorce. Sometimes, the protagonist gets adult help, sometimes not, but the thing all these stories have in common is that ultimately, the protagonist is the one who has to deal with the emotions involved, because nobody else can actually do it for them.

As for #3, there are two basic ways of having no adults around in a story: first, the young protagonist can be separated from the adults by accident or design (that is, he/she can be the lone survivor of a shipwreck or plane crash in the wilderness, or she/he can run away). In Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, the teen protagonist is the only survivor when a small plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness; Jean Craighead’s classic My Side of the Mountain is the story of a runaway trying to live in the woods on his own, and while adults occasionally pass through, the protagonist always has to consider whether they’re likely to drag him home before he decides to interact with them, and never lets them take over the responsibility that he has seized for himself.

The second way of having no adults around is, of course, to kill them off or have them mysteriously disappear. Killing off the parents early on is a time-honored way of forcing a young protagonist to be responsible for him/herself; just look at all the fairy tales that start with the main character being orphaned. Mysterious disappearance is another good way of getting rid of the adults who’re supposed to be looking after things (and can do double-duty by giving the protagonist someone to go out looking for). The two are often combined, as when one parent goes off somewhere and vanishes, and then the remaining parent dies or is incapacitated. In modern stories, divorce is sometimes used as a less extreme way of disposing of at least one parent; like mysterious disappearance, it gets one adult out of the way while leaving open the possibility that the missing parent will return.

The trouble with killing off the parents, especially in a modern-day story, is that it doesn’t get rid of all the other adults who could or should take responsibility for a child or teenager. Families seldom exist in isolation, and most communities expect some adult to step in and take care of an orphaned child. This is particularly true if the parents are killed off when the protagonist is very young; somebody has to take care of a two-year-old, or the toddler won’t survive. Once the protagonist is old enough to get by on his/her own, the author can sometimes arrange to have the main character’s entire village wiped out by bandits, an invading army, plague, or a dragon, leaving the teenaged hero or heroine with no one to depend on but themselves, but this kind of wholesale slaughter doesn’t always fit the story the author wants to tell.

This brings us to option #4, the adults being irresponsible, incapable, incompetent, or outright evil.

This one can be used alone – in comedies, in particular, the bumbling, incompetent adults who have to be rescued by the kids are a perennial favorite – or in combination with killing off the parents, as with all those other fairy tales full of evil stepmothers and wicked uncles who’re after their ward’s fortune or title. Often, the supposedly responsible adults who take the orphan in turn out to be resentful, neglectful, or incompetent (or all three at once), like Harry Potter’s aunt and uncle, or Jane Eyre’s aunt and most of the adults in the boarding school she attends. Corrupt, venal, or abusive masters are a staple of fiction in which the protagonist is working as an apprentice, rather than living with family. There are also stories in which the “somebody” who takes responsibility for the orphaned child is unexpected or unconventional, and that’s the source of the story, as when Mowgli is adopted by wolves and raised by the animals in the jungle.

And then there are the stories where only the protagonist is capable of achieving the story-solution, because he or she has some power or ability that the adults lack. In a realistic modern-day story, this might be a talent for something like chess or music; in fantasy, the protagonist may be the subject of a prophecy or have some rare magic power; occasionally, one finds a story in which children have a power or ability that is lost at puberty or when they become adult or reach some other major life-milestone. The adults can be as competent and responsible as they like, but only the protagonist can win the game/pull the sword from the stone/kill the evil wizard/etc.

Historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy allow for a final option: finding or inventing a culture in which teenagers are allowed and expected to do things that modern society reserves for adults. This can solve most of the Parent Problem quite handily; if a society considers people more or less adult at sixteen, then the sixteen-year-old hero can go off and have adventures like every other adult. Lots of fantasy takes this way out, either by basing the story on a real-life time and place where adulthood arrived much sooner than it does in the modern world, or by inventing an entirely new society that works the way the author needs it to. The Hunger Games postulates a future dystopia in which teens are deliberately put at risk as a way of enforcing the government’s control. And SF/F allows for all sorts of new ways to implement the four basic solutions, from spaceship crashes to teleportation accidents.

I have to finish by pointing out that the Harry Potter books makes use of nearly all of these methods at once: the hero is an orphan, the subject of a prophecy; the aunt and uncle who take him in are neglectful/incompetent; the other adults in his life cover the range from obviously incompetent (Minister Fudge) to supposedly-responsible but busy dealing with the Big Picture (Dumbledore) and thus leaving the kids largely to their own devices; he and his friends spend much of the final book as, essentially, runaways; etc.

11 Comments
  1. Harry Potter does do it all, doesn’t it. 🙂
    On my part, I have the mother being the one that needs rescuing, and the father as both incompetent and actively trying to stop the teen from getting involved, because it’s too dangerous. But he’s an integral part of the story, with his own motivations, etc. I find it frustrating when parents are an obstacle in the plot when they have no real reason for being so.
    #3 is very handy for portal fantasy, time travel, etc. But lately I’ve been reading Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country trilogy, where though the parents are left behind in the real world, there are still adults in the other country, the trouble being the question of who is responsible for who – the adults, or their supposed inventors.

  2. The ages of the reader and the protagonist(s) do not have to match for it to be a good story to the reader. Nor do the sexes, occupations, or hair colours. Stated very well:

    “(The Wee Free Men) is a children’s book because… 2 It has a nine-year-old heroine. This is good enough for the industry, which believes that books with children as the main protagonist are de facto books for children. For similar reasons, Moby Dick is very popular among whales.” — Terry Pratchett, rasfw

  3. I use a few of these together (the protagonist tries to get help from the parents, who don’t believe her and they almost create more of a mess and so she is forced to run away on her own). I do find it interesting how many authors choose to kill off the parents though.

  4. It’s interesting that even while story-telling conventions (from fairy tales onward) require that young protagonists learn to make decisions on their own, the relationship between the protagonists and the parents is usually very important. The Hatchet protagonist is on his own, but his character arc centers on forgiving his parents for their divorce. Harry Potter is an orphan, but his relationship with his parents is central to many of the climaxes in his series. Even the Boxcar children are on the run (in the initial story) because they don’t think their grandfather liked their deceased dad. Perhaps this is because becoming an adult is inextricably tied to trying to understand the adults who have most shaped one’s life?

  5. A lot of cultures allow children a lot more range than is commonplace in the current day United States.

  6. Like Cara, I am working on a story were the young adult protagonist is deliberately keeping their activities secret from the adults (other than the antagonist) because there is a threat against the parents by the villain that the protagonist feels they need to handle on their own.

    Obviously, this is not suitable for the youngest of protagonists, but for many teen characters this would be an appropriate story element.

  7. I would add another subcategory – adults who are not bumbling or incompetent, but the kids are keeping secrets from them. I suppose that’s along the same lines as running away, but the adults would still be in the picture. And not evil, not involved-but-incompetent – just out of the loop.
    And most ordinary “teen dramas” would be flying under the radar like that – just trying to maintain that status quo with the adults while having unusual adventures would put an additional tension into the story.

  8. Does the coming of age rite story fit in here? Adolescent is sent off to perform certain tasks in order to come back an adult.Other adults may not (openly) help.

  9. There’s a scene in Beverly Cleary’s Mitch & Amy where Amy and her friend are playing pretend.

    “‘How will we get rid of our mother?’ The first rule in any game of pretend was to get rid of parents as soon as possible. Have them die of pneumonia, let Indians shoot them with bows and arrows, but get rid of them.”

    I’ve often wondered if that was Children’s Author Cleary talking or Former Child Cleary.

  10. I read & enjoyed the Harry Potter books as an adult, and I suspect I wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much if I had read them back when I was the “appropriate age.” Back then I prefered adult protagonists, even if I was mostly unaware of that preference and couldn’t articulate it.

    I wonder how general this is: That teenage and preteen readers prefer adult protagonists and only put up with the younger protagonists because they aren’t in a good position to object. (And may not even be aware that they could object.) That the abundance of youthful protagonists comes from adults – and in particular parental figures – who mistakenly feel that this is what young readers want or ought to want.

    So a fifth option might be to go ahead and make the protagonists into actual responsible adults themselves. With the drawback, of course, that such a book would be harder to sell to a publisher convinced that “young readers want to read about young protagonists.”

  11. I think there’s one more: the adults are simply not interested in solving the problems that the younger protagonists want to solve. That could be in combination with 2) or 4), but I can imagine an adult who is not incompetent or evil, and a problem that is challenging and open to adults, but the adult in the younger protagonist’s life is not sufficiently interested in solving it, or sees no need for it to be solved. Especially if there are cultural differences between the generations, or differences in personalities, priorities, and philosophies, people can decide different things are important.