damselfish | (no subject)

One thing I find really strange/jarring about a lot of genre YA fiction is how something huge and life-changing happens and then the characters go back to doing normal teen things--particularly going to school. They also don't tell their parents things that they really, really should.

Like, authors, maybe I remember being a teenager better, I don't know, but I have something to tell you: I stayed home when I had to catch a late flight from vacation and nobody wanted to wake up in three hours to work/school the next day.

If I was secretly the princess of a magical kingdom and had until the full moon to find the Fiddlybobs of Rule, I would absolutely not be going to school. And yet, I saw this perpetrated again and again! I can forgive plots where the supernatural side of the story is a secret to be kept from parents (e.g., Animorphs), but that's not relevant in a lot of the books I'm reading now. Or sometimes the characters keep things secret when they really shouldn't because there's no evidence their parents suck, can't handle it, shouldn't handle it, or whatever. When things went south, 90% of the time my first instinct was to make an adult deal with it and those were normal life issues! If I needed to find the Fiddlybobs of Rule I would 100% be asking my parents if they know anybody in the Fiddlybob finding biz.

Were all YA authors raised by rabid disciplinarians?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oddly, I have that exact same complaint about advice columns.

You mean how the advice is so often summed up as "have you tried sitting down and talking to them?"

Well,that too.

But often, teenagers 15+ write in about their loving yet overprotective parents, and I just don't get what makes them keep putting up with, say, a 4pm curfew or a rule forbidding them from going out to walk the dog alone.

Yah, I didn't have the best trust established with my parental units but STILL...... sometimes these things come across like no one ever bugged their parents for something on the scale of a ride to the mall....

I mean it's one thing to have books where the kids don't get along with their parents or there's some canon reason for them not to say anything!* But it's like there's just an assumption that teenagers never talk to their parents about anything, which I find weird because my mother was usually my first stop on the "oh god things are falling apart and I need advice!" train.

*And while it is valuable to show relationships with parents not being great in books I'm always kind of amazed at how rarely YA depicts... well, healthy families. It could be because I read a lot of genre YA, but you hit the nail on the head with "sometimes these things come across like no one ever bugged their parents for something on the scale of a ride to the mall...."