A YA rant…
This morning, just getting off my couch, I stumbled onto a realization about something I hate about YA writing, and by extension something I hate about real adults. It’s a fallacy that is embraced by adults who read YA, and it’s an excuse that I hear over and over as a justification from real adults for why they try to program their teens like they’re personal appliances and not people with their own personalities and needs.
In two different reviews with two entirely different premises, the reviewers explained how the teen character gets into trouble, and the parents respond with unreasonably harsh punishment methods. Yet the adult reviewers both said, “I had an easy time relating to the parents, because they were just protecting their kids from bad influences.” Urgh!
News flash, adults: those “bad influences” are called “the rest of the human race,” and eventually, your own little bad influence is going to have to go out and deal with all those other people. The longer you insist on protecting and coddling your teen, the worse an influence they will be to someone else’s kids. That’s right, someone is looking at your “little angel” as their “little shit.” And they’re right to do so, because it will be your kid going “Hey, I’ve never done this before. Let’s try it.” It will be your kid acting as the bad influence because they had their own bad influence at home. YOU.
The sad joke is, for all your smothering efforts to coddle and protect your charges, you can’t change their minds on anything. You have a slim window of opportunity to influence their decision before they’ve made their minds up on any topic, but once your teen takes it in their head that something is a good idea, you have no more chance of stopping them than your parents had of stopping you before you made your own fuck ups.
And yet, over and over I see adults pick up the same delusion: “My kids won’t make the same mistakes I did.” YES, THEY WILL. In fact, they’ll make some of the exact same fuck ups, intentionally, just to rub your face in it. Why? Because of you, mom and dad. They learned it from you. You told them about your mistake and said you didn’t want them to do that. So they go ahead and do it just to spite you. If your kid does that, it’s not a sign that they’re a bad kid. It’s your sign that you’re doing a poor job of parenting. Just like your parents, most likely. Your folks failed to protect you from your mistakes, and by repeating their methods, guess what? You’re going to get the exact same result. Let us recall what the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result.
Again and again, I see parents in YA get treated like non-entities, only being there to punish the kids and lecture them. They don’t have personalities or anything resembling character development. They rarely cook dinner or talk their kids through homework, or do any other parenting besides lecturing and handing out punishments. I see these fake adults and I wonder, “Are there any YA parents who don’t treat their kids like shit for the sake of being a fictional antagonist?” YA parents are always “acting in the best interests of their kids,” at least according to adult readers. But it’s more honest to say that these adult characters are given only one role, to overreact and be a foil to their teen offspring. That sloppy writing, peoples, and you shouldn’t make excuses for it.
Real adults acting in this way are working from their desire to mold their kids lives into something more like what they want instead of what the teens want. So maybe to YA writers, this feels like the best way to handle every story. But it’s not realistic when all stories treat parents as adversaries.
I lived with some really shitty parents. I hated my mother sometimes. But when I needed someone to talk to, often I had no choice and had to come to Mom for advice. And the thing is, it was during my teens that my mother and I were the closest we would ever be. Those were the years when I could talk to her. The same goes for my dad, and that’s what I’d like to see every once in a while, the idea that even if a teen has a lousy parent, at least sometimes, the kids go to their parents for advice on major problems, even if they eventually decide not to listen and do their own thing.
I don’t need to see this in every story, and I’m not saying “writers, stop making this kind of conflict.” But I get tired of the chasm that develops in YA between kids and adults over and over. In fact, the last YA book I threw down, the scene I gave up on was the teen main character still not talking to her own mother about her developing problems, even though she was digging an unrealistically deep hole for herself. I get that this is a “strong conflict” in the writer’s mind, but what they aren’t seeing is, so many YA writers use the same trope that it’s a bad cliché, the idea that no good parents exist.
And the fact is, this harmfully stubborn streak in YA’s teen cast members is so common that it’s turning all the kids into caricatures. If these teens are so wild and rebellious, why are they virgins at 17? Why do none of them drink booze? Why are none of them party girls or easy girls? No, the kids depicted are near perfect angels, and they still get punished harshly for making common mistakes. And, I’m sorry adults, but I don’t see how you can identify with the need to torture kids just for the sake of “making a point.”
And why is it that these relatively good teen characters are punished in an extreme way just to provoke a reaction from the readers? Can’t parents be written more realistically in YA, or is YA really about blowing everything out of proportion in an effort to reach the teen readers with your coded lectures? Because you have to know, when teens read, they ignore the lectures in their fiction just as much as they avoid them in real life.
YA writers, I’m begging you, every other book, try to make at least one parent whose sole responsibility isn’t to act as a punishing dictator. Maybe sometimes, even make two great parents whom the kids love, but who still can’t help their kids with their bigger problem in life. It is okay for a parent to just answer “I don’t know what to tell you” instead of winding up with another two page lecture. My parents told me that all the time, and while it frustrated me, it also gave me the motivation to look elsewhere for answers. So my parents could be the catalyst to a decision without being adversarial in their role. And what I’m saying is, every once in a while, maybe your fictional parents can also be depicted in this way, which I feel is more realistic.
And adult readers of YA, stop acting like these extreme punishments are fair just because the teen character isn’t doing exactly what the adults want all the time. Most of these kids you’re reading about are virgins who never drank or did drugs. So if they have one really good fuck up, why is an extreme punishment “for the best”? Teens aren’t computers that you can tell what to do. If you think a harsh punishment is justifiable, then you’re a bad parent too. (You’re also probably the same kind of parent who insists that your kid is great while everyone else is a little shit. Which means you’re delusional as well.)
Being able to identify with the bad parents in the stories is not a good thing. So, how about you grow up a little and accept that your role is one of advisor to your teens, and not as the absolute ruler of their world? Cause if you see yourself in that light, your kids will too, and then, they won’t trust you. Then you’ll be a stereotypical YA parent. And that would fucking suck, to be a walking caricature with no other motivation than to agitate the fuck out of your teens.
