It’s Parental Neglect, Charlie Brown!

My partner and I were talking about “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” over breakfast the other morning, as you do. Specifically, we were talking about our deep and abiding anger at the adults in that neighbourhood. It’s just possible that every adult had the thought that giving a kid a rock in their bag would be a funny gag and that Charlie Brown had the misfortune to get it every time, but even so, that means that adults were deliberately playing tricks on children. Not to mention that Linus is able to spend the night in a pumpkin patch and not have his parents frantic. This is possible because of the near-total lack of adults in the Peanuts universe.

It’s not just Peanuts, but Peanuts is of course the most notable example. The adults are all played by trombone. But so much media seems to dump children in a space without supervision and then act surprised when things go badly for them. The best of them give an explanation—in Oz, of course, Dorothy is whisked away from her guardians and is in the first book seen as a witch and therefore given total autonomy. In some works, it’s that the parents are at work, or even just explicitly neglectful. But in a lot, there’s no explanation because the concept isn’t really considered.

From a Doyleist perspective, it’s because the work needs to focus on the children; the reason My So-Called Life put as much time into the adults as it did is that Claire Danes was too young to be on set enough to focus strictly on Angela. Peanuts is about Charlie Brown and his friends, and Charles Schultz was of an age where children spent enormous amounts of time unsupervised and involved in their own pursuits. His focus is the children. And while that works for the space of a comic strip, it only becomes a little unsettling when stretched into a half-hour—why is Charlie Brown directing a Christmas pageant on his own?

Mine may have been the last generation to have the level of freedom of those children; if anything, we had so much freedom that all parenting since then has been an over-correction for the neglect suffered by Generation X. I remember news reports discussing the alarming trend of latchkey kids, and I remember being a latchkey kid myself after those reports started airing. My mother had no choice, but neither did most of our parents. It’s only the later generations that would bear their parents’ concern about having to afford childcare instead.

But my kids’ TV shows, when they watch scripted TV, still tends to involve absent adults. At best, the adults are there but not involved in the plot’s goings-on for some reason. Jim from Trollhunters has a loving mother from whom he’s working very hard to hide his troll-hunting. Various of the Magic Girls of my daughter’s shows live alone despite clearly being children, or are supervised in some way but still go off on their own in a way that would get CPS knocking on your door if you tried to do it to your actual children.

I don’t mind the adventures. Not just because it’s necessary from the Doyleist perspective but because children should be allowed their adventures even in the real world. Too much supervision only keeps kids from learning how to do their own thing. The Chronicles of Narnia wouldn’t work if the Professor tagged along with the Pevensie children all the time. Heck, Diggory’s uncle is in The Magician’s Nephew and is just an obnoxious burden. We are only harming our children by keeping them from their own adventures, even if we really need to find a balance between helicopter parenting and neglect.

What worries me is the idea that you can’t turn to adults. Those selfsame Pevensies were able to go to the Professor and explain their concerns, and that’s astonishing for an eighty-year-old book written by a repressed Englishman. Who does Charlie Brown have to talk to? He has Linus, who is younger than he is. Several years, in fact, since Lucy was introduced as being younger than Charlie Brown, and Linus is the younger brother. Jim has troll adults, but what he really needs is a human who can understand, and he doesn’t have one because he’s hiding everything from his mother.

I want my children to have their own adventures, but I want them to know that they can come home and tell me if someone is giving them rocks in their trick-or-treat bags. I want them to explore their worlds and face their own demons and so forth and know that they can come home and tell me everything and that I will listen and support them. It may have had to do it because of Doyleist reasons, but in a Watsonian sense, My So-Called Life had the best of both worlds. Angela went off and practiced being an adult, but when she just needed her mom, Patty was always there. A lot of fictional parents are on my “at least I’m a better parent than” list, but Patty Chase is not, because she’s there.