I’ve been pretty absent lately. Thesis is supposed to be nearing completion, and I’m a couple of pages away from a breakdown. So time for some fluffy literary perspective!

The Times  has an article complaining that children’s books don’t depict fathers in a good light. The (male) author suggests that out of 100 books in his house, half had mothers, usually in a positive light, while only nine had fathers - five of which he deemed positive portrayals.

The assumption that books - fictional stories - have a responsibility to foster a positive view of parents was what struck me:

“Children’s books need to catch up,” says Nicholas Tucker, an educational psychologist and the author of The Rough Guide to Children’s Books. “There are a few in which you see dad washing up and doing things with the child, but it tends to be at the weekend or on holiday. There are not many where the dad is the most salient character.” 

Why does fiction have to mirror reality? Sometimes it does. But when you’re complaining that Peppa Pig’s dad never does the washing up, are you perhaps missing the point elsewhere? I enjoyed fiction as an escape, something entirely different to my life. I was never going to be at an American high school as a cheerleader, or go to Narnia, but that’s what ficiton is for.
Clearly, the author’s child hasn’t made it to Jacqueline Wilson yet, where parents are almost always dysfunctional, alcoholics or drug addicts, or just entirely incompetent and requiring more parenting than their children. The most positive ‘parents’ in her books are the foster parents or those running the care homes.

I guess my experience of children’s fiction is a bit outdated. My childhood reading until the age of about 10 consisted of what I suppose would be traditional children’s reading - Enid Blyton, the Chalet School, Nancy Drew - because that was what we had in the house, and to buy books at the rate I read was impossible. Then I graduated to Point books - horror, romance, science fiction - and the American series like the babysitters club, sweet valley high, the cheerleaders, and moved onto adult fiction by the time I was around 14 or so, I think.

Children’s stories most often don’t have parents around. Because if they’re functional, useful parents, the story would be incredibly dull a lot of hte time. Nobody would have holidays boating to an island with a case of ginger beer and bringing to justice a gang of smugglers (although in that case they did have parents who would have been responisble, if they hadn’t left the kids with the dopey Uncle Quentin the whole time). The number of orphans in children’s fiction is huge, because they don’t have people ‘responsible’ for them in the same way - some modern ones may be in foster homes etc but the majority of orphans are left to make their own way - because it’s more interesting that way.

The other point made in the article is that perhaps this reflects children’s experiences - fathers are absent, silly or just plain busy.

Psychologists estimate that children begin to form gender stereotypes between the ages of 3 and 5 — and while most pre-school literature perpetuates the idea that fathers are out at work and barely involved in childcare, the reality is very different. According to the Fatherhood Institute, British fathers in two-parent families now carry out, on average, 25 per cent of the family’s childcare-related activities during the week, and one third of those activities at weekends. And the pace of change is increasing. Between 2002 and 2005 the percentage of new fathers working flexi-time to spend more time with their young children rose from 11 per cent to 31 per cent. 

Well, while that’s an improvement it’s not exactly equality, is it. Rather, it makes the point that actually these ‘absent’ fathers are actually just that. I’m not one to speak on father issues, god knows, but in my experience it’s generally mothers who have the children during the day until early evening, when the father shows up - having earned more at his job STILL than a woman would, but that’s for another day and the Fawcett society. When a couple separates, more often than not the children saty with the mother and fathers might come over in the evening or pick the kids up from school, or every other weekend, but again that’s hardly an equal status. Note too that the quote above isn’t about dsingle parent families. It’s about two-parent families. That’s families with a mother and a father, when the father is involved in just one third of the weekend’s activities, and a quarter during the week. I would imagine it’s a lot less with single-parent families during the week, at least.
Ignoring the fact that fiction is sometimes just that rather than a social document (and I know it can be both) he does at least admit that there are two immediately obvious reasons for this which don’t involve ’sexism’. The classic books reflect their time - in The Tiger Who Came To Tea which he cites, Sophie and Sophie’s mum entertain the tiger while he eats all the food and drinks all the water in the taps (I love that bit), then dad comes home and takes them out for dinner. They have dad out to work because that’s what happened (the difference being….?). The second reason - that women write the stories, and this is their experience of parenthood.