Youth fiction, invisibility and recognition

The fear of being ignored is a prominent theme in many kids’ books and films.  What does this say about how young people relate to parents and authority? 

Invisibility and parental recognition

I’d previously noticed that a number of children’s books play on the unfairness of being invisible.  I’d particularly noticed the perverse glee taken in children being proved right when something bad appears to befall them, after their cries for parental attention have gone unheeded.  In Not Now Bernard, Bernard is ignored by his disinterested parents and is ultimately eaten by a monster as a result.  Noisy Nora pretends to run away from home after her parents won’t give her enough attention, but is welcomed back when she returns soon afterwards.

Often it’s even manifested in the main characters being literally invisible or small (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Borrowers) or slipping into somehow parallel dimensions (Tom’s Midnight Garden).  (It’s tempting to see a link here to other stories about parallel dimensions - Narnia;  Peter Pan;  Conrad’s War;  Alice in Wonderland etc – but I think something else is going on here.)

Once I’d spotted this theme, I started noticing it everywhere.  But I also started noticing different types of invisibility, and different responses to it.  Did they relate to different stages of childhood? 

In books for young infants (maybe three to seven years old), the reader seems to be invited to sympathise with another child who is neglected, and strives for parental recognition and approval – like in Not Now Bernard and Noisy Nora. 

Adventure time!

But in books and films for slightly older children (maybe eight to fourteen), the emphasis seems to shift.  Acting without parental supervision isn’t merely frightening and undesirable – it acquires the heady excitement of doing something magical your parents don’t know about.  And following from that, the way young readers empathise with the character not just in sympathy but with envy. 

In the film ET, the eponymous alien hero is an amazing secret known only to the children.  (In fact, the specific plot device of “We can’t let the authorities find out about you, because scientists would want to take you away and experiment on you” ends up becoming a fairly widespread plot device to accommodate this whole genre of stories.)  In Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian in the Cupboard, the toys that come to life, and the adventures they have, are known about only to the main character (a schoolboy) and his peers.  Likewise Five Children and It, The Demon Headmaster, and probably hundreds of others. 

These stories create a sense of peer-recognition and community;  the commonality that comes from disempowerment.  That shared experience and understanding is the triumphant flipside of living under parental control – the ability to act with agency, under the radar of the all-seeing parental gaze.

This new-found excitement of doing something big without the crusties is still often tempered by anxiety though.  In The Goonies, the heroes take delight in their adventure, but the happy ending comes when all their parents arrive to give them a hug.  It’s significant that the final scene in The Goonies is in the youths relating their experiences to their parents and the press.  This taps into something else that many (but not all) children experience – the sense that if your mum only knew what was going on, then everything would just be OK. Not necessarily because they’ll have practical solutions to fix everything, but simply by dint of your situation being made slightly more real by dint of their recognising it. 

Perhaps this is also why it’s so powerful when characters in stories think they’ve just escaped from danger into the arms of familiar people, or into safe spaces – only to find that they are not as safe as they appear.  (The scene in Jurassic Park where the woman thinks she’s found her companion, but is horrified to find it’s only his severed arm.  The part in 28 Days Later when we think the army will save them, only to discover they just want to imprison and rape them.  The bit in every scary film when the hero manages to escape to the safety of their car and drive away – only to realise that the killer is actually on the back seat…)

Teenagers and respect

But maybe the flipside of the emotional need for your parents / the authorities to know what’s going on, is the frustration of (or fear of) not being believed.  This is a trope that emerges for various teen characters, returning full circle to Not Now Bernard.  Because although in many ways teenagers can be eager to remove themselves from the adult world (eg through various specific identities and subcultures) they’ve also often moved beyond the phase of wanting Narnia-type adventures, and crave to be taken seriously as adults.  They want to be shown respect.  (At the very least, they want to appear grown up to other teenagers – “Old enough to grow a bad moustache”, as one character puts it in The Simpsons.) 

In The Blob, a group of teenagers are the first to recognise the threat of the giant gooey alien predator.  But the sheriff initially doesn’t believe them, assuming it’s “only kids” playing a prank.  The happy ending comes from the recognition of adults.  Similarly in Hackers, a group of teen computer geeks struggle against an evil foe, only managing to win the day when they’re able to broadcast their side of the story to the nation, by hacking into a TV station. 

Teen stuff actually gets a bit more complicated than children’s literature.  I think this is because whereas there are endless numbers of books written specifically for kids, this is less the case for teenagers – although of course many books aimed at teens do exist.  Meanwhile, there are loads TV shows and films directed at teenaged audiences.  But the cultural context of TV and film is very different to book, with plots and characters often liable to be much more driven by advertising revenues, and capturing specific demographic ranges.  This means that in children’s literature the plot will often focus on characters in quite a narrow age range, whereas other fiction rarely features only teenagers – there will usually be other characters with a range of ages, especially in family films (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Goonies); even where the main character is a teenager (Back to the Future);  and even where almost everyone is a teenager (eg Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

No doubt there are loads of other examples in youth fiction to disprove all of what I’ve written above.  And there are plenty of adults being disbelieved and rendered invisible in grownup fiction.  It's certainly too simplistic to divide all youth into three clear-cut phases, whose subjectivity is felt identically by everyone, consisting of  'clinging to your parents', 'having adventures with other children', and 'selectively entering adulthood and seeking recognition'.  But despite these caveats, I do still think that some of the tropes above tap into to specific fears and desires that are experienced by many young people at certain stages of their development.