Tell me about your (fictional!) parents

My parents are the clichéd absentee types due to the arc plot so I introduced a couple who act as substitutes.
They're both significantly older than her real parents - this means I've been able to have fun playing with the stereotypes associated with old age.
He's more set in his ways than a shoe in concrete and she's marketing their shop on the internet.

I didn't think of it until I saw this thread pop back up again. The previous MS that was in here had a very messy parents/teen relationship. The one I just finished has an entirely different dynamic.

This one starts with one irresponsible parent, one mostly-absent one, and the MC doing most of the parenting for her younger brother. BUT, all is not as it seems, and I get to turn a lot of those expectations on their head as the book goes on.

A major theme is also about making your own family, so I get to introduce a lot of other characters with family or makeshift family.

The sibling and father-daughter relationships are essential to the story, and pretty super cool to me. I guess I get a little into the family dynamics.

Absent parents. Dead parents. Parents who ignore their children. Parents who turn out to be fake & involved with the Big Bad.

The most popular kind of parents in my stories... hmm that would be Mysterious Dead Parents (MC is now stuck with an uncle or an aunt who is either pretty distant or actively involved in the crap that's hitting the fan any moment now).

Just to look at my WIPs:

1) Parents divorced, MC stays with father, he's a financial consultant, well-off and super busy, she is desperate for approval, he barely remembers she exists. Evil stepmother incoming.

2) Father unknown, distant mother is an evil scientist and Big Bad's right hand woman. And yeah, she's not their real mother. MC and her sister are actually her test subjects.

3) Father divorced mother some time ago and never wanted to keep in touch, mother is going insane without him, quite literally, and the same crap happens in 13 parallel worlds.

4) Parents unknown, MC is adopted by a legendary sorcerer who is pursued by mysterious bad guys and eventually is supposed to be killed by them... maybe he's alive, maybe he's actually the biggest villain of them all.

The curious thing is that I have a great family and we are all super close. When I was a kid, I always felt like it was very safe, you know... you couldn't have an adventure unless you left the warm bubble of your home. So I guess that's one way for me to give MC a dramatic adventure, either to make her leave home or to write it in a way that basically leaves her without a true home even when she is right there.

I'm also pretty fond of the "all adults are either distant or hostile" trope in both YA and MG. It gives such an exciting sense of danger. Trust no one. Rely on no one. Start running.

The parents in my YA are good people who don't know the full extent of what their son is going through, but are supportive in the ways they know how to be supportive. They encourage him to question authority, and watch out for him. They are good people.

My parents disappear about halfway through my current WIP (well, not literally, but they're taken out of the MC's life and we don't see them for the rest of the book).

But when they are around, the mother is strict, hard-working, religious, and sort of anti-emotions. Which is bad news for the 14-year-old female MC who struggles with depression.

Dad is adored by MC, but works so hard that he's barely around. He's pretty quiet, and still somewhat overwhelmed by the fact that he and his wife have brought nine children into a very unstable world. (Eastern Europe, dawn of WWII)

Although devoid of any real warmth (at least from MC's POV), their relationship is functional and that is infinitely more important to them than feelings.

Both parents can't help but show favoritism to MC's older sister, who is everything they ever wanted in a child. Neither are particularly nurturing and neither has time to really invest individually in their kids. This leads to a variety of responses from the children, most notable is the older sister's response: stop at nothing to secure more parental love and attention than everyone else combined. The parents' limitations is what sets her up as the antagonist. MC retreats, ostensibly surrendering in the war over their parents' affections, but she can't help but desire their approval and understanding.

do you mean, like....the parents I made up in my story? cuz if you do I have a couple of LOVING, caring and goofy as hell parents xD

I wanted to write about a single father with a daughter, but then it got complicated, as he has basically kidnapped the child he's looking after (to save her from the Big Bad), in the process abandoning his wife and daughter - who are not best pleased, to put it mildly.
But he's a very supportive dad, just trying to do the right thing in a very difficult situation.

I love writing parents. They're not always center stage, but they always matter in any story I write.

In my first draft of NA A Diamond for You, the MC Danica is greatly inspired by the love story of her late parents who died in tragic accidents five years apart. I loved her memories of them so much that I brought them back to tell their story, which was so much larger than life in and of itself. They're both passionate and loving, and love their daughter enough to stay away from her to keep her safe. Their fatal flaw may be that they love each other more than they love their daughter, whether they say as much or not.

In Black & Gold, the parents (there are a lot more involved than is first evident) appear to be backburnered or absent, but they actually have a bigger part in the action than it first appears. The MC thinks it's her and her friends against the universe when it's everybody's parents against the universe to protect them. I play with the theme of how far a parent would really go to protect their children from the worst.

In The Hotel Kincaid, parental figures appear just long enough to explain their children's quirks in a series of 'ah, that's how you got this way' moments. Some are harsh, some are sweet, some border on diabolical.

Veruca Starship has more mentors and parental surrogates than parents featured, but I've tried to make them fully-realized people, too, who just get things wrong sometimes.

Overall, single devoted parents are kind of my thing.

I have never actually put a lot of thought into how fictional parents play a role in books, but I do see how they could mould the story into something much more interesting and complexed.

In the novel I am currently writing, the mother is very sinister and views her daughter as a project - someone to manicure into the perfect spy to follow in ancestors footsteps. However, the dad was a much more genuine man, but disappears before the daughter is of any real age (he didn't want her to be involved in the spy life, which is partly why he vanishes).

More to the point, when including parents, it does make the story more complexed and it's interesting to read about the mother as a very sinister character, but we see qualities in her that are make us more sympathetic towards her.

Having the parents involved, really moves my story along.

The father in my story tried to kill his infant son, and his mother took extraordinary measures to save his life.

The strange thing is the father started out as just a macho jerk, and ended up more complex and more terrifying.

I always seem to write bad, flawed, or selfish parents!
I have two main characters in my WIP (H&Y&NM) and their parents are so different.

Phoebe's dad Nick is one of the main characters in the book, and the antag. He's a handsome, 38-yr-old high school English teacher - and a predatory paedophile. 6 years before, he kidnapped a 10-yr-old boy, Isaac, who now lives as his 'son', and Phoebe's twin.
Nick is manipulative, cunning, obsessed with control and ruthlessly ambitious. He had a tough childhood and dragged himself up, got good grades, started a relationship with his (rich) professor's daughter at university so he could have a child, a home, and an impressive marriage (even though his taste is in young boys).
Phoebe's mum was a spoilt, nervy woman who couldn't take living with Nick and having a child, and left when Phoebe was 8, and Phoebe hates her for it.

Whereas Isaac had a very different childhood. His mum was a kind, careworn, working-class woman with a badly-paid job in a bakery and 3 sons to look after. His dad worked in a factory and liked spending his evenings in the pub/bar, but he was kind to his sons and loved astronomy and his family.
But after Isaac disappeared, their marriage slowly broke up - they each blamed each other, his mum quit her job, his dad spent more time drinking, and his dad moved out to live with a friend.

But as the book's in Phoebe's POV, and Isaac's parents think he's dead, Nick (Phoebe's dad) is the main parent in the book, and he sure as hell isn't a good one.

The main ones not absent:

Bianca's father is a father barely there, almost never home. He is always busy working with his brother on the other side of dark city.

The Fallen's Mother -- The Fallen (our anti-hero's) mother is a politician, a party member. She maintains a looming almost omnipotent presence in his life. Yet gradually she fades to the background, when dream-scanners become more of a presence, trying to take him home.

Malcolm's Parents -- Unable to take care of him and his sister his dying of cancer, he is thrown to the streets at sixteen and forced to fend for himself.

There are other's, but those are the main ones of a series structured similarly to an anime series. Almost all one novella, but separated by paperclips.

In my first book, I put my MC in a boarding school and made her spend most of the rest of the time sleeping over at her best friend's place, but her parents still have a pretty significant role, considering. For one thing, her choice to go to boarding school is kind of difficult for them, particularly her mother, and emphasizes the rift that's unintentionally formed between them due to her religious conversion. And (spoiler alert) her Dad's slow coming around to accepting her sexuality is a whole big thing. The fact that she doesn't spend a ton of time with her parents doesn't mean they don't have a relationship. They raised her and she loves them and it's all just a super complicated thing that absolutely still influences her even as she's taking both calculated and just plain avoidant steps away from it. I really like writing (and reading) parental relationships in YA, so I definitely wasn't going for pushing them out of the picture altogether when I decided to write this story.

In my next book, the parent-child dynamics are a big part of what I want to explore. The MC is moving back in with and working for her mother after spending most of her middle and high school years with her dad, only seeing the rest of her family on occasional holidays. She's honestly not sure to what extent she considers her mother a parent to her any more, or vice versa, and at this stage in the writing, I don't really know how that's going to shake out. I do think that if I wanted to shuffle the mother-daughter relationship off to the side entirely, I wouldn't have made them so estranged. The fact that they don't really know each other any more ramps up the tension when they're put in a situation where they're interacting day-to-day. At least that's my theory for now.

In Millie's memories:

Millie's Mother: The queen fairy, wife of King fairy.
Millie's Father: The king fairy, advised by Voreth.
Voreth: The old wizard before the book, that held off the corruption.

And no, it's not an epic fantasy.

Mostly back story characters, and not much of a plot role. I didn't really see the point in a prologue.

The parent/child relationships in my current WIP are soooooo crazy. The MC and her mom are close, the mom is a kooky writer, very individualistic and eccentric but still a responsible, good mom. Over the course of the story, though, as she's being forced to relive and revisit parts of her traumatic, abuse-filled childhood, she loses her grip on things and the MC has to step up and take care of her, even while they're running from the bad guys.

It starts off with just the MC and her mom, but she ends up learning who her father was, that she has two full-blooded siblings, and over 60 half-siblings (!!!), some of them nice, some of them very, very not-nice. Heh. This book is full of fun surprises for the MC. Poor thing.

My main characters mostly were abandoned by their parents as infants.

One of the boys can remember his mom, sort of, and I wanted to make sure that she had a pretty solid reason for giving him up after raising him herself (illegally) for 4 years.

So, although it isn't in my novel, part of the continuation of the story is that his mom tracks him down a couple of years after everything.

Honestly I'm more interested in exploring sibling relationships.

I recently read ARISTOTLE & DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE and I don't think I can name a YA novel with more nuanced, interesting parental figures. Both the boys have really wonderful parents who are also really complicated people, and it's just beautiful.

I am still working on my character's parents. I saw this thread right before I was about to leave work for home and I am not sure why, but seeing this and a few comments smacked me between the eyes and I realized I was doing it all wrong. They are both alive, but I had my MC having escaped a country coming under occupation with her mother, leaving the father behind - but I had it all wrong. All wrong! She escaped with her father! It makes so much more sense! It DOES! Who and what her mother is will be a twist to the story, yes yes yes. WHEE. Why didn't I see this before... I definitely wanted her to have parents, and though we don't see her now-father-formerly-mother throughout, he is a major influence. She will be encountering her mother eventually and it may or may not be pretty - am working on that. Now to fix that in what I've written so far (not much, only 3 chapters in).

My last novel was a dual POV between the MC and her then-teenaged father's diary entries. The book was about their relationship with each other and also with the mother.

The nicest and most encouraging editor rejection I got ultimately turned it down because it was "too focused in the past" or something to that effect. I thought that was interesting. It's just one editor's opinion but I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me leery of involving parents too much in future stories.

mimstrel said:

Honestly I'm more interested in exploring sibling relationships.

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HECK YEAH SIBLING STORIES. I can't seem to not write those...

I love it when parents are involved in YA stories. The WIP where I've fleshed them out the most is Peter Endor- his dad is a half-djinn wizard who works for the mafia, and his mom is a freelance computer hacker.

It ended up having to affect my MC's characterization quite a bit. Having two present and competent parents who could solve the protagonist's problem over the space of an hour or two meant Peter had to become the kind of person who would deliberately hide things from them to prove he could solve them himself- which I personally think is fairly interesting.

The parents in my YA are usually abusive bastards. In my latest, Burn Baby Burn Baby, the father burned the main character almost to death when he was a child. My YA characters get through ordeals despite the parental influence, usually. They're not all bad, but it's where I go...

Emmet Cameron said:

I recently read ARISTOTLE & DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE and I don't think I can name a YA novel with more nuanced, interesting parental figures. Both the boys have really wonderful parents who are also really complicated people, and it's just beautiful.

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I adored that book so much! I've read it three times so far. (-:

In so many YAs, the parents are...less than perfect. And I'm afraid I'm not much better in creating a healthy family dynamic.

One character's parents, the father was a silversmith who died when the MC was three and the mother is mentally retarded. The MC was taken by her uncle because he believed her mother was incapable of caring for her.

Another MC belongs to a cult with his family, so as with most cults, the MC does not consider his parents as much parents or authority figures as he considers the cult leader.

And a third is a special needs foster child whose parents are completely overwhelmed with caring for her, her three other foster siblings, and their two natural children.

I love dorky fictional dads who are obsessed with books and pass that obsession on to their kids. One of my favorite books when I was younger was "Ink Heart" by Cornelia Funke. I just thought Mo was so cool -- not only did he raise Maggie to be surrounded by books, but he also restored books for a living. (And, of course, he had a superpower that allowed him to literally bring stories to life). The only dads I really hate reading about are those that are angry or distant from their children. It's too depressing for my tastes...

Emmet Cameron said:

I recently read ARISTOTLE & DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE and I don't think I can name a YA novel with more nuanced, interesting parental figures. Both the boys have really wonderful parents who are also really complicated people, and it's just beautiful.

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SO MUCH YES.

This book is amazing. Very interesting characters and so many beautiful, inspiring words. I love this quote:

"Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you -- but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet?"