Is it just me, or is there a real problem in fantasy/sci-fi books with believable kids?

[conuly]

It seems that people don't write kids well. Kids in sci-fi and fantasy can't just be kids, they always have to be precocious, and usually friendless. You don't ever have kids who just sit and play video games, you have kids like Ender, who play video games that kill real aliens, and are better at it than any of the adults. Or Tiffany Aching, who knows more words than the adults around her and, again, can do what adults can't do. Or Kit and Nita, who end up giving a lecture to Nita's parents on responsibility (though they're less of a dramatic example than the other two). Wesley Crusher is always saving the Enterprise. I can go on, but I really don't want to have to search up books for references. I want answers. IS this real, and if so, why? And does this problem exist in other genres?

Comments

[conuly]

There's got to be, somewhere, a line between "normal and obnoxious" and "superkid, the wave of the future". Can't they be nice, a little smart, without being more adult than the adults around them, and smarter?

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

Well, that's what I was thinking of when I mentioned DWJ in particular -- her characters usually *are* rounded out that way. (That's one of the things I really admire about her work; her characters just tend to be realistic.)

Still, though, I think part of why I don't mind the things you're protesting is because they're what reality was like for me growing up. I've never been able to assume, even when I was a college student at Berkeley, that somebody being older than I am would mean that they were more experienced, more mature, or smarter -- usually it was the opposite.

Still, I don't like it when the adult characters in any kind of books are all portrayed as being stupid/immature to the point that the kids do have to swoop in. I think that's more of a flaw in the way the adults are portrayed (like in the Harry Potter books) than the children, though. The kids are realistic much of the time from my viewpoint in those cases, but the *adults* are poorly-written.

I'm 27, and I'm not an inept moron that needs a little kid to come save my day... At the same time, though, I do recognize that there *are* (statistically extremely rare) kids in the world with more painful life experiences, higher IQ, and/or stronger talents than I have right now. They'd just be the ones used as characters in books, and only a few rare authors (like DWJ) bother creating realistic variants on what those kids would actually be like 20 years later.