Somebody somewhere posted something which reminded me

[conuly]

of a longstanding rant I have about a pair of fictional parents.

So this is from a Bruce Coville short story about a boy who is scared of the intermittent void under the bed, and I think there's no spoilers when I say that, as this is Bruce Coville, there really *is* a void under the bed and it transports him to a creepy underworld.

That's not actually the part that bugs me.

We're told in the narration that this kid's parents, who have ONE child and THREE bedrooms (one for them, one for him, one for guests) have spent several years trying to cure his fear of the void under his bed, including punishing him for not sleeping in his bed and even attempting therapy.

At no point did they consider: allowing him to move into the guest room and turning his old bedroom into the new guest room, replacing his bed with a futon that doesn't have space under it to be scared of, putting storage drawers under his bed for the same reason.

"Kid is specifically scared of the space under this and only this bed, not any other beds" is a very solvable problem, so long as you assume the problem is the bed and not your child's behavior.

Every once in a while I think of that story, and it pisses me off all over again. Lousy parents. Presumably their son still would have ended up kidnapped and sent to the void anyway, or else there's no story, but at least his time at home could've been free of this entirely pointless conflict.

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Comments

[the_siobhan]

Sounds like entirely the way my parents would have handled it. :-p

[conuly]

Which - the way that annoys me or the way they ought to have approached it from the start?

Some things don't have to be discipline problems if you don't make them into one!

[the_siobhan]

The way it was done in the story.

Any behaviour that was inconvenient was interpreted as an intentional challenge to their authority.

[conuly]

That is a very stupid parenting decision that could only have served to make everybody unhappy. I'm so sorry.

[the_siobhan]

Yeah, my parents had issues. I really think that there is a lot more attention now on emotional abuse & neglect, in my parents era if the kid was fed and wearing clothes without holes you were doing your job.

[readerjane]

Yeah.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> "Kid is specifically scared of the space under this and only this bed, not any other beds" is a very solvable problem, so long as you assume the problem is the bed and not your child's behavior.<<

That also requires two more things:

1) The parents must care about the child's happiness.

2) They must respect the child enough to be willing to help him solve problems.

Most adults only care about control. When an adult and a child come into conflict, the child almost always loses. Adults think it's fine to force children to do things which are boring, humiliating, or painful. And then they get enraged when the children break down. This is becoming more of an issue as increasing social pressure creates mental injuries and illnesses at ever-younger ages. A lot of those are caused by adults using force in situations where problem-solving would work better.

>>Every once in a while I think of that story, and it pisses me off all over again. Lousy parents. Presumably their son still would have ended up kidnapped and sent to the void anyway, or else there's no story, but at least his time at home could've been free of this entirely pointless conflict.<<

No, then you get a completely different story, and it's a story that people rarely tell. The vast majority of literary parents are either useless, dead, or horrible. That leaves large swaths of storytelling empty.

For example:

Boy: "There's a scary void under my bed."
Decent parent: "Okay, I'll get a flashlight and do void patrol."
...
Decent parent: "AAAAA a void!!!!"

Do they both get sucked in? The dynamics of adventure would then be very different with parent and child than with a child alone.

Do they flee the house? Then it depends if the void can follow them.

Is there an organization to which weird problems can be reported? That scenario will depend on the existance and quality of the organization.


Another possibility:

Boy: "There's a scary void under my bed."
Decent parent: "Well, you could sleep in the guest room."
...
Boy: "Now the scary void is under the pantry cabinet."
Decent parent: "I'll get the mararoni myself."

And how long until the parent personally spots the void, leading to more challenges?

Or would it still be there, as they avoid it, when they go to sell the house? Can you legally sell a house with a carnivorous void in it, or is that a failure of housing standards?


So many possibilities for different stories. In Terramagne, it would likely be a case of flickering where a child unknowingly creates portals in different places. Once spotted by an adult, this would likely inspire a call to SPOON -- or possibly to Kraken. Feel free to prompt for such if you'd like a story about decent parents.

For a previous example of what would happen if parents were decent and characters responded differently to standard setups, see:

"The Heart to Rejoice"

"A Perfection That Eludes Us"

Re: Thoughts

[conuly]

Even if you don't care one whit about your child's happiness, you only make more work for yourself if you decide to pick a fight and a power struggle about stupid, meaningless bullshit.

(Although pointing that out when telling people that their parenting is back-asswards doesn't help. I've yet to find the best line to take here.)

[adafrog]

Word.

[jessie_c]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdultsAreUseless

[grav_ity]

I mean, I had a trundle bed, so there was literally another bed under the bed I slept on with no space at all, and I was STILL afraid, but MY PARENTS DID LET ME MOVE THE FURNITURE AND ALTER THE DOORWAY, so your point is very valid.

[conuly]

Speaking of doorways and veering off into another direction, every single time people have trouble with a kid slamming their door somebody goes "Take the door away, that'll show 'em!!!!" and treats that like good advice and - no? Like, just no? First of all, it's a lot of fucking work to take the door off the hinges and store it somewhere, even if your door is lightweight and flimsy rather than the old-school 100 pounders we have in our home, and secondly it's just as effective to install a doohickey that keeps the door from opening and closing too quickly, and then you can laugh yourself silly the first time they try to slam the door and it fails.

(I'm not claiming to be nice, I just think that there's no reason to jump to overkill for what is really a very minor problem.)

[grav_ity]

Something I have learned on social media over the past few years is that the door thing is CULTURAL. Like, in white houses, kids get their own bedrooms and their privacy is considered A Thing, but that's not the same in Black houses, where taking the door is a pretty standard, lowkey punishment. (Though: not for slamming. Usually it's for a violation of trust in some way, like Having A Boy In There or keeping a big secret.)

[mindstalk]

'“I tell parents that COVID was the ultimate bully. It bullied every other virus for two years,” said Griffiths, ER medical director of a Children’s Health Care of Atlanta downtown hospital.'

No, people were actually making some half-assed gestures to not get sick, and that kind of worked. Though actually the US had a fair bit of flu and a lot of RSV last year anyway... which suggests the high rate of RSV hospitalizations may have some other cause, like damaged immune systems.

Meanwhile Japan is still at nearly zero flu, last I saw. Hmm, I wonder why? :mask:

[conuly]

Yes, if nothing else these past two years have confirmed to me that doctors really aren't more knowledgeable than the rest of us about anything. Even within their own field they can have some truly shocking knowledge gaps.

[gwydion]

That is infuriating.

[conuly]

It would've cost them nothing - or, at most, very little - to just sort out the situation.

I cannot imagine why fictional therapist didn't point this out to them.

[gwydion]

There are a lot of crap therapists out there still and child psychology of the '70's and '80's was particularly egregious.

[dorchadas]

Your solution reminds me of a story I read from a therapist who dealt with a client's obsessive and debilitating worries about whether she had left the curling iron on before leaving for work by telling her to bring the curling iron in the car with her and put it on the passenger seat.