Dead Parents.

I found a link to this article in one of the blogs that I follow on google reader: "The Ol' Dead Dad Syndrome." In my YA lit class, we talked about what classifies and what characterizes a YA lit novel, and one of those common characteristics is dead parents -- whether it be one or both, there are lots of dead parents floating around in YA lit. Think of The Secret Garden, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Hunger Games, or even stories as fundamental as Orphan Annie, or Anne of Green Gables, Cinderella or Jane Eyre. What do these all have in common? ORPHANS. If parents aren't dead, they oftentimes are conveniently out of the picture. Leila challenges readers and writers to both expect better story and character development and to create stories that are good as opposed to convenient-- maybe you need to have dead parents for the purposes of your writing (writing about death of a parent, writing about orphans, writing about foster care), but if it's in simple avoidance of the work required to create yet another character, Ms Sales calls it a "cop out."

I think this is fascinating! There's so much to do with this observation and opinion in a classroom. You could design an entire lesson plan or even smallish unit on this article:

1. Have students brainstorm books/stories that have dead and/or missing parents.

2. Ask them why they think that is, what functions could it serve, and then

3. Read the article as a class

4. and debate/discuss if Ms Sales is correct in her observation, and if they share her opinion, then

5. Write letters/emails to Leila Sales either telling her that you support/disagree or comment on the article as a class. then maybe you could

6. Write short stories that are YA-type stories that either involve parents or have dead parents, and then have students

7. Write an explanation about why they chose to include/exclude parents in their short story, and to what effect? and then you could even

8. Have students share their stories, explanations, and discuss the short stories as a class.

"A convenient story is not the same as a good story."

-Leila Sales, Author of the article