Adult Characters in Children's Fiction
copyright Stephanie Baudet
First published in Writing Magazine June 2008
I hadn't realised until I began researching this subject, just how many roles adult characters can have in children's fiction.
Of course eighteen and nineteen year olds are adults and would feature as main characters in young adult books but I wanted to explore the use of major adult characters both in books for younger children, where the adults play an important role, and in books for older readers where the subject matter is distinctly adult.
Picture books very often feature adult and baby animals as main characters, representing humans of course, but sometimes being as much about the adult as the child, such as David Bedford's Big Bear, Little Bear (Little Tiger Press) in which Little Bear is anxious to grow up but his Mum prefers him to stay a cub a little longer.
In books with an adult protagonist, that character often has child-like qualities and it is these which will be focussed upon. They don't act as adults. We don't know whether they are married or have mortgage problems, whether they bet on horses or evade their income tax. They think and behave in a childlike manner so that the child readers get a taste of being engaged in adult activities yet in a simplistic way. Their problems are ones which the reader can understand. These characters are endearing. Children can love these characters, laugh at them and learn from them much more easily than if the character was a child.
A character in this category, albeit not the main one, is Professor Gertie in David Bedford's The Football Machine series (Little Hare Books). With childlike enthusiasm she invents a series of whacky creations to try to improve Harvey's football team's performance. Here is a character whom the child, Harvey, can trust to try to help yet she too has a lot to learn. Her inventions don't always work, at least not in the way she envisages. She learns from him.
In contrast, the all adult cast in Dianne Hofmeyr's picture book, The Faraway Island (Frances Lincoln) are adult in every way. This is the story, set in St Helena, of Fernando Lopez, an unhappy sailor who jumps overboard and swims to a barren rock. There he not only endows a barren island with life but also re-vitalises himself in the process.
In the stories of Jack the Station Cat by Alan Cliff (Gwasg Helygain Ltd), although Jack is the main character, adults feature quite prominently too in the form of railway staff such as Mr Parker the station master and George the guard.
Adults in stories for very young children should be portrayed in a positive way but for older readers they need to be shown as having weaknesses and failings rather than being the authoritative figure who is always right. Look at Jacqueline Wilson's The Illustrated Mum (Corgi) for example.
Have your adults make mistakes, make the wrong decisions or act inappropriately and they will seem more realistic and believable. Don't express your own adult beliefs or opinions through an adult character, this will come across as preachy and moralistic. Have role model adult characters show by example. In Fury by Elizabeth Kay (Barrington Stoke) the actions of the mothers come back to haunt their children and it is the children who must put right the situation where the adults failed. Melanie is tricked into breaking an old vase in the museum, thus releasing The Furies, just as her mother and her friends had done years ago and all suffered the consequences. Now it is up to the children of those women to capture the Furies once and for all to prevent history from repeating itself. Melanie's mum and her friend Denise play major roles in this story, as well as Simon's dead mum, Steph.
The Pig Scrolls series by Paul Shipton (Penguin) has an adult main character, albeit now in animal form. This is Gryllus, once a soldier in the Trojan War and friend of Odysseus, who has been turned into a pig by the Sorceress Circe. Hilarious adventures set in ancient Greece, and truly cross-over books read by eight year-olds to adult.
In Griselda Gifford's World War II story House of Spies (Andersen Press) Pip, the teen protagonist is thrown into a world of wartime dangers, deprivation and heightened prejudice when she is evacuated. The secondary adult characters play a prominent part in the story, and not always in a positive light, when an angry mob descends on a local family of foreign refugees, suspecting them of being enemy aliens or even spies.
Sometimes the main character is an adult because of the job they do, or their role in the story, yet they still appeal to a much younger audience. Road to War by Valerie Wilding (Scholastic My Story) tells the story of Daffy, a young nurse in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry during World War One. Although the book is aimed at children of 8 - 12, Daffy's experiences are interesting and exciting to children learning about the period and because of her slightly unconventional upbringing, she finds it hard to fit in socially and doesn't altogether feel a part of the adult world. This helps the young reader identify with her.
Many of the viewpoints in Sam Llewellyn's Little Darlings (Puffin) are adult ones in this funny tongue-in-cheek story of a very rich family of very spoilt people. The Medici Seal is Theresa Breslin's highly acclaimed novel about Matteo, a young boy who comes to live and work at the side of Leonardo da Vinci as he creates his masterpieces, yet under the tyranny of the ruthless Borgia family. Told in the first person, it is the story of both Matteo's journey to manhood in the presence of a genius as well as an historical thriller set in Renaissance Italy. Although aimed at young adults, this is very much a story set in the adult world.
Finally Linda Newbery's award-winning Young Adult novel, Set in Stone (David Fickling Books) whose two narrators, the governess and the art tutor, are adults, albeit in their early twenties and only a few years older than the target readers. This book, however, deals with complex adult themes rather than teen problems. Its tortuous plot slowly reveals a terrible secret about the seemingly normal Victorian family.
Make sure your adult characters, whether prominent in the story or more minor, are strong and individual. Get rid of the stereotypes. Mums who bake, grandmothers who knit, granddads who go fishing. Why not have Gran learning to ride a motorbike or Dad entering a cake icing competition? Adults may feature more in children's books these days than in earlier times when children had more independence, and in some ways this poses a problem for the author but with ingenuity and imagination our adult characters can play a worthy part in the story.
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