On Kid!Fic
May. 1st, 2013 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelkyusil asked for this ages ago, and since lyndis mentioned Michelle Tanner... here goes nothin'.Kids. What's the matter with kids in 'fic?
Uh... mostly everything.
Kids in fiction tend to be horrible anyway-- witness George Eliot skewering horrible portrayals of little Victorian angels in her rant against bad lady novelists. We can't reasonably expect kids in 'fic to be much better given what the, ah, professionals churn out.
Examples of Doing it Right IMO: young Laura and Iris in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Ruth May in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Hell, the Little House books and Beverly Cleary's early Ramona books nail childhood often enough. Ramona misunderstands adults. She has seemingly illogical wants. Her thought patterns are not those of a miniature adult or a "cute" kid. Sometimes she's pretty horrible. But generations of kids have loved her nonetheless because she's not a phony-baloney child heroine.
These are all girls, but Beverly Clearly also came up with a decent "good" boy in Henry Huggins and a "bad" boy in Otis Spofford, both worth reading about IMO. Mitch from Mitch and Amy deserves a nod. But Mitch and Henry and Otis are all slightly older boys, aged about nine to twelve IIRC, and very small children pose the most difficult issues for a writer. They're alien.
No, really. Kids are aliens. They're persons, but they're not like you and me.
1) Kids and logic don't mix.
Kids don't get logic. It's been fifteen-odd years since I studied child psychology, but I think's pretty clear that the acquisition of concrete logic and then abstract logic takes a while. A five-year-old, a nine-year-old, and a fifteen-year-old are not going to have the same grasp of cause and effect, states of being, and such. Little kids don't get sarcasm either for the most part, and I'd wager it's from that same disconnect that only gets resolves when they get their heads around abstract logic. I remember being six years old and flummoxed by the Beatles lyric "You don't look different but you have changed." If something changed, wouldn't it show? No sense making to my kid!brain. Even a precocious kid who reads at twice their age level isn't likely to be that advanced in terms of critical thinking.
2) Kids and adult morals don't mix.
When I was in college, I audited play sessions at a nursery school for developmental psych. One thing that struck me about this nursery school, unlike the places I attended, was that it was not expected that the very small children-- aged two or three-- would be on-board with the whole "sharing" thing. It didn't come naturally to a child that small, and they wouldn't get it if they were forced to, and so they weren't forced to. They learned over time why sharing was a Good Thing. Stuff like sharing and realizing that "What I want isn't what YOU want" also kick in over time-- if a kid's properly socialized. Then there's that whole multi-step progression from "I'm not gonna do Thing X because I will be punished" to "I'm not going to do Thing X because it violates the the abstract rights of my fellow creatures" that also takes years or decades to develop. (And a lot of people clearly stay stuck in that whole reward-punishment phase.)
3) Kids are not innocent in that way
They're greedy. They're selfish. Everything's about me-me-me. They lie. Sometimes just to avoid punishment, sometimes for no apparent reason under the sun. They get angry (boy, do they get angry). Anyone who thinks of children as innocent little angels, unstained vessels of moral purity, has apparently never been around any damn kids.
4) Kids are also entirely not innocent in the other way
Some play with their own poop. Some have way too much fun peeing. They eat boogers and worse. Some kids do really bizarre things because the body and its sensations are interesting. I remember sticking myself with pins to see what would happen. I also ate a lot of things that were not, upon reflection, technically food.
5) That speech impediment is not cute
Fictional kids that totally violate basic progressions of walking, talking, and other developmental phases for the sole purpose of being cute are just really off-putting. A toddler may say "funny" things like "Mary had a yiddle yam," but if an older child is using baby talk, it had better be a damn good reason. The reverse is true, too. I'm sure we've all read stories of prodigies who were speaking complete adult sentences a very early age (one of the co-creators of Doom springs to mind), but that ain't the norm and there's usually something else going on there. In the example I'm thinking of, the guy in question never used baby talk and was basically mute until he started reeling off complex sentences with perfect grammar. Don't play that card to be cute.
6) Different cultures have different means of socializing kids.
The basic question is, do you take an infant and socialize them to be an independent actor or do you socialize them to be a member of the greater community? From the US to the EU to Western Africa to Japan, the ground rules of socialization are going to be different and the presentation of an "ideal" toddler would differ. This shows up in things like varied ages at which kids recognize themselves in the mirror and at what ages they're able to follow instructions. Not gonna weigh in on who's doing it "right," but these are things to keep in mind, especially if you're writing something in a fantasy culture that might not be identical to yours. At the base of it, a baby that spends all of her time on mommy's back looking out at the world is getting a different level of engagement with the world than a baby who gets intense face-to-face, eye-contact sessions with mommy and mommy alone.
7) Kids are awfully resilient.
Shitty child-rearing fads haven't killed off humans yet, and when you look at some of the stuff that Western Civ adopted in just the last century, you can only shake your head over it. We've gone from deeming parental encouragement of baby-speak abhorrent and damaging to embracing "motherese" as a positive thing for linguistic development. And that's just one tiny facet of Bringing Up Baby. A character who isn't in tune with contemporary Child Dev methods and theory isn't necessarily OMG Horrible Parent!!! (Lord knows what the state of Child Dev will be in thirty years.)
8) Kids are (alien) people too.
If they act like little trained dogs or robots, moving and speaking on cue to further the plot, they'd better damn well turn out to be robots. (Best plot twist in Toys. Only good plot twist in Toys
We don't see a lot of little bitty kids in Fire Emblem. It's not like Baby Seliph (or his FE13 counterpart) has any lines, and little!Roy and little!Lilina are... well, I'll let other people weigh in on that. I will say that, of all things, the portrayal of Toddler Leif in "Lenster's Fall" is awfully good for a plot-device kid in some ancillary material for a video game. He both displays and picks up on non-verbal emotional cues, he's not necessarily "good" in the sense of being well-behaved, he gets worried and grumpy, and when he really wants-- needs-- something, a adult explanation just ain't going to pacify him. He is in no sense an idealized Little Angel. (FE5 does imply he was quite the handful.)
Basically, Toddler Leif is better-written than 90% of the ickle kiddies in fanfic. Which is pretty damned sad.
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Date: 2013-05-01 11:40 pm (UTC)John Carmack, I presume? Interesting fellow to read about.
And I agree on every point, though I will say that having (step)children of my own (teenagers, granted) has really helped me wrap my head around this particular aspect of 'fic over the years.
My general response is to avoid writing kids at all. Heh.
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Date: 2013-05-02 03:58 pm (UTC)Yep, John Carmack.
Not writing kids is indeed a tempting way to handle the problem!
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Date: 2013-05-02 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-04 12:06 am (UTC)Kids are just weird. I mean, people are weird, so why wouldn't kids be?
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Date: 2013-05-02 12:20 am (UTC)FoL "Gran 761"
Thracia 776 Leif is "15-17 years old", pretty sure he's 15
According to what I read from books, Leif acted more like someone that is around 3-6, but he's... One years old in that thing?
Oh well, I blame the mess in the timeline
Good read though. The first thing that always come to me when I read/watch kids in fiction i was like "I'm pretty sure I'm not as nice as that child when I'm around that age", and you sums up all the issue
As a sidenote, did Yubello and Yumina count as a child?
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Date: 2013-05-02 12:45 am (UTC)Leif has to be about two in FoL anyway-- he's talking in complete sentences and is understanding fairly complex directions from the adults. Maybe he's just shy of two. He could plausibly be three. But that ain't a one-year-old unless kids with holy blood are super-advanced.
As a sidenote, did Yubello and Yumina count as a child?
They're 13-14 years old. If they act younger than 13 I'm sure it's because they were so horrifically abused.
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Date: 2013-05-02 06:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-04 12:06 am (UTC)Avoiding kids in 'fic is definitely one way of dealing with it.
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Date: 2013-05-02 02:37 pm (UTC)2) Fwiw I'm not convinced that adult morality (even in non-sociopaths) is significantly different from avoiding situations in which they know they'll receive punishment, except that they've generalized it to a fairly reactionary level and also expect it of other people out of "fairness". But empathy is definitely learned.
4) hahaha dude every now and then you get these sets of anecdotes going around on Tumblr from kids saying things like "I'm imagining what would happen if I were covered in a wave of blood" and other similar things.
5) I've heard a similar anecdote with a bilingual kid, who was silent until the age of two, and then started speaking quite well in both languages, with the clear ability to distinguish between them.
7) I think it'd be fairer to say that people are awfully resilient, as many of them sort it out over subsequent years (eg as teenagers).
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Date: 2013-05-02 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-04 07:06 pm (UTC)I'm glad you posted this! It's a nice little encapsulation of child psychology. I work with young kids, so I can tell impressionistically when a portrayal works and when it doesn't, but I usually can't say too much about why beyond "kids just don't act that way." That said, one thing I'm a little surprised I don't see more is writers attempting to recreate childhood idiosyncrasies in characters. I mean, I feel like everybody's got stories about themselves or people they know having odd little rituals, or very specific fears, or even just their favorite stuffed animal/blanket that they took everywhere. Getting the psychology right is great, but even with writers who mostly cover that I feel like I'm missing a lot of those individual accents unique not only to childhood, but to each kid.
ETA: Also, if anyone is in need of inspiration for little troublemakers, this should do it.
and little!Roy and little!Lilina are... well, I'll let other people weigh in on that.
No problem. I assume you were getting at the fact that they're just as contrived as most kids in fanfic, and you're right. I think the problem is that they were originally intended to meet as really little kids, but the writers wanted to kill a few foreshadowing birds with one stone, so they bumped their first meeting up to line up with Zephiel's ascension (and maybe Roy going to Ostia to study? not sure on this). So instead of reading like 11-year-olds, they read like well-spoken 6-year-olds.
...You know, I should really just go ahead and make that "everything wrong with the FE7 epilogue" post. It warrants an entire post, and then I would finally be forced to shut up about it once and for all. Everybody wins!