Lost Parents

Paper Summary:

The paper argues that the story of today's family is in many ways quite the opposite of Peter Pan. It is the grown-ups who have flown out the window and off to wonderful adventures, while the children wait to see if they'll come home. The question has become not so much one of losing one's children, but rather, if they will have left the windows open when one comes back. In more direct terms, the parents of today are often trying to live in a "Neverland" of work and social involvement and the fear of losing ones children has increasingly changed to a nagging thought that one may instead be lost to them. The paper uses literature on the subject to support its argument, including "There's No Place Like Work," by Arlie Russel Hochschild and Jerry Adler's "Building a Better Dad".

From the Paper:

"There is more to the story of the Lost Parents, though, than just the history of their escape from the home. There is also the story of the children who are left behind. In the staged version of Peter Pan, the character of Captain Hook is generally played by the same actor as Wendy's Mother. In a similar fashion, the Wizard of Oz draws parallels between the evil witch and the evil adults in Dorothy's life. The children, in trying to escape from their families and all those controlling grown-ups, end up encountering those grown ups in far more horrid forms. They have gone from parents and neighbors to pirates and witches. In our parallel story of the lost parents, it seems that a similar phenomena may be occurring. While adults are escaping from their children and families, they are increasingly running in to the same problems returned in a more terrible way. Hochschild mentions this, pointing out today's children are more likely to run into a host of problems such as drug use, teenage pregnancy, and to be victims of violent crime. One might also remind the reader of the increasing upswing in crimes committed by children. The child whose parents have escaped out the window becomes the pirates of their fantasies -- and this is played out in a host of ways. In many urban areas, gangs of children are widely feared. In a more corporate sense, children getting into trouble with pregnancy, drugs, and even simply at school create a financial drain on the economy, "stealing" the resources their parents work to create."

More papers on Lost Parents:

• Poem Review # 119375 : "Little Girl Lost" and "Little Girl Found"
• Film Review # 137174 : "The Lost Boys of the Sudan"
• Film Review # 109019 : "Family and 'The Lost Boys'"

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