I am in the middle of teaching short stories to my grade 9-12 Creative Writing class, and I found a startling trend in one of their assignments. I asked my students to create characters, giving them a list of personality, appearance, and background to develop as they made compelling, 3-D characters. When I received the characters to grade and give feedback on, I grew increasingly puzzled about the fact that almost all of my 32 students created characters who had no parents. It did not matter the age of the character, but the common thread was that the parents had died or abandoned the character. Even the students who included living parents for their characters explicitly stated that the parents were workaholics, abusive, not around, or single parents. Only 1 or 2 had a normally functioning family.
I asked my students why they thought so many of them made their characters without parents, and I got a variety of responses.
One student said that she thought that her character wasn’t going to be interesting if there were parents, and another agreed by saying that she thought the parents would keep her character from having an interesting life. A couple said that not having parents seems like the worst tragedy they could think of, and wanted to show that their character could overcome odds. Others said they didn’t have the expereince of 2 parents to write about, while others thought life would be better if they lived with a friend or friend’s family.
Overall, the consensus was that having parents and those dynamics would hold them back from having an interesting story, but we all left thinking.
I welcome any thoughts or reactions to this.
