Why Is Everyone an Orphan in Children's Literature?

A post about the missing parents

My aunt Niki recently gave me a Barnes & Nobles gift card for my birthday, and it came in handy last weekend because I’d run out of books to read. Luckily, I have a Barnes & Nobles just a few blocks away, so my dad took me last Saturday. When we walked in, we bumped into my friend who was there also with her dad! While the dads were chatting away we browsed for books together and I walked out with a pile of them - see the picture below!

I’ve already read a few of them since: The Attack of the Black Rectangles (a similar theme to Ban This Book I wrote a post about), two of the Enola Holmes books (great mystery stories), and I also read Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan. It’s a story about a girl whose parents die in a car crash and she has to find a foster home. It would be a good book to write a post about but while reading it, I decided to write about a question I’ve had for a long time instead: why are there so many orphans in children’s literature?

Don’t believe me?

Well, then think about this: What do the Little Prince, Cinderella, Harry Potter, Pippi Longstocking, Tom Sawyer, Heidi and Oliver Twist have in common?

And what do The Secret Garden, The BFG, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Anne of Green Gables, and Walk Two Moons have in common?

Exactly. They are all about orphans. Mostly both parents are dead, but sometimes only one is and the other parent is somehow absent.

So, why do authors orphan their heroes constantly?

Perhaps they all hated their own parents and decided to become authors to create fantasies without parents… but that seems unlikely, so I’ve come up with a few better theories.

1. The authors were also orphans

I’ve heard that authors often bring their own lives into their books. So, perhaps many authors grew up without parents.

For example, I read all of Roald Dahl’s books and several of his characters are orphans, such as Sophie in The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) or James in James and the Giant Peach (and when they do have parents they are pretty terrible, such as in Matilda).

That might not be a coincidence because I also read Boy by Roald Dahl, which is his childhood autobiography, and I remember that his father died when he was young (sadly, his sister also died and I think his father died in grief of his favorite child. He also wrote a second autobiography, Going Solo, which is about his adult life, but I didn’t like it as much).

I don’t think that EVERY author writing about an orphan was an orphan, but I think it could be the case sometimes.

2. Without parents, the plot has no limits!

If there are no parents to tell the kids what to do, what’s wrong, and what’s right, then they can literally do whatever they want! They can even make up their own bed time (or maybe they don’t even have a bedtime at all)!!😝

So perhaps authors make their protagonists orphans so they can tell more exciting stories. For example, Pippi Longstocking’s mother is dead, and her father is a sailor, so she lives all alone in a big house with her pet monkey and horse, a chest of gold, and does whatever she pleases. Her best friends and neighbors have pretty strict parents and without Pippi their lives would be boring. Put simply, the whole story wouldn’t work if Pippi had parents! The same is true with A Series of Unfortunate Events.

3. The orphan has to face their fears

Children often have fears, so if there isn’t a soothing mommy and daddy to help soothe them, well then, the child has to either overcome these fears on some big adventure and become a hero, or the story results in the child returning to their soothing mommy and daddy.

For example, Harry Potter is very brave. His dead parents are always mentioned in the books and he has nowhere and no one to turn to, so he must face all the enemies on his own. Professor Dumbledore is sometimes like a father to him, but not enough, and then Dumbledore is murdered in book 6 (Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince) - which just proves my point!

4. Authors want a touching story

Usually when a character loses one or both parents, especially during the story, that makes for a lot of sadness and conflicting emotions, which often results in a touching story. Readers feel empathy towards the character and that makes us root for them.

In most stories, the parents are already dead. The book I read recently, Counting by 7s, is different because the parents die in the story (as I mentioned, in a car crash). It’s hard not to feel sorry for the girl (especially since she’s twice orphaned because the parents who die were foster parents).

5. It makes the character special

In the real world, not as many kids are orphans as in books (I think and hope so). But in books the protagonist is usually also the only orphan in the setting, so it makes them stand out. So perhaps they are an outcast, have to find friends, and so on and so forth.

So, what’s the verdict?🤔

I think it is a mix of these. Maybe some authors actually were orphaned, and others actually didn’t like their parents. Of course, all authors probably want a touching and compelling story, and they want to make their character special. But mostly I think it’s about allowing authors to tell plots that would be impossible with parents in them.

Many books are about orphans, but luckily not as many people in the real world are. Sometimes I think about wether I would want to be the main character in the books I read, but then I would probably lose my parents, and I definitely wouldn't want that!