The Adult Problem

A young adult genre issue

Sometimes I quip that the difference between the juveniles of my youth and the young adults of today is that in the juveniles, the main character could be an adult, albeit young, but in the young adults, they have to be juveniles.

That's not entirely true. Some YA books I have read have legal adults as main characters. The thing is, they tend to be in the military.

Now, an adult in the military can reasonably tackle more problems than a minor. But a newly enlisted soldier, or a very junior officer, has to have reason to be the person making the decisions that the plot requires, most of which are often far above their grade. Consequently, it hits --

The Adult Problem

The adult problem is the burning question of why, in the situation, the adults (or the character's seniors in the military) do not intervene, so that the driving problem of the plot is resolved, or at least taken out of the main character's hands.

Thus stopping the story dead. Nevertheless, even making all due allowance for its status as a vital plot device, it is unreasonable for the characters to not do so.

The Adult Problem does not exist when the problems the main character faces are age-appropriate. A teen can have to learn to deal with flirting, to earn spending money, not to abandon interests in the name of popularity or trust flattery, or what have you. Indeed, adult intervention may be the problem in those cases.

Likewise, the soldier or junior officer can cope with issues in his sphere. Surviving his first battle, bringing back intelligence, adjusting a plan when they find the enemy in an unexpected location -- but not the grand questions of strategy that will win the war.

In a story, other problems can arise. Those that are legitimately within the adult (or superior) sphere. If the protagonist's problem is set as "Adults do not know of this and I must get word back," that can work.

There is some leeway in the face of crisis. Youngsters may have to rise to the occasion because the adults are busy, but even there, some proportion must be maintained. The adults will drop their work to deal with the graver problem, possibly leaving the original problem to the youngsters.

If the problem is not within the youngster's scope, by necessity or by nature, and the problem is not how to bring the issue to the attention of the right adult (or superior), you must keep the adults from solving the problem -- somehow. They can be absent -- whether for good or bad reasons -- or incompetent incapable or evil.

Absent gives the parents the best chance of being good parents. The children were abducted, or at least carried off by magic or the like; the parents were abducted, and the children have to rescue them; the parents have to deal with a serious problem and leave the children alone in what (to their best of knowledge) was a safe place.

The downside of this is that it requires careful handling. "Your father and mother were abducted by the Evil Overlord. You must rescue them!" is a much darker and more dangerous tale than your parents having to rescue you. Trying to juggle the difficulty and danger has given many a YA work an air of unreality. Pushing the situation into a problem of reasonable scope for a child the age of the protagonist without making the setup obvious is a real trick, but necessary.

When the adult is absent because the youngster keeps secrets, there's the delicate balancing act between the secrecy and the youngster's judgment. There's only so much folly in a sympathetic character.

Also the parents have to evaluate evidence reasonably for their character. You can make them bad parents, or give them reason to overlook, say, mud and bruises, or ensure that the youngster manages to avoid much evidence, but all of that will interact with other elements of the tale.

Military stories tend to run with this, plausibly enough. There are far more reasons for juniors and newly enlisted soldiers to be out of touch with their superiors than for youngsters. Even when the superiors are evil or incompetent, the juniors tend to skedaddle on the pretext of one of those reasons, often well enough to have plausible deniability about the matter. At that, when the superiors are good, there is often the need for plausible deniability if only as distraction. The superiors may be deploying the forces that would be plausible merely to let the juniors have a chance, since they will not be threats as plausible to the enemy forces.

Children are more likely to have incapable or evil parents -- who shade into each other in the middle, though the ends are distinct.

At one end, you have the parent or parents who are the villains of the piece, intent on hunting down the youngster, or conquering the world, or both.

At the other, you have a parent enchanted to be unable to notice the problem or lacking the superpowers that are the only way to fight.

In between we have adults whose response to the youngster's suffering assault and battery is telling the youngster to try harder to get along with the attackers -- which is why my first impulse was to think of these parents as incompetent.

The merely incapable ones can, in fact, act as a support system for the mission if they are adequately convinced that the youngsters really have to do it, but the incompetent ones have to be carefully handled because they are obstacles that may complicate the plot, and should do so in a way that contributes to it.

The evil ones, of course, just form the main plot, and have a degree of simplicity from that. Still, it has to be juggled properly, because sending under-aged protagonists against their own parents could easily get very dark, and avoiding that can give the work an air of unreality, as in the absent parents.

Any of these three in some combination at least give the genre a solid footing.