On unaccompanied minors in the Foobisphere

[dreadedcandiru2]

I remember once having written a blog entry that assumed that the Pattersons' love of having small children wandering around unescorted was an artefact of the Declining Years, a symptom of Lynn’s having lost touch with how parents behave. Sadly, the New-ruins have cured me of this belief. We’ve, after all, seen a lot of reprints that depict the same insouciant disregard of the boring fact of where the children are. The strip that appeared on 6 December 2009, wherein Elly used a movie theatre as a baby sitter, was simply the latest example of this annoying, distasteful and dangerous trend. There are, after all, a lot of impressionable people out there who, for reasons unknown, regard the strip as some sort of parenting manual so they might actually regard this as being the harmless sort of behavior Lynn wants to think it is; since we live in a world of Amber alerts and Megan’s laws, this is, to put it mildly, a catastrophically bad idea. When I look at Mike and Lawrence cheering on Blaster Man, I can’t help but wonder what sort of real-life bad guy might lie in wait for them and the rest of the audience because I have a brain, a brain that remembers a boy named Adam Walsh. I also remember the law; Elly simply cannot use public places like cinemaplexes, malls and the like to baby-sit her children for her while she goes off and does whatever; to do so invites charges under the Criminal Code of Canada as well as public censure. What really disgusts me about the whole thing is not only that Elly doesn’t seem to think that bad things can happen when she's not looking, a belief that never went away even after John had to fish a frightened child out of a freezing river, but that she seems to think that she’s too important to have to actually supervise her children. Since she adds hateful immaturity to her nauseating and raging narcissism, asking her to do her duty elicits moping as if doing what she must is doing her children a huge favor which will require that she own their horses later on in life.

Comments

[aprilp-katje.livejournal.com]

Since it is a new-run, this can still be seen as LJ's having lost touch. However, even when she did still have actual young children in the house, she had age-six Michael going off to the store by himself to buy Lizzie's birthday present. I also came across a strip where Elly had sent Liz, who would have been eight or nine, to the store to buy milk on her own. Plus there was that strip where Mike comes home for a visit and finds April all by herself playing in the front yard while Elly is next door with Connie, Jim is walking the dogs, and John is I-forget-where.
And this was post-Farley.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

I also came across a strip where Elly had sent Liz, who would have been eight or nine, to the store to buy milk on her own.

That was one of the first sequences I can really remember; as I was watching Elly get all shirty because Lizzie tried to tapdance her way out of breaking the bag of milk, I thought to myself "Why did you send a nine-year-old to do that in the first place, you potato-nosed moron??"

[aprilp-katje.livejournal.com]

It's disturbing how made of "fail" she is.

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

I looked up the sequence you are talking about and the interesting part is that Liz would rather make up a story about how she was robbed of the milk than confess her error. This theme is similar to the recent new-run where Lizzie is outdoors and doesn't make it back to the house before she goes, and then is in fear of her mother's reaction. Elizabeth had a pretty healthy fear of Elly's expectation of what she could accomplish.

[aprilp-katje.livejournal.com]

I agree--that fear of Elly is pretty telling.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

What I took away from that is that Elly had no idea why Liz was afraid; she simply doesn't seem to be all that aware of how terrifying her rages are and why they make her kids afraid to talk to her. In her mind, she's not some screaming loon who rules by terror and bellowing; the occasional and quickly-forgotten rediscovery that Mike, Liz and April thought of her as a shouting ogre who refused to listen saddened and horrified her.