The Child Narrator

A Rant

I am tired of the child narrator, both as a reader and a writer. Lately, I’ve read it so often in new fiction, especially in short stories. It feels insanely popular all of a sudden, and I don’t know why that is. I’ve even written stories from this perspective. One of the pieces I’m most proud of was written from the perspective of a child.

It’s not necessarily childhood stories I’m tired of. Adults looking back on childhood or even a third-person narrator don’t bother me. It’s the child narrator I’m sick of seeing on page. There are too many tropes writers fall into with this story, but there’s one in particular I’m sick of seeing.

The trope I see most often is the child encountering a problematic or scary moment and talking about it in a dispassionate and matter-of-fact way. Instead of writing, “My father packed his bags and left,” they write bullshit like, “My father put his leather suitcases in the driveway. I asked my mother where he was going, and she stayed silent. I hugged him and asked him to remember to get milk.”

This writing style elicits sympathy from the reader because the child doesn’t understand what’s happening, but we do. Poor, poor child, we say. It’s effective, but it can also be saccharine.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that children never understand what’s going on. In my own example, I don’t buy that the child doesn’t understand what’s happening, and I think this is a common mistake writers make. Adults think kids are stupid, and we write them as if they never understand. As a former teacher and childcare worker, I know children know a great deal more than we give them credit.

Another issue, though less common, is that some writers use the child narrator to get away with problematic language. I recently read a piece that used a slur without justification. It added nothing to the story, and if an adult had said it, the piece wouldn’t have worked. But because a child said it, it’s meant to feel hyperrealistic.

Kids do say words they don’t understand, but I don’t find it engaging. It seems like an attempt from the author to be edgy. I rarely find it believable.

Anyway, that’s enough. I feel like lately every other short story, for both slush reading and my personal reading, is about children, and I needed to rant. I have no subscribers, so this will be lost in the ever-growing ether of the pointless internet.