When I first wrote this in 2009 it was less known, but now is recognised as a standard TV trope. I included a video this time, which I should have last time.
In the comments is the phrase "...kids, like jackals, sense weakness..." An excellent observation.
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The stereotype is that 1950's television showed stereotypical two-parent, two-child families where nothing went wrong, and this was unhealthy for the attitudes of children growing up watching this. Leave It To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet are cited as examples.
But more frequently, television killed off a parent somewhere and started the story later, with the bereft or even orphaned child adjusting to a new family situation. Rather creepily, Mommies got eliminated much more often than Daddies, though both parents getting the hook before the series started was also common.
Uncles taking care of nieces was big: Bachelor Father, Sky King, Family Affair. Dads left with the kids also seemed to be a big draw: My Three Sons, The Rifleman, Andy Griffith, Bonanza.
Circus Boy, My Little Margie, Danny Thomas, Gidget, Hank - there's dead parents everywhere. Or live parents nowhere might be a better way to put it. It's easy to see the sympathy draw, and perhaps the losing of a mother rates higher on the instant sympathy scale. Men taking care of kids also offered more opportunity for comedy. Still, it's weird how many moms they picked off here - maybe TV producers didn't like their wives or mothers or something. I can't think of any early single moms except for December Bride. Tough women left with the ranch out West came up though. It seems to be the reverse of the Dad-as-nurturer show - Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley winning against all odds.
Super-intact families were used more for comic effect in unusual situations: The Munsters, The Addams Family, The Flintstones, The Jetsons. Still are: The Simpsons, Family Guy. The Real McCoys and The Beverly Hillbillies both had multigenerational weirdness going, with missing relatives seemingly no problem. Maybe that was an Appalachian stereotype thing.
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Man, the mothers are dropping like flies, and you didn't even touch Disney movies: Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, the Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Aladdin, Pinocchio (okay, he never had a mother to begin with), and Bambi's mother gets killed on screen. I always thought maybe men were easier to draw.
Great minds...
I was just about to add the missing parent syndrome in Disney movies. Don't forget to add missing parents in Finding Nemo & the Lion King (another on-screen death)
Perhaps it reflects family dysfunction in Hollywood or in the family backgrounds of the scriptwriters and actors? Or perhaps it is a psychodrama writ large: generations that could assume two married parents putting family first, but still working the inevitable conflicts ,developmental stuff, that went on. Remember, houses were much smaller then, families larger and people stayed at home more. I often say, no wonder moms shooed kids outside to play until dusk! I've always thought that one of the reasons traditional families churn out accomplished kids is that the kids want to do well enough to escape and only return for visits!
Also when a family structure is assumed to be the norm, people might play more with depicting variations from it. WWII and Fifties propaganda and the general psychological received wisdom that if there were problems it was always Mom's fault must have made people feel just a tad confined in their roles at times. Different families offered the possibility of breaking free of the role assigned by chromosome, at least in fantasy and on TV.
The fantasy that mom is dead or the fear that she might vanish. The husband who wouldn't seek a divorce to marry his secretary until the 1960s could dream that she would tragically, painlessly and QUICKLY disappear, leaving him appealingly free and vulnerable to attract a younger, hotter, less tired mate to take over the kiddie care.
We used to debate what it would be like if one or other or both our parents died when we were kids. Perhaps there was more than a touch of the Addams family about our domestic situation ("they only need one boy".). Growing up Mom and Daddy such an oppressive united front who would impose demands and discipline with no appeal. A kid would fantasize about a single parent because of course kids, like jackals, sense weakness or a strong parent made vulnerable by misfortune or exhaustion, and take advantage of it.
Bonanza was a bit different as it was 4 grown men, 5 counting Hop Sing.
My theory on Bonanza is that none of them could keep a woman because it took all of them to make a "complete" man.
Damned if I remember.
I'll throw in 'The Brady Bunch' (step-dad and step-mom, I dunno if they ever explained what happened to the missing parents) and the 'The Partridge Family' (single mom, again I don't remember an explanation of what happened to the father).
About the only thing that changed in the 1970s was that the explanation for the missing parent was usually divorce rather than death.
"Maybe TV producers didn't like their wives or mothers or something."
Or maybe a single mother might whiff of illegitimacy; Daddy's not around because, no matter what Mommy says, he skipped or they were never married, or even if his death is solidly written into the backstory, you don't hear the backstory often, so people still might make unpleasant inferences. If Daddy's there and Mommy's missing, then the kids are almost certainly not bastards, though it is still possible that Mommy skipped.
The missing parents trope isn't just a Disney thing. Almost no child protagonist in an L. Frank Baum story (Oz series, et al.) has present parents. It's common all over children's literature, for a very practical reason: The story is about the kid having an adventure. The fundamental function of a parent is to prevent the kid from having (dangerous) adventures. So you have to get them off stage.
Yup.
In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Applejack's parents are all but stated to be deceased.
There's also a mechanical aspect: in the adventure series, a stable two-parent family would mean the kid character lives a normal boring life at home, under Mom's supervision, while Dad does the dangerous adventure stuff and maybe talks about it at the dinner table. So kill off Mom and let the kid tag along.
Similarly, in stories where the kid is primarily interacting with friends or the outside world, the story only needs one character to represent "the parents." So kill off the other one and that gives you some built-in sources of stress and conflict.
Sometimes, as in "Little Women," the mother may be alone because the father is off at war. But as noted above, unless the drama is to consist of dark abuse at home, the prerequisite for a conventional childhood adventure is to be suddenly bereft of the adult protectors. Otherwise the kid has to be kidnapped or dropped down a rabbit hole.
https://youtu.be/1Dohfr-wHTQ?si=_5CSAUfNxcQoqQts
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