The Child in Time

> absence from fiction

AND, if they are in fiction..there's always some babysitter or someone else to fend them off to while the characters in the books do more fun and exciting things.

I will offer a few reasons why this may be (complete wild guesses).

(1) We don't remember this time period.

Personally I have very few memories that are reliably from this time period. I can't look back at it and think about how I thought about things and think "hey, that would make a good story", etc.

(2) We don't, as a society, consider them people.

At this age they are a cute-thing, a spectacle, a burden, or an occasional source of noise.

(3) People who have them are so busy cleaning up after them that they don't have time to daydream a story with the child as the protagonist.

(4) (Similar to 2, but more radical.) Children at that age are more of a different species than just one of us at a different age.

We can remember (back to point (1)) middle school and high school, at least, and if we are not at middle or advanced age, we at least have spent a lot of time talking to and trying to understand people at those age levels. It just takes dramatically more imagination to get inside one of these little critters' heads than to do the same at any other stage of human life.

OK, so that's the end of my speculation.

One comment I'll make is that Calvin and Hobbes has been praised for depicting a kid as a kid. Older than toddler, but not much, and one of the youngest instances in the genre where a real attempt was made to think like a kid thinks, not just be a snarky grownup in a diaper.

Also, there are a couple of Simpsons episodes where Maggie is a strong protagonist.

It may not be a coincidence that there are more instances in graphical media, if, as I suspect, their worlds are a lot less verbose than ours.