It's not just Disney. Bruce Wayne has Alfred, Harry Potter has Dumbledore, Taran has Gwydeon. Even orphans get some kind of male surrogate.
I've only written one major character who is a child (11 years old) and his father dies almost right in front of him. There are two reasons for this: First, as others have pointed out, agency. The death of the father lets my boy off the chain, and he needs to be let off the chain. Second, it gives him an immediate problem he needs to deal with, and he's nowhere near the people or the tools he needs to deal with it. Adventure ensues. Weird. I think I've enjoyed writing this character more than any other I've written, but I haven't tried another child character. Dunno why. I've written a couple of very foolish but interesting young men, but their problems are utterly different from a kid's problems. I'm now wondering if I should try a story about a kid again.
I have to say, a lot of my own protagonists come from families where the parents are either gone, one simply never makes an appearance, has been separated from one another, or are plain dead... I think I just enjoy the lack of an authoritative figure to control my protagonist and allows them to do whatever they want.
Me too. Title: Tommy's Place Synopsis: Billionaires Mr and Mrs. smith are about to tell their ten year old son, Tommy, to go his room for the last time. Little do they know, the two of them are to become victims of a very gruesome and emotionally scarring truck accident, leaving them both paralyzed for life. When a legal loophole makes Tommy legal guardian of his parents, the Smith family must learn to survive in their new roles, especially Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Tommy's place, Tommy's rules.
There is a great deal of non-acceptance in the world about toxic parents. It's often swept under the rug under platitudes of no-one being perfect, parenting is a hard job and no-one gets it exactly right, they're doing the best they can. This is especially true if the child happens to belong to an affluent set and the parents aren't obviously abusive in terms of physical violence or being drug dealers etc. Yet parents that inflict emotional violence on their children are more common than we would like to admit. And yes, there is also the lie that all mothers genetically love their offspring, yet many mothers are abusers of their own offspring. Orphaning I think is a euphemism for the unloved child and it appears in young adult and children's fiction most often because it's how a petulant child would fantasize about themselves in an ideal world. What disciplined child in a fit of anger hasn't thought how wonderful it would be to be orphaned and free of their disciplinarian? So I think it is more than just about the sacred cow of motherhood. It's also about how children think and is a useful tool for capturing an emotionally immature person's attention.
