Who is the worst fictional parent?

[OneUmberJoker]

Cilla Battersby

Also, the Thernadiers. Grave robbing, abusive kidnapping slave traders!

How dare you?!

Another vote for Irene Pollock from the Scotland Street - listening to the series at the moment on loan from the library

They are by no means the worst but Charlie and Lolas parents left him to suffer that bratty sister too much. I longed for the day Charlie went berserk and told them straight.

Frank Cross’s dad in Scrooged and

Darth Vader

The Dad in “I Capture The Castle”. I got so angry with him. Writers Block? Then go find another fucking kind of job and support your poor neglected family!

This!!!

Johnny rokeby, strike's dad

They’re good parents. They make mistakes like we all do.

Claire can be a bit of a bully, though.

Have you read The Hallmarked Man?

Quentin and Fanny from the Famous Five books. Just let those kids roam country wide, get kidnapped on a fairly regularly basis and justify it by saying that Uncle Quentin must have silence because he's a very famous scientist.

Also ever single parent in the point Horror books that I used to devour as a teenager. Admittedly if they'd been better parents there'd have been no story but seriously, not one competent adult in 20 plus books.

Lorelai Gilmore.

Rory was so mature for her age because she had to parent her Mum.

I’m going to say pretty much all the mums in the Jacqueline Wilson books although they’re usually in poor MH and a bit sad in some way.

Mr and Mrs Lambchop the parents of Flat Stanley. Child gets horribly harmed in a freak domestic accident and their response is to allow his sibling to use him as a kite and they roll him up and post him to holiday destinations to save money on plane tickets.

I think that's why The Lottie Project was always my favourite, because even though Charlie's mum Jo had become pregnant very young she worked hard to give them a nice home life and the two of them had a lovely relationship.

I was in my early teens when I read The Illustrated Mum though and found it harrowing. God knows how a young child would get on with it.

The old woman who lived in a shoe.

That might be part of it, but I don't think that it is the biggest reason, at least in children stories. Children want adventures in their fantasy life that involve going away to exciting places and doing exciting things that could never be part of their life with their parents. But they are troubled by the idea that they might wish to leave their beloved parents. Guilt and ambivalent feelings about that wish interfere with the enjoyment of fantasy adventures. So it's best to kill the parents off at the beginning of a story, then the reader can identify with the child in the story who loves his parents but can happily travel away to adventure because they have been tidied away by death.

Harry Potter is a good example of this. Sure, he has the Dursleys, but they aren't his real parents. They are a good dumping ground for the negative parts of the child-reader's ambivalent feelings about their parents. They can be safely hated while the child still honours and misses the idealised-and-safely-dead good parents and runs off to Hogwarts.

I was going to say the Illustrated Mum. Objectively she was absolutely terrible - pregnant by a new man every 5 minutes, very mentally unwell but not seeking help, forcing her older girls to bring up the younger ones.

Also Lola Rose - similar theme - man chasing mum, older child forced to look after the young one, I remember one scene where Lola has to hold back her hair so she can vomit during a hangover. Thank God she found her aunt (Linda?).

I forgot about Stanley Lambchop! 😂

Some of the OPs I have read on mumsnet

Yes, every time Lorelai trots out the old "We're best friends before we're mother and daughter" line I want to give her a shake and tell her to grow up and act like a mother not an emotionally stunted teenager.

Sir Walter Elliot is a dreadful father.

Emma's dad in Jane Austen's Emma - hypocritically preening himself on his concern for others' wellbeing while cultivating an imagined vulnerability and dependence on his daughter that causes her to give up all idea that she could get married and live a life of her own.

He does such a number on her, makes her feel so guilty at the very idea of leaving him, that she can't even see that she wants to ever get married, so that she projects her buried wish onto various hapless men and women around her.

Oily selfish old git of a man.

Also, Dr Frankenstein, endlessly running away from the parental commitments he entered into when he made a person. Drives the created person so mad from emotional abandonment that he kills several people and rampages about in the Arctic circle.

oh that tickled me.

Daryl Van Horne - literally the devil.