To be fair, as noted above, so much classic Disney is adapted from Grimm’s fairy tales and similar sources. Those stories have mama issues.
Partly, of course, for narrative purposes. If you want stories about children and young adults with real agency, having to cope unaided with situations of real danger and trauma, you need to find some way of getting loving parents out of the picture. Make them either dead, absent or evil, in order to give your young protagonist the needed space.
“Kid, your mom can be killed.”
I’m dubious about your definition of “childhood” here. There are plenty of cultures where parents and adult children continue to live together in the parental household, and that’s not viewed as “extended childhood”.
Even in American society, it was traditionally routine for daughters, even employed self-supporting daughters, to live with their parents until they got married. If they never married, they might remain in the parental home forever, until their parents died and they inherited it. Now, that was often regarded as a tragic missed opportunity for the “old maids” in question, but it wasn’t viewed as an extension of childhood per se.
AFAICT, from about the 1950s onward, one powerful driver behind the exodus of young adults from the parental home was generational differences in sexual mores. A lot of young people started regarding it as the norm to have premarital sex, while a lot of their parents still regarded premarital sex as unacceptable. The only way you’re going to dodge that conflict is by setting up in a home of your own where your personal life isn’t under your parents’ scrutiny.
Now that there’s a lot less generational conflict on the subject of premarital sex, one of the main motives for early establishment of independent households is removed. If you can have your own life, including your own sex life, in a home environment you already like that’s shared with people you already love, why should it be regarded as automatically better, much less necessary, to go live somewhere else?
(And joint-family households are a lot more environmentally sustainable than a bunch of singleton apartments plus a pair of empty-nesters rattling around in the big family home, anyway.)
I’m not denying the existence of the problem of a lot of adult children simply never developing adult abilities or pursuing educational or career achievement. But I object to treating other characteristics, such as “living with one’s parents” or “not getting a driver’s license”, as automatic proxies for those developmental problems. It’s perfectly possible to be a well-adjusted competent adult without having your own lease or mortgage or car.
If they wanna update Bambi losing his mother for more woke tastes, just have Bambi’s mom run off with her lover to find herself. Female empowerment!
Even better if Mom runs off with a female deer or maybe a male some-other-unlikely-species.
I bet we can make the RW rage-aholic’s heads asplode if we try to wokify Bambi from end to end. Real wokify, not pretend Faux-outrage wokify.
And Bambi, in particular, is based on a novel by Felix Salten. Bambi’s mother is killed in the novel as well, as are several other deer characters (including Faline’s brother). Don’t blame it on Walt, it was all Felix.
You’re right - you can absolutely be a well-adjusted competent adult without having your own lease or mortgage or car. But having a driver’s license and having a car are two different things and in many places, a person without a driver’s license and at least access to a car is going to be looking for rides from other people.
True, although speaking as someone who’s had a driver’s license since age 18 and so far (late 50’s) has never owned a car, it’s perfectly possible to manage a car-free lifestyle even without driving at all.
It takes a lot of forethought, planning and adaptability, and I’m sure there are many places in the US where it’s absolutely impossible, but not having a driver’s license doesn’t automatically have to reduce an able-bodied individual to becoming a mere helpless lift-cadger.
Especially nowadays with the rise of rideshare services, it’s pretty manageable to live independently and driving-free in densely populated areas, even in the US.
Which has what to do with maturity? Public transit is a thing. Uber is a thing. Bicycles are a thing. And, yeah, sometimes asking a friend for a ride is a thing. None of that maps on to “being an adult” one way or the other.
And for some young adults, a license represents an investment of time and money that simply can’t be prioritized by their family. Were once again back to imposing our personal lives experiences on all children.
Look, I didn’t say it was automatically a sign of less maturity - just that not having a license and not having a car are not the same thing. And sure , if the person who doesn’t drive lives in a densely populated area with good public transit and rideshare services and cabs, they will be fine. But that’s not everywhere - and the people who are asking their neighbor or their coworker for a ride every day are not really living independently.
Okay, and? Is “living independently” a requirement for being an adult?
It is not.
But one can argue that a personality whose most obvious trait is “moocher” is living a circumscribed life of relative leisure on the backs of the more industrious.
We all know which passions that little morality play inflames.
And not having a car means you’re a moocher?
Well, photo ID is kinda important for many things. If you gotta go down and get a state ID, why not take the test and get a license? Or you can carry a passport around I guess.
I’m actually going to start a thread on Kids These Days later, in which you can argue to your heart’s content, I just need time to put together the evidence. But probably we shouldn’t miss out on the great subject of this OP.
No, it does not. As I said. Choosing to travel by car frequently, but only when you can bum rides off friends without reciprocating in any way is an attitude. An attitude that is an unpleasant mixture of entitlement, laziness, and creating situations that fail in ways you can blame others, not yourself, when things go wrong.
Which are all behaviors totally expected in an e.g. 8yo. But not in a productive member of adult society.
I agree, there’s no need to shield kids. The sooner kids are exposed to the brutal realities of life and the world, the better. It’s kind of like a vaccine/immunization for the brain and heart.
Now of course, the way it’s done is important. But there are definitely plenty of violent and upsetting things about life that one should not be shielded from at any age in life.
Then why are you bringing it up here?