The Problem With The Boxcar Children Is...
September 7, 2023 10:21 AM Subscribe
They Never Got To Spend Enough Time In The Boxcar
Sounds forcibly whimsical, actually a wistful musing on the social structures of childhood and siblinghood: "The end of any childhood is a bit like the French Revolution; things that mattered a great deal at eight years old seem in retrospect like having been the First Valet de Chambre at Versailles in the Ancien Régime. You have to understand, it seemed terribly important at the time."
Sounds forcibly whimsical, actually a wistful musing on the social structures of childhood and siblinghood: "The end of any childhood is a bit like the French Revolution; things that mattered a great deal at eight years old seem in retrospect like having been the First Valet de Chambre at Versailles in the Ancien Régime. You have to understand, it seemed terribly important at the time."
Real gut punch in the middle there. I'm glad Danny can remember his siblings as the kids they once were instead of who they grew up to be.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:42 AM on September 7, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 10:42 AM on September 7, 2023 [9 favorites]
Real gut punch in the middle there.
Yes, as someone who had to cut his father and eldest brother out of his life before their demises, that jumped out at me hard. At least I have a couple of other siblings who I still talk to and like.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:50 AM on September 7, 2023
Yes, as someone who had to cut his father and eldest brother out of his life before their demises, that jumped out at me hard. At least I have a couple of other siblings who I still talk to and like.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:50 AM on September 7, 2023
I can't believe I guessed this was a Danny Lavery piece before I even clicked on it - but it was such a Toast title.
I think that the great dilemma of children's literature is the line between something being dangerous in a romantic and exciting way, and something being dangerous in a scary and tragic way. Maurice Sendak, in Where the Wild Things Are, was the best to ever do it; as soon as things tipped over and got too scary for Max, he sailed back homeward, where his dinner was waiting for him (and it was still hot!)
You want the children living in the boxcar - you want independence, you want freedom, you want to be challenged and not have a safety net to fall back on, but at the moment when you're dirty and wet and cold, you can be impressed with yourself for being brave and resilient for about three minutes and then you actually do want that safety net to fall back on, please.
You want that adventure from within the relative confines of safety - but when it's safe, when the boxcar is in the Italian garden, it can't be real again.
And really, I think this is more about the discomfort of adults than the discomfort of children. Kids can accept a fun story about kids living in a boxcar way more easily than their parents can.
I thought about this a lot as I was writing a novel about a teenage girl taking a cross-country bike trip. Some of the reviews I got were "This is so unrealistic, obviously no parent would ever let their kid do this" (OK, fair) and some of the reviews I got were "Obviously if a teenage girl did this in real life she would face a lot more sexual harassment/sexual assault", which... I have really complicated feelings about what we tell girls about their risk of sexual violence, but honestly, it wasn't a political choice or an aesthetic choice or a choice based on statistical realism as it was based on having many more encounters with dangerous drivers, mechanical failures, weather, and assholes than with sexual harassers. But at the same time - I WAS influenced by Jean Craighead George, and Gary Paulsen, and those other writers who wrote about young people in dangerous situations, and I wanted to write a book that said, you know, it's survivable to get into dangerous situations. It's survivable to get in over your head. And it's a little fun, even when it's scary.
But that suspended disbelief of - it's scary enough to be exciting and romantic, it's not scary enough to be SCARY - that, you could hold that tension for one book. You probably couldn't do it for two hundred. But you'd miss it, when it was gone.
posted by Jeanne at 11:11 AM on September 7, 2023 [31 favorites]
I think that the great dilemma of children's literature is the line between something being dangerous in a romantic and exciting way, and something being dangerous in a scary and tragic way. Maurice Sendak, in Where the Wild Things Are, was the best to ever do it; as soon as things tipped over and got too scary for Max, he sailed back homeward, where his dinner was waiting for him (and it was still hot!)
You want the children living in the boxcar - you want independence, you want freedom, you want to be challenged and not have a safety net to fall back on, but at the moment when you're dirty and wet and cold, you can be impressed with yourself for being brave and resilient for about three minutes and then you actually do want that safety net to fall back on, please.
You want that adventure from within the relative confines of safety - but when it's safe, when the boxcar is in the Italian garden, it can't be real again.
And really, I think this is more about the discomfort of adults than the discomfort of children. Kids can accept a fun story about kids living in a boxcar way more easily than their parents can.
I thought about this a lot as I was writing a novel about a teenage girl taking a cross-country bike trip. Some of the reviews I got were "This is so unrealistic, obviously no parent would ever let their kid do this" (OK, fair) and some of the reviews I got were "Obviously if a teenage girl did this in real life she would face a lot more sexual harassment/sexual assault", which... I have really complicated feelings about what we tell girls about their risk of sexual violence, but honestly, it wasn't a political choice or an aesthetic choice or a choice based on statistical realism as it was based on having many more encounters with dangerous drivers, mechanical failures, weather, and assholes than with sexual harassers. But at the same time - I WAS influenced by Jean Craighead George, and Gary Paulsen, and those other writers who wrote about young people in dangerous situations, and I wanted to write a book that said, you know, it's survivable to get into dangerous situations. It's survivable to get in over your head. And it's a little fun, even when it's scary.
But that suspended disbelief of - it's scary enough to be exciting and romantic, it's not scary enough to be SCARY - that, you could hold that tension for one book. You probably couldn't do it for two hundred. But you'd miss it, when it was gone.
posted by Jeanne at 11:11 AM on September 7, 2023 [31 favorites]
They ought to have spent the rest of their lives roaming from town to town across America and helping other desperate children reclaim old rolling stock on spur tracks in former logging camps.
Roaming? They're the Boxcar Children, not the Steam-Engine Children! They can't go anywhere!
posted by mittens at 12:11 PM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
Roaming? They're the Boxcar Children, not the Steam-Engine Children! They can't go anywhere!
posted by mittens at 12:11 PM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
The Boxcar Children “were never so happy as when showing visitors each beauty of their beloved old home,” but their new home has eaten the old one, and it has eaten their happiness with it. All they can do is point at what they have lost and say Someone used to live here. Something used to happen here. You have to understand, it seemed terribly important at the time.I read this earlier and felt many emotions. I think that's what I've been doing since, oh, the early 2000s. I'm reminded of a quote I can't source, possibly by the cartoonist Rory Blank, to this effect: it's not that you can't go home again. You can, but no one is there.
Pretty moving for a reflection on a book I never even read as a kid; it was one of those dusty 1900s books I couldn't get into -- no magic, and kids who seem like they wouldn't cuss if they could.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:33 PM on September 7, 2023 [8 favorites]
It’s never “The Mystery-Solving Children”. It’s never “The Quite Clever & Resourceful Children”. But you stay in just ONE damn boxcar…
posted by dr_dank at 12:57 PM on September 7, 2023 [31 favorites]
posted by dr_dank at 12:57 PM on September 7, 2023 [31 favorites]
I have confused, for years, Boxcar children with “A Family Apart, Orphan Train Series.” I’m so glad my googling has improved enough to finally find the title
posted by raccoon409 at 1:09 PM on September 7, 2023
posted by raccoon409 at 1:09 PM on September 7, 2023
How poignant and lovely. Thank you for sharing this.
posted by Zephyrial at 1:12 PM on September 7, 2023
posted by Zephyrial at 1:12 PM on September 7, 2023
This piece reminded me a lot of Alison Lurie's work in her two colllections of essays on various classic children's literature in Don't Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever.
posted by orange swan at 1:42 PM on September 7, 2023
posted by orange swan at 1:42 PM on September 7, 2023
I relate a lot to this essay.
People don’t understand me when I wistfully recall my sixteen months in an Atwater Village bungalow with no air conditioning and a crippling drug addiction as the happiest time in my life. It can’t have been, not by a long shot, but it was as formative a time in my life as age 16-24 was, and at the end, just as much an opportunity for real transformative change. That’s a big part of why I recall it as such.
If the boxcar children were real and not just characters, they might look at their “mobile” home the same way I look at my two-room tenement, or the way my friends still on drugs recall their salvage-titleRV that burned to the ground in Northridge/Riverside/Lancaster. And if the boxcar children were real instead of characters, you bet your ass they’d retreat to the boxcar when life got too tough (at least until their grandfather found them competent CBT practitioners).
posted by infinitewindow at 2:13 PM on September 7, 2023 [8 favorites]
People don’t understand me when I wistfully recall my sixteen months in an Atwater Village bungalow with no air conditioning and a crippling drug addiction as the happiest time in my life. It can’t have been, not by a long shot, but it was as formative a time in my life as age 16-24 was, and at the end, just as much an opportunity for real transformative change. That’s a big part of why I recall it as such.
If the boxcar children were real and not just characters, they might look at their “mobile” home the same way I look at my two-room tenement, or the way my friends still on drugs recall their salvage-titleRV that burned to the ground in Northridge/Riverside/Lancaster. And if the boxcar children were real instead of characters, you bet your ass they’d retreat to the boxcar when life got too tough (at least until their grandfather found them competent CBT practitioners).
posted by infinitewindow at 2:13 PM on September 7, 2023 [8 favorites]
Now I'm vaguely reminded of We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea with a different spin...
posted by ovvl at 3:57 PM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by ovvl at 3:57 PM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
Ohhh, I totally get the nostalgia for what were actually and truly pretty shitty circumstances. When I was probably at my personal height in terms of outward circumstances and things--when I was married, and owned a home, and had a job that at least seemed pretty good for my field--I used to dream about living in a van, owning nothing more than what would fit in that van, and working a job at the FedEx super hub that had no real benefits except for the possibility of deadheading on a flight to anywhere that FedEx went, which is most places in the world. When I lived a life that was close to that--couch surfing, working shitty jobs and living hand to mouth--it wasn't fun, but it took getting some distance from that life to be able to appreciate how relatively unburdened I was; I was young, and didn't have to take a handful of drugs every day, and wasn't thinking about the rest of my life in terms of how many years do I have left. Even during the times in my childhood when things were at their worst, I could carve out a little space and peace for myself, and that was truly and totally mine, even if only because it existed mostly in my own head.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:42 PM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:42 PM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]
You want the children living in the boxcar - you want independence, you want freedom, you want to be challenged and not have a safety net to fall back on, but at the moment when you're dirty and wet and cold, you can be impressed with yourself for being brave and resilient for about three minutes and then you actually do want that safety net to fall back on, please.
I think the tragedy of “There are plenty of books about children who live in houses with their families; there are precious few books about children who live in abandoned freight cars” is that there are children who don’t have that safety net. I lived in a house but had the independence and challenge of being a child with no adult safety net. I was drawn to this genre of books as a child—From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler and Pippi Longstocking come to mind—because it was generally the closest I could get to children whose lives looked like mine. Surviving on their own, taking care of their own basic needs because there was no one else to—children being brave and resilient because there is no adult to fall back on in three minutes. But of course, because this genre is so scary, particularly to adults, they always do have to have an adult to fall back on, in the end. The only exception I can think of is A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I read the entirety of in secret at the library.
posted by brook horse at 7:02 PM on September 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
I think the tragedy of “There are plenty of books about children who live in houses with their families; there are precious few books about children who live in abandoned freight cars” is that there are children who don’t have that safety net. I lived in a house but had the independence and challenge of being a child with no adult safety net. I was drawn to this genre of books as a child—From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler and Pippi Longstocking come to mind—because it was generally the closest I could get to children whose lives looked like mine. Surviving on their own, taking care of their own basic needs because there was no one else to—children being brave and resilient because there is no adult to fall back on in three minutes. But of course, because this genre is so scary, particularly to adults, they always do have to have an adult to fall back on, in the end. The only exception I can think of is A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I read the entirety of in secret at the library.
posted by brook horse at 7:02 PM on September 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
And really, I think this is more about the discomfort of adults than the discomfort of children. Kids can accept a fun story about kids living in a boxcar way more easily than their parents can.
Absolutely. See also: the forward to My Side of the Mountain, where the author describes a back and forth with her publisher about whether the book might be inappropriate because it would inspire kids to run away and live in the woods.
Like Danny Laverly, I read all the Boxcar Children, but my truly dog eared books were ones about children surviving independently long term — whether that was roughing it in the woods or the weird post apocalyptic (and Rand-ian) future of The Girl Who Owned a City. Competence porn for the elementary school set was my jam.
posted by deludingmyself at 7:26 AM on September 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
Absolutely. See also: the forward to My Side of the Mountain, where the author describes a back and forth with her publisher about whether the book might be inappropriate because it would inspire kids to run away and live in the woods.
Like Danny Laverly, I read all the Boxcar Children, but my truly dog eared books were ones about children surviving independently long term — whether that was roughing it in the woods or the weird post apocalyptic (and Rand-ian) future of The Girl Who Owned a City. Competence porn for the elementary school set was my jam.
posted by deludingmyself at 7:26 AM on September 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
I have a long standing deeply held resentment towards this book for giving my lunatic mother some really insane ideas about what children are capable of without having any instruction or support.
And honestly I'd be surprised if the ideas in this book about how children behave in the absence of adults didn't help to send child-rearing down some of the dark paths that it took in the next few decades. It's a pastoral elegy to child neglect, a celebration of child abandonment, and I think it served as an excellent excuse for parents who really didn't want to be parents to stop parenting. If the kids would be just as well off without us, then why bother?
And if children are actually capable of surviving on their own in a crisis, then their childish behavior from day to day is something they can be blamed for; if they're really little survivalists who would pull together and joyfully do chores if only they were suddenly homeless, why is it so hard to get them to do anything now?
It's no surprise that a book from 99 years ago would have some appalling toxicity built into its foundations, but this one in particular completely skeeves me out.
posted by MrVisible at 9:06 AM on September 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
And honestly I'd be surprised if the ideas in this book about how children behave in the absence of adults didn't help to send child-rearing down some of the dark paths that it took in the next few decades. It's a pastoral elegy to child neglect, a celebration of child abandonment, and I think it served as an excellent excuse for parents who really didn't want to be parents to stop parenting. If the kids would be just as well off without us, then why bother?
And if children are actually capable of surviving on their own in a crisis, then their childish behavior from day to day is something they can be blamed for; if they're really little survivalists who would pull together and joyfully do chores if only they were suddenly homeless, why is it so hard to get them to do anything now?
It's no surprise that a book from 99 years ago would have some appalling toxicity built into its foundations, but this one in particular completely skeeves me out.
posted by MrVisible at 9:06 AM on September 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
FWIW Danny also has the skeeved out by the Boxcar Children market covered.
posted by deludingmyself at 7:34 AM on September 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by deludingmyself at 7:34 AM on September 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
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Now that is a sentiment!
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:30 AM on September 7, 2023 [6 favorites]