Sarah Boxer helps bring to light some interesting facts about movies for children in her article “Why are all the cartoon mother’s dead? The dead-mother plot is a classic of children's fiction, but animated movies have supplied a new twist: the fun father has taken her place”. Boxer is a non-fiction and graphic fiction writer who has also worked as a photo and web critic, an arts reporter, and editor. She has also published a couple of books. Boxer wrote this article for the Atlantic in summer of 2014.
Is the media really biased against motherhood or is this just a common, fun plot line? Throughout her article she supplies us with examples of many children's movies, more than just Disney, that have a missing mother. Boxer also goes back into history to see if this common theme of a missing mother is more of a modern plot ploy or has been around since the beginning of storytelling. She also explores why fatherhood seems to be prominent as opposed to motherhood. Boxer also explores all the different ways a story can have a missing mother and how those different plots and drive the story forward. She concludes that having a missing mother does drive the story forward and demands another character to become the mother figure. She…show more content… In the U.S., households are mainly parented by a couple, both a mother and a father (67%). Single mothers are a quarter of the household’s heads (25%). This leaves single fathers to be a small part of our society (8%). This is almost opposite of the film industry. Instead mothers are killed, just not there or they are there but don’t have a role in the story. This reminds me of cartoons I watched when I was little, adults were not talked about, only voices, or even cut off at the neck, we hardly ever saw their faces. Boxer declared that this may be because kids like to think of what it would be like if their life where different and for many that means mom would no longer be
