ABSTRACT
The mediating presence of parents who function to defuse the threat of the ordinary, mischievous child, ensuring that amusing playfulness, rather than original sin, lay at the heart of this new construction of childhood, are rarely deemed necessary by the end of the century, at least in the realm of adventure. While parents still play a large role in popular domestic narratives cited as favorites by girls, the adventure novels favored by Welch and Edward Salmon's respondents prove remarkably free from an adult mediating presence. The dictate that the majority of twentieth- and twenty-first century children's writers take as a given, get the parents out of the way so that adventure can occur, was made possible only because parent characters in children's adventure novels in the early nineteenth century had acted as midwives for the adventurous child's birth. Having now served their purpose, such parental guarantors could safely retire from the field.
