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Aang and Parenthood and The Ongoing Work of Growing Up

Having some thoughts about Aang and fatherhood, and the way a lot of fandom seems to feel that LoK cast him as a neglectful/potentially abusive father based (it seems) on the statements given by Aang's kids that Aang favored his airbender child over the others. And it makes me wonder what space we give parents to be people as well as fathers/mothers, and whether there's any way for Aang to be 'good' in the construct he's presented in?

1) We don't have hard and fast ages for Aang's kids, but based on the pic snapped of Aang's family, Aang had Bumi young (early 20s) and there's probably ~10 years between Bumi and Tenzin. You do a LOT of growing and learning not just between Kid 1 and Kid 3, but also in who you are as a person from your early 20s to your early 30s.

The idea that maybe Aang got *better* at parenting by the time Tenzin came around? And that Bumi and Kya might (understandably) resent that they were not afforded the same level of parenting skill? It doesn't feel outside the realm of possibility to me, and it also doesn't feel like a reason to cast Aang as an awful parent for not getting it right on the first try.

2) There's also the element where Tenzin is the baby of the family - which does have the potential to carry certain dynamics that aren't always healthy in terms of the youngest being spoiled or having markedly different behavioral standards. But if Bumi is 10ish years older, it's not hard for me to see him forming opinions about the care and attention given to a young sibling that he isn't getting, opinions that might not be shared by external adult observers. This is the perceptions of the kids on their own childhood, after all, and we know from Zuko that children in the ATLA universe aren't necessarily accurate interpreters of parental behavior.

3) Aang also died young. The kid would have been in their 40s to earlier 30s. And speaking from personal experience, the process of navigating your relationship with your parents as you transition from childhood to adulthood is not easy. It's not always intuitive, weird things suddenly become the source of tension, boundaries you didn't think you needed suddenly have to be defined.

And it goes along with the growing ability to suddenly articulate the casual things and offhand comments your parents never had a second thought about that messed you up. Not in a cruel way, but in a 'once your dad used the phrase 'watch your girlish figure' in a joke and 22 years later you still think about it every time you feel like your clothes don't fit you right' way. Is your dad a bad person for saying that? No. Did something he did without thought impact you beyond what you could articulate at the time or he could have predicted? Yeah. And now you have feelings about it.

You were a tiny person who didn't have the language or context to fully articulate your needs or responses or feelings to the things that bothered you, and now you do (or are working on it), and sometimes that means you're trying to navigate and process things that happened years ago in order to define how you want to be treated by your parents now.

And Aang died in the middle of that process for his kids.

And I think we do a disserve in underestimating the impact of that feeling of never getting to engage with a parent the way you wish they saw you, of never being able to find that stable place where you could interact as equals the way you wanted to be interacted with, of feeling like you got stuck in this place that wasn't reflective of how you wished they saw you. And of it happening because you ran out of time, and now you can't ever do what you wanted to do. (Aang died at 66 when prior Avatars lived to be 100+ years old. Why would they have expected to have so little time to spend on hard conversations?)

4) That kind of regret and frustration can meld into grief in a very complicated way, and can linger even when the sharpness of grief fades. Which isn't to say that Bumi and Kya's feelings of not being favored, or being second-fiddle, aren't valid. But Aang's kids are still processing a relationship that they're never going to get to work on anymore. And the fact that they need to process it doesnt mean Aang was a bad parent. It means he was a human parenting other humans.

5) The apparent expectation that Aang meet everyone's ideal definitions of parenthood, which so often feel based around modern western nuclear family-centric ideals, or else be cast as a Bad Parent and therefore Bad Human feels deeply unfair to the concept of growth, to the idea that people can try hard and maybe not get it right but still be good people trying to figure it out, to the idea that parenting is work.

And you can want to be a good parent and still mess it up, because you're human as well as a parent, and perfection is not an attainable goal or standard, and because tiny humans are complicated and complex, and because your ideas of what being a good parent is might not match what your children want or need from you.

And I don't know that we have evidence that Aang never tried to do better, that he wasn't willing to put in that work and make that effort. We know he, functionally, had a very demanding and busy job, and one that impacted his relationship with his children in different ways. We know Bumi and Kya felt excluded and Tenzin felt included. And maybe that was favoritism, or maybe that was him learning that he couldn't let work get in the way of his relationship with his kids and trying something different the third time around.

6) But it strikes me that if the ask we have of Aang to consider him a Good Parent is that he always prioritized his children over his duties and responsibilities as the Avatar, then there'd be just as many people clamoring about his selfishness (already a popular topic!), and his willingness to risk world peace for his own individual needs and concerns and wants, and his inability to accept his responsibilities and grow up.

It strikes me that the entire construct that Good Parent = Good Human and Bad Parent = Bad Human just puts Aang (and everyone) in a trap with no way to win.