Basic Trope: Parents who don't actively raise their own kids.
- Straight: The Troper siblings — Alice, Bob, Chester, Dan, and Ethel — are a Five-Kid Band of Free-Range Children who frequently go on adventures in dangerous settings. Their parents, Jim and Kate, are too lazy and/or neglectful to care.
- Exaggerated: Every Nuclear Family in Wackyville is like this, resulting in a veritable army of Kid Heroes.
- Downplayed: The parents are somewhat irresponsible (e.g. "Kids, your dinner's in the fridge.") but it's not like they let their children risk their lives.
- Justified:
- The parents in question are hippies.
- Jim is at work or on business trips all the time, while Kate is an artist (or vice versa).
- They're both always at work.
- They both had overbearing parents who micromanaged every aspect of their lives, and are overcompensating from such treatment.
- Inverted: The parents care too much; Alice, Bob, Chester, Dan, and Ethel are supervised 24/7.
- Subverted: The Team prepares to go on an adventure, but Kate asks, "Where do you think you're going?"
- Double Subverted: Jim adds, "You forgot your snacks. Don't you want to bring all that delicious candy we bought you?"
- Parodied: The Troper kids are perfectly well-adjusted not even though but because their parents give them less structure than usual.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Jim and Kate are alternately too tight and too loose, whether jointly or oppositely.
- The parents supervise Alice and Bob more than the others because they're Delicate and Sickly and a troublemaker respectively. Dan and Ethel are the reliable ones and don't need as much supervision. As the middle child, Chester feels ignored.
- Averted:
- The parents look after their children normally.
- The Troper siblings happen to have no parents or legal guardians.
- The Troper siblings' parents don't look after them actively, but they are all adults by now.
- Enforced: "It's a kid's show, so it should be centered around kids. We should make them Free-Range Children with lazy parents."
- Lampshaded: "Mr. and Mrs. Troper should be ashamed of themselves, letting their children wander around like that!"
- Invoked: The Troper siblings always complain about how strict and absolute their parents can be. So their parents leave them neglected and unsupervised for a whole day to teach them a lesson in how their parents, even if they are strict sometimes, are a very important component in their lives.
- Exploited: The villain goes after the kids who can't take them on without adult assistance.
- Defied: Alice says, "Mom, Dad, I appreciate that you let us do whatever we want, but now it's time you start acting like real parents and take better care of us."
- Discussed:Sarah: "Man, parents with a hands-off parenting attitude are too rare to find. Troper siblings are so lucky to have them."
Martin: "Yeah. I wish my parents were like theirs." - Conversed: "Those children are Exploring the Evil Lair alone? They must have the worst parents ever!"
- Deconstructed: As a result of having parents that neglected to teach responsibility, the children too have become irresponsible, and this shows later in life.
- Reconstructed: Not being able to depend on their neglectful parents for anything means that the kid has to learn how to be mature and self-reliant. They also learn valuable lessons from these adventures that they wouldn't otherwise learn from their parents.
- Implied: The kids drop whatever they're doing to have some adventure, and they just Hand Wave away concerns about their parents not knowing where they've gone.
Feel free to head back to Hands-Off Parenting, because we don't believe in rules, man!
